Whose In Your Top Five?

Well, it looks like Summer is officially here in Chicago, and here to stay. We were greeted Saturday morning with our first near 90 degree day (yes, we have had several since then, and I am most definitely not looking forward to running home from work this evening) and took full advantage of it by stupidly bravely getting our first "long run" of the season underway. We suffered through the pain cave by dragging our favorite Adidas rep out with us. I someone survived 14 miles and then immediately went into a comatose state for the next 4 hours. Around 6 we met Rob and Beth at Cooper's, #99 for some outdoor patio drinking and supper. The beer menu at Cooper's is intimidating and the food was well above average. Disco fries, racks of ribs, and burgers were consumed to our enjoyment.




Hall shows up at the tail end as we're discussing H2C and he relives his story last year there of endless puking and shitting. It was a good thing we already ate. It was here Rob brings up the Celebrity Top 5 list. We try to guess Beth's and she gets utterly disgusted when Kyle suggests Hugh Grant. I believe her response was, "ewww, Hugh Grant looks like my old college roommate, and she was a girl!" The game became the theme of the evening.

After a few hours at Cooper's we walk down to Kirkwood so Hall can make his appearance at JJ's bachelor party. Not much to write about here, we already visited Kirkwood a few months ago and today wasn't any more entertaining than before. Hall buys Kyle a shot of Maker's Mark, and he starts feeling the FML side effects kicking in. After 1 beer we (all but Hall) walk down the street to The Coach House, #100. The Coach House is merely the back room at Uncle Fatty's, and is anything but an actual coach house. We were uncertain what vibe they try to give off here, but it was anything but fun.

Some memorable quotes did come up here:
"If I would throw up in the alley here, I would go inside." -Beth

Q: "I don't know what this place is trying to be?" -Beth
A: After Rob looks around for a second he responds with, "Lame."

"I think this back room is a private party going on." -Beth
"A private party I don't want to be invited to." -Kyle

The Top 5 list discussion carries on. Kyle knows immediately who his Top 5 (Keira, Eva Mendes, Gisele, Charlize (seriously?), Shakira) are as we all ponder ours. The discussion gets out of hand when Beth mentions her Top 5 girls. This gets Kyle thinking who his Top 5 guys would be, and immediately responds with Martin Short. Rob also teaches us that the black cowboy hat is in fact, the party variety of cowboy hats.



Kyle doing his Jay Leno giant-jaw impression

After a single $5 312, the four of us head down to Cesear's, #101 to meet up with Annie and her friend Julie. We make the outdoor rooftop patio ourselves after our loud and obnoxious set of jokes. Kyle perfects the whale noise to a T, but disappoints the crowd with the Bavarian creme pie joke. I believe a couple about rapists were also involved. This is the 2nd Cesear's location we've been to so far, and believe it or not, the insensitive jokes were kept to a minimum this time. We each enjoy a couple Mega size margaritas (Large < Jumbo < Mega) and enjoy life.

We decide to cap the evening off at one more bar. The Avenue Tavern is right across the street and seems like a logical destination. After sitting at our booth for 15 minutes and having our waitress completely ignore us, we dub this one of the worst bars we've been to yet and proceed to leave without getting a drink. Yes, we'll have to come back at some point, but I won't enjoy it. The final destination is Friar Tucks, #102. FT is a dodgy/dive bar meets Medieval English pub. Drinks are cheap, the atmosphere is great, what more can you ask for? Well apparently that answer is a bachelorette party. Kristin and Ashley (not sure which one is getting married) get Kyle to show his nipples, and in return he gets some fabulous plastic beads. This group provides endless entertainment going from group to group in the bar to accomplish their scavenger hunt clues written on penis shaped paper. The extremely cheap pitchers of beer weren't bad either.

Friar Tuck's Ceiling, all ready for the Pride Weekend

Saturate, fill me up; Liquidate, empty my cup

Just a few notes from our brief Saturday mid-afternoon 2-bar-crawl before I take off for 4 days in Boston.
Our discussion at Clark Street Bar involved some mathematical heavy lifting. We wondered if after the shared numbers of 2, 3 & 5 would the Prime Numbers ever again pass the Fibonacci Sequence? My guess is no...just through 9 digits Prime Numbers are only up to 23, while Fibonacci has already reached 89. The 1,000th Prime Number is something like 7,179, and at this point Fibonacci has reached a number with more digits than my excel spreadsheet at work was willing to display, no matter how wide I stretched the column and how small of a font I used. So theoretically I suppose it's possible that Prime's could eventually catch up, but it'd be pretty difficult and I'm sure the Prime Numbers that reach that far haven't yet been discovered.

Our other discussion while at Clark St? On the Sox broadcast they mentioned Bartolo Colon was the 7th winningest active pitcher in the bigs. So who were the top six? Thanks to a text from Trivia Wunderkind, Vh1 World Series of Pop Culture Champion, and pop culture blog Intensities in Ten Suburbs author Andrew we now know.
#1 - Tom Glavine (although he has since hinted at retirement)
#2 - The Big Unit
#3 - Jamie Moyer
#4 - Andy Petite
#5 - John Smoltz
#6 - Tim Wakefield
#7 - Bartolo the fat toad
Pedro, when he eventually signs, will enter the list behind Petite.

While watching the Duke-UV Lacrosse game at Kirkwood we noted their field could use the assistance of The Sodfather Roger Bossard.

Adam texts us (from 10 feet away), "There's A Dream And I Live It". Rick and I both shake our heads in disagreement.

During one of the televised horse races Rick goes with Poltergeist and I choose Danger2Society. Winner gets $1. After running in 3rd most of the race, D2S drops to last and Rick pockets a buck.

Adam, before we left: "If the Pickup Artist were here right now would he be disappointed in us?" Only with you, Adam. Only with you.

As mentioned up-post and in Rick's most recent writings, we're headed to Boston for 4 days to cheer on a few of our friends in the Boston Marathon and to generally cause trouble. A full report will follow.

Recent audio addictions:
We Were Promised Jetpacks - "Quiet Little Voices" (Thanks Bill)
The new Thermals Album - Now We Can See (they're playing The Bottom Lounge on 4/29.

Like a kitten versus rain.

We Were Born to Sin

The prior weekend was a quiet one for us, but we did tackle 2 more bars in the neighborhood. Saturday started off at Clark Street Bar where we enjoyed our overpriced hot dog and fries, and extremely cheap pitcher of 312 while watching our White Sox take on the Twinkies. I guess you can consider this a dive bar/dive eatery all in one. It’s no Hoagie Hut though, which we were truly spoiled by when we resided at the 907. The Hoagie Hut was pretty much our go to hangover joint. We have yet to find one of these places in our new neighborhood; The Bagel had a good run, but ever since Intelligentsia increased the price of their coffee by 50%, my rendezvous down to Broadway has been limited.

After watching a couple innings of the game, we headed down Wellington to meet up with Adam, Sonny and Jorge (amongst many others in their posse) at Kirkwood. They claimed they were there to watch the Masters, but it seemed to us they were more preoccupied with the surroundings of the bar (especially Adam who was trying his hardest to bring out his ‘A’ game). We stayed through the end of the Sox game and progressed our beer intake by enjoying a couple Fat Tires and then finally a Delerium Nocturnum. I am pretty sure this is the earliest in the day I have ever had a Delerium – needless to say, I had a solid buzz going for a couple hours even though I was sans drinking. There were also a handful of idiots within Kirkwood, which I guess is expected on a Saturday afternoon. One especially that sticks out was sitting at the table with Adam. He got to be known as “Sunglass Dude” since he kept his shades on while he was INSIDE the bar the whole time. Seriously why do people do this, I don’t get it? What is even worse are visors, do dudes still wear those? If they do, they should be stoned (like in Biblical times, not with a joint). Anyway, Sunglass Dude is the epitome of Wrigleyville/LP d-bag. I hope he’s reading this (as we gave him a business card) so he can straighten his life together, you can thank us later SD. Adam claimed he wasn’t his friend, but a friend-of-a-friend. Okay Adam, okay. The biggest chuckle of my day came when Jorge was looking at the beer menu and told me how much he enjoyed Kalibur. I debated if I should tell him or not that a Kalibur is a N/A beer. He’ll learn someday.

Kyle and I split ways after this, I met with Annie and we dominated some damn good BBQ at Smoque. Kyle went to a beer tasting and eventually down to Guthrie’s to play some Battleship and Connect Four. We planned on meeting them at Guthries, but it took us a good 2 hours to get home from Smoque because the Addison bus apparently doesn’t run after 8 and there no cabs in sight. So we relied on the CTA and ended up taking 3 buses to get back to her place (Pulaski to Belmont to Halsted). At this point we were beat and bailed on Kyle. I do look forward to Guthries in the near future and taking down my opponent in Scrabble.

On Sunday we headed down to Bridgeport for the White Sox game. So far we’ve been to 2 of the 6 games and my goal is to go to 1 game of every home series. We’re well on pace. We’ll be MIA next weekend as EBONY is heading out to Boston to cheer on our peeps in the Boston Marathon (and celebrate afterwards). Keep your eyes pealed though as we’ll keep the blog rolling with our exploits in Beantown. Peace.