Friday, July 24, 2015

Good morning crew,

The only other exciting thing to happen last weekend was the Caribbean Block Party here in our little suburb. They do it every year. They close down a few blocks of what the locals like to refer to as 'downtown' and build a big stage and set up streetside booths for vendors. Plus, every single bar and restaurant along the strip sets up a little, temporary bar right on the street, sort of like a redoubt, so fest-goers can quench their thirst without having to brave the crowded interiors.

But I didn't get to see too much of the fest. The wife and I met my brother Nino and his wife Marianne there, and Marianne recruited us to help her secure a table at a bar where one of her favorite local bands was playing.

Early on in the fest the bars are relatively empty, but after the first few hours, once the crowds start to build and the heat of the afternoon sets in, they become more and more crowded until there is usually standing room only. And bars with live music are even worse.

So at noon we were able to walk right in, commandeer a table and immediately get the attention of a waitress. There was a whole fest right outside the window waiting to be enjoyed, but Marianne did not want to lose that table 20 feet from the stage, so we took turns leaving the bar and walking up and down the street.

And it worked. By three o'clock, when the band started, the place was packed shoulder-to-shoulder, but we were close enough to the stage to smell the performers. They were pretty good, too. They played a lot of favorites and knew how to get the crowd involved.

In the last hour Nino's son (my nephew) Marty showed up at the bar with his new girlfriend. She is a sweet, young girl from a small town in Ohio. They met in college and Marty took advantage of the summer break to bring her home and introduce her to the family.

They are both 21-years-old and not completely used to the bar 'scene', and I think last week's episode might have intimidated the poor girl a bit.

There must have been 500 people packed into the 350-person capacity room, and every last mother's son of them had been drinking for five hours. It was probably close to 90 degrees in there and everyone was screaming lyrics along with the band.

From the way she was staring wildly around her I don't think having 500 sweating drunks scream 'Sweet Caroline' at her was the way she pictured her day going.

Sure, by spending 5 hours in one bar we missed the classic car show, the bean bag toss tournament, the amateur dance competition, and most of the food vendors on the street, but I did get to see a man throwing up in the bathroom and a drunk woman hit on me, and there is a lot of entertainment value in that.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

P.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click GopherArchives

***
"A new study found that people with a lot of phobias are more likely to have health problems. Or as those people put it, 'I was afraid of that.'" -Jimmy Fallon

***
"In Michigan, a man was too drunk to drive, so he had his 9-year-old daughter drive their van for him. Yeah. As he was being arrested, he told the girl, 'I'm going to need a lawyer. Go get your little brother.'" -Conan O'Brien

***
"We are in the worst drought in 56 years. That seems unbelievably negative. Wouldn't that be the best drought?" -Jimmy Kimmel

***
I recently picked up a book called "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" which is roughly an autobiography of the author, Bill Bryson, but is more specifically a look at what life was like growing up in the midwest in the 1950s. Following is a hilarious excerpt...


Most things that were supposed to be fun turned out not to be fun at all. Model making, for instance. Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable but it was really just a mysterious ordeal that you had to go through from time to time as part of the boyhood process. The model kits looked fun. The illustrations on the boxes portrayed beautifully detailed fighter planes belching red-and-yellow flames from their wing guns and engaged in lively dogfights. In the background there was always a stricken Messerschmitt spiraling to earth. You couldn't wait to re-create such lively scenes in three dimensions.

But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object--a human finger; the living room drapes, the fur of a passing animal--and become an infinitely long string.

Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn't stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other; never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spider web of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediable attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn't give a shoot about the pilot, the model, or anything else.


*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
A Sunday School teacher of preschoolers told her students that she wanted each of them to have learned one fact about Jesus by the next Sunday.

The following week she asked each child in turn what they had learned.

Susie said, "He was born in a manger."

Bobby said, "He threw the money changers out of the temple."

Little Johnny said, "He has a red pickup truck but he doesn't know how to drive it."

Curious, the teacher asked, "And where did you learn that, Johnny?"

"From my Daddy," said Johnny. "Yesterday we were driving down the highway, and this red pickup truck pulled out in front of us and Daddy yelled at him, 'Jesus Christ! Why don't you learn how to drive?'"