P'Cheen, North Highland Pub, and the Great Atlanta Pub Crawl

On Tuesday night I ventured down the less traveled side of Highlands Ave (south of Ponce) for a night out. I've driven past P'Cheen a few times and thought it looked cool. So I checked it out on the net and decided it was worthy of hosting me for dinner. I sat outside and had a wonderful pork tenderloin dish along with a Peroni and a Moretti to drink. It's a pretty laid back pub with a wraparound wooden bar. Apparently they have DJ's at 11pm (also the downfall of The 5 Spot) but I was out of there by 9:30. According to other reviews "P'cheen" is the gaelic word for moonshine though I can't find any proof of that. Anyways the beer list was impressive, the food was great, entrees were around $15, and I recommend it.

Afterwards, I headed over to the North Highland Pub. I'm ashamed I've never been there before. Unfortunately (or fortunately) it's not located next to any other bars so it's kind of a hassle to get to unless your starting off your night there. It's what I think of as a Manhattan bar. Just a narrow bar that goes straight back. This is a drinking man's bar. No frills. A tv, some old pictures on the wall, and a wooden bar. I had a draft Paulaner and I remember them having about 8 other beers on tap including Sweetwater 420, Harp, Stella Artois, and some other quality beers. This is definitely a place where I want to start off the night in the future.

And finally... I'm going to start my great Atlanta Pub Crawl. I have roughly 12 more weeks of single life ahead of me. In that time I'm going to try and visit as many Atlanta bars as possible. 100 different bars would be awesome but I'm going to at least hit 75. I'll write a short recap of each one here. So for those who think I've slacked off on my social activities in the last year or so. Here you go. I'm up for a drink Monday thru Saturday. So I got 2 bars down, 98 to go, and I'm looking to knock off 2-3 tonight.

Links

For those of you who watch 30 Rock, apparently the girl who played Liz Lemler "the other Liz" was Anna Chlumsky of My Girl fame. If you missed it you can catch her in the first minute or so of episode 17 you can also watch the last 5 episodes from that link. You're welcome Kdudd.

I thoroughly enjoyed this TV theme song quiz

And somewhat NSFW Girls Gone Sports is supposedly a sports blog by two girls who live in Texas. What's interesting is that they're attracting a crowd by occasionally showing PG pictures of their cleavage in posts and their profiles.

don't ask questions

just read this article

Lists

More McSweeney's, I just found their archive of lists, which is like living in an alternate world where Letterman's Top Ten Lists are still funny and not restricted to being 10 items long.

My favorites:

Foolproof Dinner Party Icebreakers

HAL's Comments While Trapped on a Desert Island, and Your Name Is Dave

Long-Awaited Sequels to Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound

Potential Nicknames for the Star Player on My Son's Soccer Team

Linebackers Who Are Twice as Good as Mike Singletary

I know how people are with spoilers so I'll advise you not read the following list unless you've read through all of the Harry Potter books, even though that completely kills the joke. But it made me laugh The Endings of 10 Famous Novels You Always Meant to Read but Never Got Around To

The video quality is awful, but this is actually a very funny Top 10

Little Girls Aren't Funny

McSweeney's is a horribly designed website that makes it a task to uncover their funniest essays. But every now and then you find a gem like this.

Music Stuff

Check out this post from Atlanta music blog, Cable and Tweed, to download a Tenacious D cover of REO Speedwagon's Keep On Loving You. Nevermind that embarassing info about the Wagon's exclusivity deal with Wal Mart. I'll choose to forget that info and only remember seeing the Wagon at Music Midtown a few years ago. The Sunday lineup at the 96Rock stage was Ween, REO Speedwagon, and Journey. REO dominated. I became a changed man.

If you've ever spent time in a non-chain record shop you should enjoy this brief article about different types of customers. On a similar note, I'm guessing spending time in the Sea of Timeless, Big Shot Records, Wild Man Steve's, and Wuxtry Records stores of the world made High Fidelity more enjoyable as well. My personal favorite story: The Dude and I were in the old Wuxtry Records in Athens once and heard two employees having a debate over the "Top 5 Double Bass Drum Albums of All Time". I'm pretty sure this was right after I had read High Fidelity and lead to me having to go outside because I started laughing so hard.

Barry: Top 5 songs about death. A Laura's Dad tribute list, okay? Okay. Leader of the Pack. The guy fuckin' beefs it on his motorcycle and dies, right? Dead Man's Curve. Jan & Dean.

Dick: Do you know that right after they recorded that song Jan himself crashed his car...

Barry: It was Dean you fuckin' idiot...

Rob: It was Jan. It was a long time after the song.

Barry: Okay, whatever. Tell Laura I Love Her. That would bring the house down - Laura's Mom could sing it. You know what I'd want? One Step Beyond by Madness. And, uh, You Can't Always Get What You Want.

Dick: No. Immediate disqualification because of its involvement with The Big Chill.

Barry: Oh God. You're right!

Dick: Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald - Gordon Lightfoot.

Barry: You bastard! That's so good - that should have been mine... The night Laura's daddy died. Sha na na na na na na na na! Brother what a night it really was. Mother what a night it really... angina's tough! Glory be! "

U2 Video

I can't decide if U2's video for Window in the Skies is cool or not. It's definitely makes me nostalgic and features some amazing editing/photoshop skills, but is it mainly just a vehicle to get millions of people to continually watch a video for an exceedingly mediocre song? I don't know, but I'm a sucker for montages. I treated it like a triva game and tried to recognize as many of the artists as possible. I think I did pretty well. And the lasting thought it left me with....

NOBODY LOOKS COOLER IN BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY THAN RAY CHARLES

CJ's Landing

According to a waitress we talked to on Saturday night, CJ's Landing will be likely be closing on June 16th. So soak up the precious few Saturday nights you have left to enjoy the Brian Wiltsey Band. Who in my opinion, might be the best lead singer for a cover band I've ever seen. His chops on Purple Rain are enough to seal the deal for me, but hearing him nail Lenny Kravitz' "It Ain't Over Till It's Over" a couple weekends ago then hitting the high notes on Roxanne a couple songs later was amazing.

According to the Atlanta blog, Drive a Faster Car, CJ's is buying the Star Bar. If you haven't been, the Star Bar is a hole in the wall live music bar in Little Five that's basically across from the Vortex. I've seen a few punk bands play there over the years and really enjoyed the place. They also use to have a pretty intense music trivia night on Mondays, but I believe that got replaced by karaoke at some point. It's a completely different scene from CJ's though. Mainly, there's no kickass porch with a tree growing right in the middle of it.

Go Go Gadget Groove Thang

I'm not gonna lie. I find it a little worrisome that a robot can be programmed to dance better than I can. Granted, I did create the Buckhead Bounce which was stolen and later bastardized into the popular Bankhead Bounce, but that was roughly 12 years ago. I haven't started a dance sensation in a long time. So take notice cute little fuzzy robot, the Dancing Jman is gunning for you.

Whatever happened to dance shows on tv? I'm assuming that Soul Train, Club MTV, the Grind, etc. are now dead. Which leaves possibly only Pants-Off Dance-Off on Fuse TV as the only way to showcase your groove on cable. If someone started a dance show and regularly brought in enough hot dancers, wouldn't it get ratings or create an online presence? I'm sure you could film it in L.A. and get reality stars, porn stars, aspiring models to dance on it. Though, I'm sure these shows started going downhill about the time 13 year olds figured out how to get free porn on the internet.

Masters Stuff

ESPN has a live blog of the coverage. There is a link to the live coverage of Amen Corner on that page as well. Which I just checked out, and it's got exceptional picture quality this year. Here's the leaderboard if you can't get away with watching video at work. Me? I'm going to be using my Slingbox to switch back and forth from the Braves game to the Masters. Braves start at 3pm, USA's Master's coverage at 4pm, and conveniently my boss/father leaves for vacation at 2pm. Sweet.

Also, here's the Google maps thing I did with August National's back 9 last year so you can get a feel for how the course is actually laid out.

Final Four Thoughts

- Judging by those around me, watching your team play in the Final Four is one of the best sporting events possible. As a non-partisan fan with pretty bad seats it's cool and an experience to remember. But the Ohio St and Florida fans were going crazy the whole game. At one point Ohio St. took a 5-3 lead or something like that and you would have thought they hit a game winning shot.

- Ohio St fans need to get some new cheers. I"m pretty sure they have 3 and they all involve spelling Ohio. It just gets real tiresome.

- Initially we thought Georgetown brought more fans to Atlanta than UCLA and were a little surprised. Apparently the Bruins fans just showed up late and/or baby blue and yellow don't really stick out in a crowd. I'd say it was a slight edge to Florida fans over Buckeyes followed by UCLA a distant 3rd and Georgetown an even more distant 4th (which makes since b/c of their size).

- Georgetown has a cheer where half the crowd yells Hoy-As and the other half responds Sax-A. We spent half the night trying to figure out what Saxa meant. I get home and look it up on Wikipedia and it turns out that Hoya doesn't even mean bulldog which I always just assumed.

- UCLA has some really lame cheers that involve a bunch of white people punching their fists into the air like an old lady who just won Wheel of Fortune. However, their band etc. More than make up for it. They have your typical pep band and mascot. Then they throw out 5 dance team members. I remember them looking pretty skanky on tv the other night but from the upper deck they looked hot. Which I think is the definition of skanky. They only bring two male cheerleaders and two females. And then they have two guys and a girl who are part of "yell crew" that start cheers I guess. But the absolute highlight... they have a juggler.

They have a team Juggler! Seriously! While the pep band plays he just juggles the whole time. When the dance team and cheerleaders go out on the floor during timeouts... he goes out and does a juggling performance. It's the oddest and coolest thing I've ever seen. It doesn't hurt that the guy is amazing. Check out the Youtube clip of him below



And here is my view for the game. Usually seating stops at the far left of the picture and they have a large black cloth screen extending above the temporary seats. For the Final Four they sold tickets basically around the entire upper deck except for the 5 sections that were furthest away. Some people who were sitting over there moved behind us and said that "we could see a ball go in the air but we had no idea if it went in or not". They supposedly paid $250/seat.