meanwhile, in ohio...
(via The Guardian)
notes on a restaurant i want to love but yeah
Food solid but lacks flavor (solution: fucking add salt) except the sweet potato fries which are wonderful but still fucking add salt – and not that umbrella lady iodized shit: I'm talking real, grainy, melt sidewalk ice kosher salt – to meat I mean come on.
Claustrophobic on Sunday brunches, especially when half of their plates are the same size as some of the smallest tables (solution: use smaller plates: a lox bagel does not need to be served on a serving platter brimming with capers and half-past avocado FFS).
Breathtakingly slow service – I try not to be annoyed, and I know the wait staff is doing the best they can but damn it, the hanger is real – from being woefully understaffed (and underprepared) for the amount of brunchers and accompanying half-assed and ill-followed reservation policy (solution: Sunday brunch is reservation only, smaller menu, remove center tables; if you don't have a reservation, see you after 12:30).
An atmosphere that tries to be something to everyone (chic and trendy with family-friendly downhome comfort and childless Guinness and eggs benedict alcoholic 🤗 bruncher mimosa college crowd college professor crowd blah blah blah) and ends up being utterly forgettable (solution: fucking pick one and roll with it I mean I don’t love Bob Evans but at least they have their schtick and stick with it).
Question for myself: would I be more forgiving of the above if they fucking added salt? Perhaps. It’d be a start.
how i spent my afternoon
Little did I expect that two+ hours of my day (before picking up The Morkie from her doggie day spa appointment) would be spent in an obscenely wealthy gun nut’s panic room listening to his dissemination of each firearm in his (admittedly impressive) WWII collection. And that was after accepting his invitation to fire a silenced pistol, a semi automatic rifle, and a fully automatic rifle from his deck at a target near his woods; a memorable experience, certainly, but not one that I care to repeat - my abject loathing for those things (guns and obscenely rich white people in love with guns) remains intact.
/202308171110
A caravan of at least four monster trucks, on trailers, up the road. Purple, blue, digital camo, and ... the fourth color (rust?) escapes me. Afterwards, a person on a zero-turn riding lawnmower pulled into the gas station to fill up their tank, a local phenomena around which I'll never be able to wrap my brain: wouldn't they waste more than the convenience's worth of fuel driving the lawnmower there and back?
Ohio’s issue one is anti-democratic horseshit, (special, single-issue) election day edition
As Ohioans throng to the booths to decide to whether or not to take away their democratic rights in a single-issue special election concocted by gerrymandered cult-drones (here’s a useful guide as to what wouldn’t have passed in Ohio with the issue one-decreed 60% threshold and onerous requirement to get signatures from all 88 counties instead of the current 44 before any measure could even make it to voters) who claim it has nothing to do with abortion though the signs saying it does are all over the place (and, in one case, plastered in windows AND lawn) – as are the NO signs – a re-sharing of two earlier articles and a record of my duly registering my hearty FUCK NO on this horseshit issue. FFS Ohio, indeed.
ponypull (!)
Attended what was supposed to be a draft horse pulling contest today but my grandfather – the 96-year-old horseman with whom I attended because, as I said to him, When was the last time we did anything together that didn’t involve a hospital – misread the advert and didn’t see that the big horses didn't show up until 1800, but we did, instead, sit in the baking sun on a metal bleacher watching tough-as-hell ponies pull a fuckton of concrete blocks (2700 pounds, by the time we left). I dislike ponies, intensely. One bit me once, a long time ago. I still have the scar on my stomach. But I can, nonetheless, respect the little assholes’ physical prowess, if only begrudgingly. K and my grandfather will be attending the 1800 draft horse contest though now I kinda want to see a draft horse / pony tug of war.
boofuckinghoo
Given the insanity endemic in the Rethuglican party and the Ohio varietal’s accelerated transformation of this state into a (more) corrupt MAGAstan hellscape, I'm hopeful that Householder won't be the last of this coterie who trades in their suit and tie for an orange jumpsuit. They deserve every day of their sentence and then some – Ohio will (if it finds its way back to sanity - a big if) be digging itself out of the mess Householder et al created for years beyond that.
Can you hear the song I’m playing on the world's smallest violin?