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With a little prodding from the wife, it looks like I'm firing up the old blog again, and this time she's helping out with the posts. So all of you devoted readers who've been checking my blog every day for the past year and a half only to find no new posts, your effort has finally paid off.
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Paul and I like to eat out a lot and I thought detailing our dining experiences would be an interesting idea. It would also make me feel a lot better about spending so much money on food.
I wanted something a little different and a new Chilli's opened up near the Tanger Outlets. I haven't been to Chili's in a while, so I suggested we give it a try. Well Charleston and Mt. Pleasant have now gone no smoking. When we walked in the door of Chili's we were asked for smoking or non smoking. Dangit. I forgot we were in N. Charleston. Oh well. The sections were adequate and no smoke bothered me through the dinner. I had a sweet tea while Paul ordered a draft blue moon. He originally asked what their local beers were seeing as the menu said they had some. The waitress replied the usual, bud, budlight, etc. Hm...I wonder where the local Budweiser brewery is around here. Anyway she was training someone and another waitress tried to help us because she had no idea where her tables were. After all that confusion, I ordered the Chicken Caesar Pita and Paul had the Grilled Chicken. Both came with fries. Mine was really good. It came with its own pita stand, which was pretty useless and taking up space on my plate. It was a lot better than I thought it would be. Paul didn't think his chicken sandwich was completely cooked, but he ate it anyway...must have been hungry. The whole time eating, the waitress never came by. I needed some napkins, because the one thin napkin she gave me was useless. It was one of those types that the first time you use it, there is a big hole in it. It was so thin, it was like I just wiped my hands on each other. I also needed a new tea. I don't know what happened, but when I looked into my tea midway through my meal, there were all these brown seed type things in it. I don't think I put them in there because I didn't see anything else like that around me. I don't see how it managed to get inside just my drink. Well we originally had three waitresses (real waitress, trainee waitress, and confused waitress) and now we couldn't find anyone.
I had seen this dessert on the Chili's website that I just had to have. After the let down yesterday of Sticky Fingers no longer selling the Oreo Cookie Pie, I had to have something good, so we decided to try the Sweet Shots. These were supposed to be seven layers of chocolate, strawberry cheesecake, or apple caramel in a shot glass. You can get one or all three for $5. Well we decided we would go for three...two chocolate and a strawberry. Finally the waitress showed up to take our plates and ask if we wanted dessert. Paul got the dessert order and she was gone before I could even get a word out my mouth. Still no drink and no napkins. Well the dessert came back and it was lacking to say the least. Seven layers? More like 3...maybe 4, if you count the layer of air at the bottom. The strawberry on top was still frozen and tasted more like ice. We still ate it of course, but it was nothing like advertised. The pictures in the menu should say 4x actual size.
Here is Paul disgusted after eating the dessert.
One other thing I didn't like about the restaurant was the bathroom. Putting the restrooms in a place where you have to walk through the smoking section defeats the purpose of sections. We had to walk around the whole bar to get there. The only other option would be to walk around the outside and go in the door by the to-go place.
Well, you live and learn. Although my pita was very good, it will probably be a long time before we venture back there. I may go on my own sometime, but Paul has wowed never to go anywhere with unrealistic pictures on their menu. We'll see.
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I came across this disturbing article today about a 2-month old baby who was found floating in a lake in Brazil after having been wrapped up in a plastic bag and apparently discarded by her parents. Moral outrage among Americans will surely ensue, though with late-term and partial-birth abortions of viable fetuses still legal in many states as a form of disposing of unwanted children, I think we should probably take this opportunity to take a look at ourselves as well.
CNN.com: Baby found floating in bag in lake
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Yesterday a U.S. drone bombed a Pakistani village with the intent of killing Al Quaida's number 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahri. Instead of hitting our target, however, we managed to kill 18 civilians, and if you watch the news reports, at least one cow. Imagine if some wanted terrorist were hiding in your hometown, and Pakistan decided to bomb it hoping to take him out, killing your wife and children. If that's not enough to create a militant soldier with the sole intent of destroying the country whose policy is to bomb first, ask questions later, then I don't know what is.
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Finally, my brother has felt the pain I had felt twice before: sitting through an extremely long, drawn out film by Peter Jackson and loathing every minute. My brother Chris is a big Lord of the Rings fan, and he's never understood why I disliked the trilogy of films (or at least the first two films; I gave up on the series before the last movie was released). On Christmas night, though, he, my wife, and I went to see King Kong, and we all came to the same conclusion. The film was WAY too long. I have been known to fall asleep watching TV and DVDs on a regular basis, but I've only fallen asleep during three movies while in the theater: About Schmidt (I was extremely tired), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (I was extremely bored), and now Peter Jackson's Swedish-made enlarger version of King Kong (I was extremely both of those). I can see why people would enjoy the Lord of the Rings trilogy after having read the books and anticipating a decent film version for so long; I was neither of those, so I guess one could say I just didn't get it. I can also understand why people want to see the extended DVD versions of the film, since the novels were so massive that fans want to see every minute of the story unfold on the screen. There was no way to create three films from three epic novels without cutting something out as was done with Lord of the Rings; King Kong, however, is quite a different story. Having been a film, and only a film, Peter Jackson's source material was quite terse, unlike the grand Tolkien works of literature he had to work with before. The 1933 version film clocked in at a svelte 100 minutes; Jackson's version clocks in at a morbidly obese 187 minutes. Even before King Kong, I had come to the conclusion that Peter Jackson couldn't make a film under three hours; this problem, coupled with his obsession with the original Kong film, makes for some extremely drawn out viewing. Jackson seemingly refused to add any major plot elements to the film for fear of tainting the original masterpiece, so how did he manage to stretch the film to an additional 87 minutes? He just made everything take longer. Much, much longer. Instead of a two-minute fight between King Kong and a couple of dinosaurs, it now takes ten minutes. What once took mere moments to establish the tribes of Skull Island now takes enormous sweeping, special-effects laden camera shots of various dirty, dentally-challenged people of politically-correct indeterminate race and their incoherent babbling. Instead of taking ten minutes to shoot a giant gorilla off the top of a building, it now takes around a half-hour. It was very sad to see Kong die such a violent death in the original film; in the new version I was ready to shoot him down myself just to get it over with. I'm sure that many people will go to see the film and find its length appropriate; for those of you who don't, however, will, like my brother, finally feel my pain.
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You're hearing it everywhere: Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa. At first, these phrases seem quite innocuous, but underneath them lies a dangerous subtext: America's ongoing War on Merry. The PC Police are at it again, this time targeting one of the English language's most beloved words. Slowly but surely, the word "merry" is being stripped from our vernacular. Today it's "happy holidays," but what will tomorrow bring? Go on your happy way? Happy-go-round? And what will happen to the children if this sick trend continues? Will they never know the joy, or dare I say "merriness," that the word "merry" has brought to so many generations before them? If you don't believe the seriousness of this issue, just look at what this country's homosexual agenda has done to the word "gay." So join me in the struggle to keep merry from being fagified by the left-wing liberal media. Let's put the "merry" back in meaningless, holiday-related semantic jestures!
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I honestly believe I killed every bug in South Carolina last night on my way home from Thanksgiving dinner:
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For quite a while now I've felt a certain disdain for news anchors, radio "personalities," and sportscasters. These people are paid to run their mouth constantly so as to alleviate the typical American's fear of silence (which apparently is called sedatephobia, I've just learned), so naturally, since there's really not that much interesting to say on any subject for hours on end, they can become quite annoying in a short amount of time. Radio personalities are just useless, especially the ones who come in twos and go by their first names (bonus points if their names make them sound like dumb rednecks); these guys tend to sing songs about flatulence and the like and usually clog up your local record store's comedy section with albums named after female genitalia. News anchors probably bother me the least, but they definitely annoy me when they break character and start straying from the teleprompter; nothing's worse than seeing a news anchor try to tell a lame joke about a green puppy, then segue into a story about suicide bombers. Or so I thought. Tonight while football was on my TV (I hesitate to say I was watching it, since I had been reading a book during the game), a sportscaster made the same fatal mistake of telling a joke. Unlike the news anchor, however, the problem wasn't that the joke was unfunny, but rather this sportscaster's overestimation of the intellect of his fellow sportscasters who then attempted to expound on that joke with an even funnier one. Here's how it went down:
Sportscaster 1: "I'm going to make a guess here. You could count on less than one hand the number of balls the Steelers are going to throw..."
giggling ensues
Sportscaster 2: "You could probably count them on less than one finger!"
Now there's no better way to kill a joke than by trying to explain it, but I figured this one's already rigor mortis by now anyway so no harm done. You see, the first sportscaster was trying to say that the number of balls the Steelers would throw was zero, hence the ability to count them on less than one hand, or no hands if you will. However, apparently the second sportscaster was thinking of the type of no hand that has at least one finger, so he felt it best to correct the first sportscaster by saying one could count on less than one finger the number of balls thrown, which would eliminate all doubt that the number was zero. And the comedic genius that is the sportscaster strikes again.
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 Sorry, Dover, Pennsylvania. You're screwed. Pat Robertson decreed today that because of your refusal to teach that the world began with a talking snake and a woman made out of a guy's rib as scientific fact, God has turned His back on you. And don't bother crawling back to the Lord during the next natural disaster, either; after all, "you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there." On the other hand, Kansas, you have decided to let God into your science classes, and for that, you're off the hook. The next time one of your cities is leveled by one of God's tornadoes, which should be next Tuesday if my research is correct, feel free to pray away. God knows you need it.
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