Summer: Time for carny fun!

Summer time isn't just for visiting the RenFaire.

It's also time for carnivals!



Thank you Steven Colbert for putting together this handy kid's guide to summer carnivals.

Happy Anniversary Kate & Steve

We headed out to Iowa this weekend to celebrate the 10th wedding anniversary of MizBubs' sister Kate, and her husband Steve. Steve's family owns a farm and we make it out there a couple times a year to camp and visit.

This weekend was wonderful. While there was no Sunday Afternoon Cocktail, there was a keg of Pabst Blue Ribbon, multiple bottles of bourbon and at one point Saturday afternoon a delicious Bloody Mary appeared, made by some guy named Andy we'd just met for the first time, chock full of horseradish and minced garlic. Whew. I'll have to get that recipe.

There was singing, party games, adventures with chainsaws, and fishing, and a ratio of one dog per every 2 people. It rained a little, but it didn't seem to bother anyone. There is no better feeling than being in a warm dry tent at night and listening to the rain falling.

Here are some pics from the weekend. Hope y'all had a good one. Now it's back to work.

Time for drinks and socializing

It looks like spring is finally here, and a young man's fancy turns to tropical drinks and socializing.

We are going to be graced by a visit from noted Buckeye Flannery Alden. She is going to be in town on "business" as she puts it, and is staying somewhere just this side of the Indiana state line. After a series of emails, she picked (how lucky for me is this?) the fabulous Hala-Kahiki lounge in River Grove as a good spot to meet. Some of us carnivores will strap on a cheap feedbag beforehand at Gene and Jude's just down the street.

Both places are pretty easy to get to from the city and from the suburbs. The Hala-Kahiki is pretty darn swanky, and has an extensive menu of deceptively potent and reasonably-priced tiki drinks. It's possible their outdoor area will be open by then.

So, dear readers, how's about it? I say it's been too long since we got together and had a few drinks. Let's spend some time together and welcome visiting celebrity Flannery Alden.

Here's the info:

Wednesday, May 13 7:30-ish until whenever...

Hala-Kahiki Lounge
2834 River Road, River Grove, IL

Gene & Jude's
2720 River Road, River Grove, IL


View Hala-Kahiki/Gene & Jude's in a larger map

Hope y'all can make it. If you think you can, email me or comment here and let me know.

Bottoms up!

Close, but not quite

It was quite a contest, and our gal Nora was a crowd favorite, but she didn't quite have enough to win.

Nora had a swell time, and it looks like she's got some cool opportunities on the way as a result. She's made a bunch of new friends and enjoyed her time in the limelight.

The winner was a truly adorable and talented girl named Danni Doll, who did a pretty amazing dance number.

Thanks for all your support!

When the levee breaks

This just in from Southside Bureau Chief Dena at Linkadelica. Dena is one of our oldest and best friends--she and Bill got married in our house in Chicago years ago--and she's got a bunch of cool stuff cooking. Check out her eBay store here and buy some stuff from her.

Dena just told me that her friend Marianne created this next video, and that's her doing the music. I just found out that Marianne has a blog called Diarrhea Island, and I was amused to find a video of a goat yelling as soon as I visited it. Yes, a goat yelling like a man. Or a man-goat. It's compelling.

For some reason I can't stop watching this. Dig the garage techno soundtrack:

Better random and late than never random at all

During the frenzy of activity that was Nora's romp through the Fangoria spooksmodel semi-finals, I left many things undone around here. What with the bank of computers running sophisticated statistical projections, and the walls being covered with butcher paper for all our brainstorming notes, and the empty Chinese takeout cartons and pizza boxes everywhere...you get the idea.

One of the things I left undone was this tag from Utah Savage. So here it is:

The Rules

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

1. I am, at the moment, the perfect picture of the disheveled blogger sitting around in his pajamas and accomplishing nothing.

2. I constantly plan trips that I will likely never take. I usually have fairly detailed plans of places to stay and visit for a number of different destinations. Right now I've got files on Nashville, Denver, the Florida panhandle, San Antonio/Austin, and Boston. I always have current files on Las Vegas and New Orleans.

3. I have changed the way I eat and drink since driving home from a Superbowl party and feeling like a bloated, queasy wreck. Since then I've lost 15 pounds, mostly by cutting back on booze, the deep fryer and meat, and adding a lot more water and fruit. The last two nights were fat, meaty exceptions, and I am already correcting that.

4. I'm having more fun at work than I've had in years.

5. This is the first time in years I haven't played at least one or two relatively well thought out April Fool jokes. There's still time for a hoax, but it won't be up to my usual standards if I do.

6. I feel a profound sense of relief that this tag only calls for 6 things, and is not the excessive 25 things that seem to be demanded of Facebook users.

And now, the tagging. I have committed a number of tagging blunders before, and I'm feeling a little tentative about identifying specific taggees by name...so. Let's do this by telepathy. If you hear a voice inside your head telling you, no, compelling you to respond to this? Well then, you're one of the six people I mentally tagged.

Bad music for bad people

Splotchy has put up the complete Lenten Mix: Man, You Know That Sh*t's Not Good For You, my Green Monkey Music Project brainchild. Being the procrastinating blowhard that I am, I waited until everyone else wrote about their song choices before being sufficiently shamed to talk a little bit about my tracks.

Why do I listen to raunchy music? I don't know. As a kid, I didn't listen to it for its shock value--I was too obedient and made sure my parents never heard what I was listening to if it was "offensive". As a parent, it's only recently that I've stopped hiding raunchy music from my kids, once I was sure they had already learned all those bad words, without my help. Another big milestone was when the kids started digging through our LP archives and the vast digital freakshow of the internet and picking out a lot of that raunchy music on their own. Our eldest claims that listening to all that freakery gives her a greater appreciation of our own normalcy.

That, my friends, is a relief.

First up is F*ck the Pain Away by Peaches. Our eldest, Nora, told me an amusing story about Peaches claiming, in an interview in Bust magazine, that this song was once deemed too inappropriate for some strip club. I don't need to post any lyrics for this. Nora describes the song as sounding like the techno soundtrack in a bad Eurotrash nightclub in a sleazy movie. She wants to make sure I note that she means that in a good way.



The second track is Little Girl by John & Jackie. I have this on two compilations, Rockin' Bones and Las Vegas Grind. Released in 1958, it's a manically upbeat little pop number with John crooning some fairly straightforward lyrics:

Little Girl
Little Girl
Well I love you and I think you're fine
Well you're cute let's make some time...

What sets this song apart, especially for 1958, are the backup vocals by Jackie, who gasps and moans and does a better job of vocalizing her orgasms than any porn actress. Whew. I need a cigarette when this song's over, and I don't even smoke.

My favorite is next: Sister Ray from the Velvet Underground album White Light/White Heat, all 17-plus glorious minutes of it. Music that must be endured to be enjoyed. It has drag queens, heroin, oral sex, sailors, gun violence and a police raid. The song was recorded in one take, with all the amps turned up to "11". In a great apocryphal story the recording engineer left during the session after setting the tape to record. I used to get psyched up to work midnights by listening to this track on my drive to work. Here's what Lou Reed said in this interview:

"'Sister Ray' was done as a joke--no, not as a joke, but it has eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear. The jam came about right there in the studio. We didn't use any splices or anything. When we did 'Sister Ray,' we turned up to 10 flat-out, leakage all over the place. [The producers] asked us when it would end. We didn't know. We were doing the whole heavy-metal trip back then. If 'Sister Ray' isn't an example of heavy metal, I don't know what is."

It occurred to me that it would have been possible to do nearly all of this mix and draw only from the collected body of work of The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed. This next track is the title track of Lou Reed's 1978 album Street Hassle.

The tableau set out in Street Hassle can be seen as a worn-out, late 70's version of the scene going on in Sister Ray. A smack fueled orgy without the joy or exuberance:

"Hey that c*nt's not breathing,
I think she's had too much
Of something or other, hey man,
you know what I mean?
I don't mean to scare you,
but you're the one who came here
And you're the one who's going to have to take her when you leave...

Sha la la la man...why don't you just slip away?"

Yes, it's 10 minutes and 52 seconds of good times, presented in three distinct movements, with an absolutely earnest and therefore hilarious spoken word interlude by Bruce Springsteen dropped in at about 9 minutes.

Of course I wasn't the only one to think of Nick Cave when I thought of someone making music that embodies sin.

Stagger Lee is an old blues song that's been recorded hundreds of times, with variations on the theme. We've got about 10 versions of it here at the compound, if you count the Clash's Wrong Em Boyo. Most of the versions tell the story about a killing that takes place over gambling and/or a hat.

The Nick Cave version, snarled out slowly in front of a heavy beat and ominous piano, features gun violence, murder, ass-kicking, a prostitute, ass-f*cking and wildly obscene language that might even make Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann wince.

Enjoy!

Laissez les bon temps roulez!

Yeah, don't expect much from me either while we're down here. I will say this much--I have found a new favorite junk food, something called "Boo Fries" that we had at Acme Oyster House.

In a nutshell: we landed, we drank, we caught beads and doubloons, we ate, we drank some more. We walked. We passed out, thankfully in our own bed. We never met an unpleasant person, and we experienced a series of happy coincidences and small kindnesses from strangers that made it seem like the universe had aligned, for just this one night, in our favor.

Behold the splendor of Mardi Gras:

Boo Fries are a delicious medley of french fries topped with roast beef gravy and cheese:



Within hours of landing I was able to cross several must-haves off my list: the Sazerac, served up in the Carousel bar of the Monteleone Hotel (more later)

Abita Turbo Dog beer, oysters and something fried, in this case crawfish tails:

Those poor shellfish never had a chance

That's it for now. Time to go try and catch a coconut from a Zulu.

It's like Duffy was saying

A gift from me to you for the weekend

A very thoughtful Katie Schwartz sent this video my way.

It's from a documentary called Playing for Change: Peace Through Music. The video features musicians from around the world, and I was thrilled to see a New Orleans street musician who I recognized, Washboard Chaz.

Please, treat yourself for the next 5 minutes or so and check this out. It's been a beautiful week, and if you're ready to do a little more celebrating or relaxing this weekend this video will give you a fine start:



Y'all take care of yourselves this weekend. Be good to each other.

Remoulade

Remoulade...I'm in love with saying that word. I made my first remoulade sauce earlier today, and it came out pretty well.

Our eldest requested fried scallops and jambalaya for her birthday dinner, with pecan pie for dessert.

This was the scallop portion of the meal: deep-fried scallops served over salad greens with remoulade sauce and crispy onions.



I may have a new house bourbon--Buffalo Trace. It's pretty freaking delightful. A little Buffalo Trace over ice with a splash of water was the Sunday afternoon cocktail while the jambalaya cooked, football blasting in the background.

All in all, a fine day. Hope y'all had a great weekend...

And the winner is...

Thanks for playing everyone! I apologize for not getting the results posted sooner.

A few notes before we announce the winner. Germany or Florida is a difficult game, and guessing the correct answer is more of an art than a science. At the height of its popularity on the show Loveline, Dr. Drew got approximately 40% correct, and Adam Corolla 55%. In other words, you're doing really well if you approach anything over 50% accuracy.

As I have stated before, there are a number of subtle cultural clues that can help:

Sausage=Germany
Crack cocaine=Florida
Fetish or weird sex=Germany
Nudity=Germany
Monkeys=Germany
Inept criminals with poorly thought out plans=Florida
Cannibalism and/or body parts=Germany (Is this where Wisconsin gets it?)
Domestic violence=Florida
Pitbulls and/or gunplay=Florida
Religious zealotry=Florida

Incest and morbid obesity can go either way. It bears repeating, though, that none of these single clues are 100% accurate. Now, on to the winners of

Germany or Florida: Amputee Criminal Holiday Edition!

Third place was an impressive four-way tie among Skylersdad, Dale, Freida and Spartacus, with 8 correct answers. Well done, folks!

Second place was a tie between Bill T. and Bad Tempered Zombie, with 10 correct answers.

And the winner is...Eebie, with 11 correct answers! Eebie will be receiving a copy of Peeping Tom by Jack Woodford, published in 1948 by the Diversey Publishing Corporation of Chicago:



According to the back cover, this book is "uninhibited and racy." It must be, because an earlier owner underlined those very words:



I've printed the questions below, with the origin of each story highlighted at the end. My comments are in red. I liked the problem-solving strategies that a lot of readers used in the comments, too.

1) A man and woman got in an argument over her misplaced false teeth. The man gave her what she called “flying lessons”, throwing her up into the air and onto the kitchen floor. She grabbed a knife and threatened to kill him. FLORIDA
Classic domestic violence=Florida.

2) A pregnant woman wearing a cap, sunglasses and rubber gloves attempted to rob a bank. She also brought her toddler along. FLORIDA
The rubber gloves might have suggested a fetish angle (Germany) but the correct call was made by Bill T and Cormac Brown: the toddler. Cormac suggested, rightly, that daycare would have been available in Germany, and Bill seemed to grab the overall white-trashitude of bringing your kid along on a badly thought-out score.

3) Police officers sent to investigate a loud party were mistaken for strippers by the raucous female partygoers. GERMANY

4) A man was arrested after offering to pay for his takeout order with marijuana. FLORIDA FLORIDA FLORIDA

5) Parents want a teacher fired after she performed a striptease for her teenaged students. GERMANY
This was, perhaps, the toughest question. Hot teacher said Florida, but nudity says Germany. Her dance was captured on video:



6) A boy was blasted through the window of a bathroom after making a stinky poo, spraying air freshener to cover the smell, and playing with a lighter. GERMANY

7) A woman dropped by a man’s apartment to smoke some crack. While waiting, she opened some canned sardines and some sausages, enraging him. He beat her and got arrested. FLORIDA
Crack cocaine and interpersonal violence trump sardines and sausage, making Florida the correct call.

8) An unknown amputee, missing both arms, managed to steal a 24” television set. He got two people to assist in somehow clamping the television to his chest before walking out. He was not caught; the theft was discovered later after when the security video was reviewed. GERMANY
What I didn't make clear was that the two people who helped the offender were strangers to him. That made it a clear Germany story--a criminal in Florida who planned on the kindness of strangers would have been victimized himself.

9) A man in a wheelchair robbed a bank. He was captured minutes later, a block away from the bank. He initially told cops he was forced to do it by two armed men who took the money from him. The cash was found in his prosthetic leg. FLORIDA
Classic poorly thought out Florida crime. In this case, alcohol was involved:

10) A man turned on the gas in his apartment to kill himself after his girlfriend dumped him. When the girlfriend stopped by later to pick up her things, she lit a cigarette and caused an explosion. The man was charged with murder after his neighbor died in the explosion. GERMANY

11) This area is experiencing a critical shortage of shopping center Santas. Successful candidates need a “clean police record.” GERMANY
Another really tough choice.

12) A 37 year old man living with his parents was arrested for attempting to attack his father with the family Christmas tree. FLORIDA
Once again, domestic violence=Florida.

13) A 56 year old man was stripped of his gun license after a home inspection revealed the gun was hidden under a pillow in his bed. The man’s home was being checked because he had threatened to “throw a hand grenade” if the city council approved plans for a high voltage power line near his house. GERMANY
The most popular places to keep guns in Florida are where they are easily accessible. Places like under a pillow, or in a glove box of an unlocked car. While the crank threat against public officials sounds American, I can't imagine police in Florida inspecting a home for guns. They don't have enough cops or a big enough overtime budget for that.

14) A drug dealer escaped from prison by concealing himself in a large cardboard box, which was then carried out of the facility by a courier service along with other packages. GERMANY

15) A 28 year old woman was arrested after a man came home to find the drunk woman on his roof, drinking beer, and refusing to come down unless he gave her more beer. FLORIDA

16) After drinking with a friend, a man burglarized a preschool to steal toys as holiday gifts for his children. Police found a stolen see-saw, a desk easel and some Frisbees in the man’s yard. FLORIDA

17) A woman suspected that her husband was cheating on her. She demanded that he allow her to smell his penis to determine if her fears were true. When she went to sniff, he punched her in the head, kicked her when she was on the floor, and left before the cops arrived. FLORIDA
While there might have been a fetish aspect to the penis-sniffing, this is really straight up Florida trash. Bacon Lady nailed this one, and pointed out that there is a popular rap song titled, appropriately enough, "Smell Yo Dick". The artist, Riskay-The Drama Queen, hails from Bartow in central Florida.

The Big Wicked Online Pageant.

Way back in ought-six, when I was new to all this, I was introduced to a swell group o' bloggers by the lovely Melinda June. Soon after that, the fabulous Beth of A Cup of Coffey, and silken-voiced Canadian Dale co-hosted the Little Miss Sunshine Online Pageant.

It was a roaring success. About 30 participants dug up old pictures of themselves from 3rd or 4th grade and posted them. And, for the record, may I say that in those brainy-cool glasses and knee socks Ms. Beth was anything but a "nottie" as she puts it. My studious and groovy self would've chased her like crazy.

I digress.

The reason I'm telling y'all about this is that Beth and Dale have graciously agreed to co-host a little something I thought up in a fit of whiskey-lubricated nostalgia:

The Big Wicked Online Pageant.

Go click on that link, like now, and read about it and enter. Here's the rules:

• Scan a photo from your Halloween past.

• Post it on your blog Monday evening, October 28.

• Once you post your photo, e-mail Beth at the address on her navbar. If you can, include the URL to that specific post.

• Beth, our hostess, will post a link to every participant’s blog Tuesday morning by 9 a.m..

I will sit around with Dale, snickering and poking each other in the ribs about how we got the girl to do all the work. And then I'll pat myself on the back for having such a swell idea. Dale will undoubtedly provide some wonderful commentary. (Added 10/14/08--you can see some of that commentary from Dale here.)

So, you go now. Find those old yellowed Polaroids. Show us your best hobo, your best gypsy, your best eyeholes-cut-out-in-a-plain-white-sheet ghost. And if you can't find anything that old, just find the best, most mortifying Jaegermeister and draft-beer Halloween party moment from your more recent past and send that instead. I'm just saying.

If you're good, maybe you'll earn the coveted Sprawling Ramshackle Compound Freak of the Week...

Yep, we're getting ready

Cousin Clete is all excited. He took the gate off the neighbor's dog run and he's getting all set up for the big party this weekend. He felt cheated when we didn't throw a party last year, and he's promised to make up for lost time.

I wouldn't live there if you paid me...or would I?

We just got done cleaning off the dinner dishes, and the Tom Waits that my youngest played at dinner is over (Alice and Blood Money). Out of nowhere, MizBubs, sentimental fool, puts on More Songs About Buildings and Food by Talking Heads. I was listening to the song "Big Country", something of an anthem of anti-suburban anger when I was a kid:

I see the shapes, I remember from maps.
I see the shoreline. I see the whitecaps.
A baseball diamond, nice weather down there.
I see the school and the houses where the kids are.
Places to park by the factories and buildings.
Restaurants and bars for later in the evening.
Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas. And I have learned how these things work together.
I see the parkway that passes through them all.
And I have learned how to look at these things and I say,
I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live there, well no siree!
I couldn't do the things that, that those people do.
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: but I do live there! I've been living there for years! How the hell did that happen?

______________________

I got this bright idea today to cook this big dinner. MizBubs had to work at the library today, and I decided to cook a couple recipes out of a cookbook I bought her for Valentine's Day--Food of Love, from Rosemary's Restaurant, where we had possibly the best meal of our lives when we were in Las Vegas last December. I was going to make Hugo's BBQ shrimp with blue cheese slaw, and pan-seared scallops with parsnip creamed potatoes. There were sauces involved, and I started out great. Then somewhere along the way my apple cider reduction turned into a caramelized crust, and my blue cheese mayonnaise was a disaster, a soupy mess. Next thing I know, I was standing there with a bourbon in hand, not doing anything, and wondering how it all went south.

MizBubs got home a little later. I tried to act as adorable as possible, and in no time at all she made a new, perfect mayonnaise, and she rescued my apple cider reduction too, making a beautiful apple cider butter sauce for the scallops. I got out the fry daddy and made some deep-fried parsnips and crispy prosciutto to garnish the scallops. Here is the end result:

Now, closeups.

Here's the crispy fried parsnips and prosciutto

And here's how they looked on top of some pan seared scallops, served on a mound of parsnip creamed potatoes and an apple cider butter sauce


There was no cocktail, but there was beer: we paired the meal with some tasty Belgian ales:

And there you have it.

I have a wicked case of procrastination, and haven't been able to finish the project I'm supposed to do for the side job I landed, and I go back to work tomorrow. Shit, I didn't even get all the laundry and housecleaning I planned on done, and now it's Sunday night, with Monday morning looming ahead. Oh well. I may be a lazy slacker, but I'm a well-fed slacker with a woman who loves me and a couple of great kids. So screw everything else, right? Right.

Hope everyone had a good weekend. See you later, alligators.

December 26 post-holiday choir practice

Remember folks, December 26 is right around the corner, and that means:

• Deep discounts on Christmas decorations, gift wrap and greeting cards!
• Special day-after-Christmas sales at your favorite stores!
• Back to work, you.
• It's time for a lovely informal gathering of all your favorite bloggers!

Chris at Some Guy's Blog has featured this event, and this year Mr. Grant Miller of Grant Miller Media will be hosting a lavish award ceremony to recognize this year's Drysdale Award winners.

This year we'll be meeting at the fabulous Hala-Kahiki Lounge at 2834 River Road in River Grove. The Hala-Kahiki is the oldest tiki bar in the Chicago area, and features a wonderful assortment of reasonably-priced exotic drinks, as well as your standard beers and hard liquors for the less adventurous.

MizBubs and I plan on arriving around 7 pm, but it looks like most of the really cool kids won't get there until closer to 8pm. The lavish award ceremony is scheduled to kick off then.

For those of you taking public transportation, it looks like you could take the 331 PACE bus from the Cumberland Avenue El stop. You can see the CTA System Map here. Metra's Milwaukee District West line stops at River Grove, .8 mile away from the Hala Kahiki. You can see the station on this map:


View Larger Map

If anyone needs a lift to or from the Metra station, email me and let me know.

Hope everyone gets through the next couple of days healthy and happy. See you Wednesday night!

Sunday afternoon cocktails

Today's Sunday Afternoon Cocktail is the Suffering Bastard:

The Suffering Bastard (for two)

2 shots of bourbon
2 shots of gin
2 oz fresh lime juice
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Ginger ale or ginger beer

• -Mix the bourbon, gin, bitters and lime juice in a cocktail shaker
• -Pour over ice
• -Top with ginger ale
• -Garnish with a sprig of mint and a maraschino cherry (and a fresh orange slice if you've got one.)

_____________________

For dinner tonight I kind of outdid myself in the swine-eatin' shiftless hillbilly department. The Emeril Lagasse recipe I started with was called "Pork Roulades", but here's what it really was:

Pork rolls wrapped in bacon.

Yes. Forget carbo-loading, I've made pork-loading an essential part of my marathon training. I think maybe I could get even more pork into this recipe if, instead of stuffing the roulade with ground pecans, parmesan cheese and garlic, I stuffed it with more ground pork. YEAH, AND SOME EXTRA PORK CRACKLINS' ON THE SIDE!!! WOOOOO HOOO!


Whew. Back in control now. That little green smear you see in the upper left of that picture is a grilled pattypan squash, with fresh pesto made by MizBubs. MizBubs hacked her way into the garden with her machete to harvest a bumper crop of basil, which is now engaged in a UFC-style brawl with the mint. It is good (but not necessary) to have one bacon-free part of a meal, after all, and the squash was a tasty companion to the pork rolls.

____________________

I'm full of bright ideas this week: a BIG multiple choice "Germany or Florida", a reprise of The Future the Way it Used to Be, some good freak and weenie-waver news, and some other stuff I've gleefully lifted from other blogs. I'll probably get distracted and not do any of them. We'll see.

Hope everyone had a good weekend.

I will survive

I think there a few reasons for this high score:

1) I've always been a paranoid gun nut. Probably from all those zombie movies I watched as a kid.

2) My daughter gave me The Zombie Survival Guide as a gift a few years ago.

3) I've always been a paranoid gun nut.


91%Mingle² - Free Online Dating



From Evil Spock by way of Johnny Yen.

Lattice of Coincidence...

"A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either..."

--Miller

Way back in August 2006 the lovely and talented Melinda June mentioned the Compound favorably on her blog. I started reading her, and checking out the sites she linked to, and then the sites the people she linked to, linked to. It took me a a little while, but I realized that quite a few of these bloggers:

• were from the midwest
• specifically from the Chicago area
• about the same age as we were
• had a bunch of the same interests we did
• frequented a bunch of the same bars and hangouts we used to

Melinda, it turns out, grew up in Iowa a short distance away from a bunch of MizBubs' family. Melinda, Lulu and Coaster Punchman all went to school in the same town as some of MizBubs' family. Tenacious S is a huge fan of Naked Raygun, and MizBubs' best friend dated their drummer for a long time. Lulu grew up a short distance away from where we now live, and now lives about a couple blocks away from where I used to live--we've essentially switched neighborhoods. Johnny Yen went to the same grammar school as MizBubs, and had the same teacher in the gifted program. He also worked at a barbecue joint next door to the tattoo parlor where MizBubs and I both got some work done.

And yet none of us ever ran into each other. Until recently.

MizBubs and I had the good luck to have met Lulu, Tenacious S and Johnny Yen recently. Last Friday night we all met and had a couple of well-deserved drinks at Tiki Terrace. The coincidence continued; Lulu informed me that it used to be the site of a Mexican restaurant that allowed underage teens to drink, and I collected bloody clothing on one of my first big cases from the 7-11 across the street.

I can't remember the last time three or four hours passed by so quickly. Let me tell you--I don't think you could ask for a better group of conversationalists. At times it almost turned into a game of "6 degrees of separation", made more surreal by the Hawaiian language version of theCarter Family tune "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" playing in the background.

Oddly enough, no one ordered a plate of shrimp. Maybe next time.