joel's pub

so we hit up the car show yesterday. i liked some of the stuff there. for instance, it was cool to see the Ford GT supercar up close. and a few 2006 vehicles are interesting to get a look at. I also spotted this new limited-edition retro Ducati motorcyle there. i want it baaaaaad. it's got that old school 70s look, but has all modern equipment. here's a look....

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i managed to catch the u.s. national team's friendly against norway today, played in southern california. the u.s. team won 5-0, with a hat trick by former maryland fwd taylor twellman. one thing that really did impress me was the play of clint dempsey. the guy just gets his legs moving and has an incredible quickness and some very fluid step-over moves with the ball. he seemed to be really "involved" on offensive chances. here he is playing for the MLS' new england revolution.

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jay, mark, steve and i are hitting up the northeast auto show in providence today. woo. i definitely wouldn't consider myself a "car guy" (i don't even change the oil myself!), but i have to say i'm excited to check out some sports cars and whatever crazy concept cars the manufacturers bring out. and if someone out there really loved me, they'd buy me the nissan z....

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i don't know whether to laugh at this or be disturbed. the last paragraph is particularly interesting.
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read this expose on a writer who has been posing as nasjidd, a navajo author. fascinating.
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for all you pennsyvlanians visiting this site, there's a great guide to pennsylvania's breweries, brewpubs and bars written by the excellent lew bryson (click on his link at right). lew updates his guides often, too, so you know you're getting the most up-to-date info.
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call her lizzie from now on...

dionne left to run an errand a few nights ago. unfortunately, while backing out of the driveway, she smacked her car right into the concrete steps to our back door. she actually broke THE STEPS in half. note, these are VERY sturdy professionally-built cement steps. when asked what happened her answer was apositively lizzie grubman-esque "I don't remember!"
here's her next car....

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king george HAS to be stopped. read this great article in slate about bush's wholesale disposal of the constitution. here's a chilling excerpt: "As Andrew Cohen, a CBS legal analyst, wrote in an online commentary, 'The first time you read the 'White Paper,' you feel like it is describing a foreign country guided by an unfamiliar constitution.' To develop this observation a bit further, the nation implied by the document would be an elective dictatorship, governed not by three counterpoised branches of government but by a secretive, possibly benign, awesomely powerful king."
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check out this amazing artist....
Sand Art

Watch Video
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14 things i'm diggin' right now...

1. macka diamond
2. the soul train line (see below)
3. you tube
4. long trail
5. colbert report
6. bode miller, aka "miller time"
7. brown rice... no link, it's just low in carbs
8. picasa 2
9. ikea restaurant
10. mylo
11. big ben
12. the puma "sprint" sneaker
13. "fire coming out of a monkey's head" by the gorillaz
14. soba noodles
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i finished reading pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" a few weeks ago. i really liked the book (it's basically a novella, only like 150 pages). anyway, it's written in this very surreal way and describes a woman in southern california in the 1960s who thinks she has stumbled across a secret society. very paranoid. i dug it and highly recommend it.
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jay and i brewed on saturday, our first brew session since december. each beer takes approximately 6 weeks from brew day until each bottle is ready for consumption, so it requires some planning ahead and managing of the schedle. (click on the "da brewery" link on the right for more info. and notes about our various beers). anyway, this beer we're doing now is going to be a belgian-style white ale, similar to hoegaarden or allagash white... it's actually a wheat beer that uses a belgian yeast strain, coriander and bitter orange peel. it should have a nice "clovey" spicey flavor, velvety body and cloudy yellowish "white" appearance. the eventual goal with this beer is to build a nice yeast cake so that we can brew a high-gravity belgian ale for our next batch in a few weeks. we're excited. here's a movie jay made of our belgian white ale... notice the extremely active fermentation.
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hey now... is there anything better in the world than the soul train line? seriously. i think it may possibly be america's greatest contribution to human civilization. i mean, could ANYTHING possibly be more expressive than a couple rockin afros and the LOUDEST clothing ever sewn together while funkin it down the stage in these impossibly-chreographed disco routines? watch the clip... a lot of them look like they're actually wearing roller skates. but no, they're rocking PLATFORM SHOES!

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there's actually a website dedicated to sleeping in airports. it's important information to know next time you're stuck in papua new guinea and have to sleep on the floor. apparently the world's best airport for sleeping is singapore's changi airport, followed by schiphol in amsterdam (which i can attest, is like the disney world of airports). worst in the world is port moseby, new guinea (you stand a good chance of witnessing a stabbing), and freakishly, logan airport in boston.
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farewell, BLACK TABLE. we hardly knew ye. well, actually, we knew ye well, and you could publish some downright scary stuff at times. the web-zine black table has been on the scene for the past few years and has always been really fun to read. unfortunately, they're giving it the terri schiavo treatment and saying "adios." hopefully they can AT LEAST find a new home for "this week in craig," possibly the funniest column on the internet. wow, that's saying something....
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i updated a few little things lately to make the blog look a little better. hopefully you like them. first, i added a bunch of new photos of me, dionne, family and friends. The picture of di with the painting was taken on our honeymoon in mexico. others are from the wedding reception and rehearsal dinner.

another thing i did is fixed up my perma-links on the right hand side. I used a button maker to do them. i think the site looks much cooler now.

last thing i did is added a feature called "Mapstats," which tracks the geographic locations of visitors to joel's pub and puts them on a google map of the world. To view it, just click on the blue button that says "BF Mapstats" on the right hand side.
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here's a good onion-esque spoof of a typical pointlessly-contrarian skip bayless column. i laughed.
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i did talk to keagan today for a while. he just got back home after a loooong trip from qatar to amsterdam and from there to philadelphia. he said the trip to mecca was the most amazing experience of his life. there hopefully will be some pictures coming soon and i'll post them when i get them. cheers.
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here's some background on the dudes behind the infamous "lazy sunday" music video on SNL. (which still cracks me up, even after watching it about 50 times.)
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i just wanna say one thing....





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crazy delicious!
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keagan is due to return any day now from his hajj to mecca. he was lucky enough to get any oppurtunity to make the pilgrimage due to generous benefactors. He spent time in mecca, medina and qatar. from what i hear, the sheer number of people there is just mind-boggling (check the photo below). also, we did worry about him when we heard about the 350 people who were trampled to death in mecca last week, but he was not in the area at the time. actually, the stampede occurred at a sorta side function that involves throwing stones at pillars representing the devil... not actually part of the main pilgrimage.

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check out stephen colbert's show "the colbert report... click on where it says "stephen vs. conan" for a great clip of him going on conan's show.
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our allies in the u.k. are apparently none too happy to be working with the u.s. military in iraq. here's the take from a british brigadier general. he claims that the u.s. military in iraq is too "gung-ho," too blindly optimistic, too quick to take offensive action and too institutionally racist to succeed in counter-insurgency in iraq.
this is what happens when the army becomes an all-volunteer force apart from the rest of society. those countries with mandatory military service are onto something.... (note: I never would have supported that when i was 18.)
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slate has also had a bunch of good stuff on just how fascist alito really is.
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alito = fascisti!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
don't get it confused, samuel alito, bush's awful supreme court nominee would absolutely strangle our democracy to death if given the chance. and it looks like he will. get ready to have war declared on YOU from high above in the supreme court. if you're not angry, just start reading up on this piece of human puke. here's a good place to start.
(notice the graphic in the top left corner, too!)
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this kitty! gatsby, our cat, has a new favorite toy... q-tips. she's addicted. we find her playing with one on the floor and take it away from her. then five minutes later she's got ANOTHER q-tip in her little kitty cat mouth. then yesterday morning somehow she climbed up onto a cabinet and pulled down an entire box of 500 q-tips. they were all over her floor, and i'm sure they were good fodder for her secret stash. 
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check out these funny t-shirts. my favorite would have to be "no seriously, who let the dogs out?", or possibly "What wouldn't Jesus Do? with a picture of Christ hang-gliding.
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sorry for the lack of posts lately. di and i travelled down to nashville to visit her family over the holidays. it was very nice to be down there... we brought adrienne and gatsby (our cat) with us for the 15 hour drive down to middle tennessee. anton and his girlfriend camille, plus keisha and simone were there. we played much scrabble (which included a heated argument over whether "chored" is a word... according to the dictionary, it is), ate much good food, especially di's mum's lamb curry. we also saw the grand ole opry.... which wasn't impressive at all from the outside... and a little of downtown nashville, which reminded me of a country/western version of south street in philly. later in the week we drove up to philly to visit my mom. keagan is off visiting saudi arabia for his pilgrimage, so it was just the three of us and gatsby. we checked out "Body Works," an exhibit at the franklin institute. a bunch of scientists took donated human corpses and used chemicals to "plastinate" the bodies... basicallly preserving them with chemicals. then they took the bodies and turned them into anatomical textbook manuals....



my favorite part was where they injected the entire ciruculatory system, from the arteries downt to the tiniest capillaries, with some kind of bright red chemical. then used other chemicals to completely dissolve away everything but the blood vessels... leaving a stange netting of bright red vessels and capillaries. just bizarre.
overall, i wasn't blown away by the exhibit, though. a lot of the organs and full human bodies just didn't look "real" due to the plastics they used... so it just didn't have a very high creepiness factor. not nearly as high as the mutter museum in philadephia... which displays all kinds of medical oddities in formaldehyde.
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