I was excited to hear about the free Grand Slams that Denny’s was giving away. It was, until the fourth quarter, the most exciting thing about the Super Bow. Then I remembered that the 24-hour breakfast place near my house is, alas, an IHOP. (iHop- Apple’s new pancake application?)
Anyhow, the trib has an article by a dude that went to five different Denny’s for 5 different Grand Slams, risking parking lot fights and long waits. The best line:
Many have braved long lines to eat free what ordinarily would have cost $6.
This is America.
Personally, I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know [Denny’s Grand Slams are occasionally] free.
- New bb high score: 26320. Ranked 49147. I totally broke the top 100,000! #
- Another high score! Two days in a row! Only barely though- 26990, so close to 27! #
- I should cc twitter on every single sms that I send. That would be sweet. #
- Man what a day! Three great meals, solid day of work, good workout, and my daily good turn! Time to read. #
- The bus tracker just added two minutes to its ETA. Not cool, bus tracker. #
- Malort ipsum. #
- @ccbayer Its not like they serve buffalo wings. You’d expect to see them at Pizza Hut or something. #
I recalled this so fully that I saw the cats, one with a Hitler mustache, at the window.
When I came across this bit while reading Humboldt’s Gift, I put a little note in the margin because I thought it was funny. Today, unfortunately, I had some time on my hands while waiting for my coffee to brew, and I started wondering when people first started referring to cats having Hitler mustaches. Also unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me that the earliest date wasn’t going to be from Shakespeare’s time. We’re dealing with pretty much 1935(?) to the present day.
We know about the internet site devoted to such precious litle kitlers, we know Humboldt’s Gift was published in 1975, but we don’t know whether Bellow was the first to make note of it. The best search tool I have is Google Books Search, though I suspect Lexis Nexis would do a more thorough job. So off I went. My suspicion was that the fuhrer/feline similarities wouldn’t appear until well after the war, when it wasn’t so real. I was again, wrong. Cats with Hitler mustaches were a thing to be mentioned before the war even ended. Read More
Wow. So yesterday’s post was #500. I guess that’s fine that my 500th post would e a long, quasi-incoherent blathathon about a book I read. That’s pretty cool. th efirst post was back in August of 2004.
In August of 2004, I was living in Houston and I was writing for what I endearingly called the “brettlog” on the make or break site. The tone is a lot different now than it was back then. I think in ’04 I didn’t even shre the link with anyone. I had spent the summer working at a furniture warehouse, and I had just quit that job to do some market research. The market research job was a lot of fun, but I still had two weeks left at my warehouse job. I remember going into the warehouse job and asking if I could leave two weeks early, and they looked at me in a rather confused manner and said “We thought last Friday was your last day.” So that was that.
Anyhow, 500 posts. That’s about 1 post every three days, 6 hours, ~10 a month, etc. So I guess, if past performance is any indication, it’d be a good bet to visit here every three or four days, and chances are there will be something new. (Of course, I know there was a lot of blank months between August 04 and May 05, and so on and so forth. So my average these days, in the brettroyal era, as it were, is probably closer to every other day. Oh well.)
Happy 500, me.
This week’s leisure time was spent in hot pursuit of the last page of Saul Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize winning Humboldt’s Gift.
Why bother mentioning the prize? Not because I care much for it- the only literary award I’m interested in is the Caldecott medal, but because the eponymous character says this on the third page:
The Pulitzer is for the birds- for the pullets. It’s just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates. You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak the first words of the obituary are ‘Pulitzer Prizewinner passes.’
As it happens, Bellow also got the Nobel, which generally precedes the Pulitzer in the obits. Read More
So I’ve had my computer turned off for one day and John Updike dies. I figured I could go 36 hours or so without being in constant contact with all the latest stuff, but I was wrong. You unplug for just a day and something terrible happens.
My sister told me yesterday on the phone that he had passed, and it was the first time I’d ever been actually moved the death of a celebrity-type unknown before. The first thing I do when I get the New Yorker is read the back page comics, but the second thing I do is scan the table of contents to see if there’s anything by Updike. Unfortunately for me and the rest of the world, we’re not going to see him there anymore.
His Rabbit series has always been one of my favorite works. In it, he captured life in the second half of the 20th century. It’s my Updike evangelism recommendation, it’s probably the first thing I recommend to people who are looking for something to read. So. That’s that… I was hoping to find a Simpson’s clip on youtube where it’s revealed that Updike was Krusty’s ghost-writer, but it’s not there… yet. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
- Downtown. #
- At the Billy Goat, drinking darks. #
- Karyn’s Cooked for dinner. Vegan and only 10 bucks. #
- And back on the bus. Unrelated: I found 60 bucks behind my driver’s license!! #
- Things that aren’t awesome: clogged drains, cheap pipe snakes, old, brittle gaskets. #
- Guess where I’m drinking coffee… #
- “Why is cheese delicious on italian food, but when you melt it on chinese food its disgusting?” #
- @ccbayer The world mocks us in a million ways. in reply to ccbayer #
- Salad, apple, Green Eye, bus, Whistler, Watchmen, bed. Hell of a night. #
- Giving my sweet B+ today. I should just do it at home and save it in the fridge in case I need it. #
- I can’t find the Reader anywhere! How am I gonna do my crossword? #
- New Thai place, Anong, is better than the old Thai place. #
- Yup, I’m back here. Drove my station wagon to yoga, then walked to get my soy latte. I think it might not be funny anymore. #
- Just cause you can don’t mean you should. #
- @ccbayer omg tots lolzorz #
