On Saturday I went out to dinner with the readers Poodleman at a very nice and tasty restaurant on Court Street in Cobble Hill, Lobo, which I highly recommend to readers in the area. The soundtrack playing in the background was amusingly much more northern England than southern U.S. (the first two songs we heard were Blue Monday and Life In A Northern Town) but the food and drink were thankfully not, a little more Mex than Tex and like I say, quite delicious, at least my Chipotle Shrimp Enchiladas and Blood Orange Margarita were (and I think my companions also had no complaints). Then we went to see the new Alexander Payne movie, Sideways, which was really good and does continue to seem better in retrospect, but I would caution that it's pretty slow and a little over two hours long, so it may not be the best movie to go see after a full meal and some tequila, about 2/3 of the way through you'll probably feel like a taking a little nap under those circumstances. But it's definitely worth seeing. After that we emerged into a cold and clammy drizzle for a walk over to the G train which took us up to Williamsburg to meet reader Will H. at this new place called Barcade. As you can probably figure out from the name, it's pretty much an old school arcade with probably around 40 games from the early 80s (Tempest, Berzerk, Zaxxon, Crystal Castles, Gauntlet, Frogger, Arkanoid, etc., etc, you get the picture and I got the high score of 13,110 on Frogger) that's also a bar. The only downside was that it was fairly crowded when we first arrived at 10:45 or so and the kids just kept on coming after that, plus as you might expect I'm pretty sure that our group were the only patrons that could have been actually nostalgic about the atmosphere, everyone else looked to be under 25 years old. When I was trying to play Dig Dug, not very successfully due to a fucked up joystick, I overheard this guy on the Asteroids machine next to me impressing the girl who was with him by saying, "What you do is you leave a couple of the rocks and then you just buzz all around the screen waiting for the little aliens to come out. I learned that when I used to play this all the time back in the day - I used to work at Urban Outfitters and they totally had this same game down in the basement." It was so geekily tempting to bust in and tell him that you should only have one tiny rock that's moving slow and relatively straight up and down rather than the 4 rocks of varying sizes that he had going, that you shouldn't buzz all around but pretty much straight up, and that the move is called 'hunting Beaver' (with the big UFO being Wally), but I didn't feel like both messing with his scene and looking like a sad old man, so I kept my superior knowledge and skills to myself and moved over to Road Blasters. Still, if you could somehow keep a place like that in business with a 'must be born before the bicentennial to enter' policy it would be the best bar ever. Then yesterday I just went to the gym after posting that photo down below, which is an excellent time to go by the way, at least to a gym in midtown, because there was hardly anyone else there and I could do anything I wanted with no waiting, plus the pool was totally empty. Got home around 5:30, read a little, cooked myself a nice meal not from a box, watched Arrested Development, read some more and then to bed. Ta da.