-A new scoring wrinkle that will help teams in bad shape after round three was given a trial run last night and worked fairly well. We’ll see it again tonight.

-Could the empire be expanding to North Broad? Stay tuned.

-Questions were pretty tough last night. Expect more of the same tonight.

-People always ask me where they have the best chance to win. It varies over the course of the year, but right now I would definitely say the Good Dog. No dominant team and a new winner nearly every week.

-Oooooh, I’ve got some sweet new last place prizes too.

QUIZZO TONIGHT: Locust Rendezvous 6:15 p.m.
Black Sheep 8 p.m.

-Cheesy chain Buca Di Beppo closing down. Nice work, Philly! But let’s don’t stop there. Now let’s run the Olive Garden out of town. (But not Applebee’s of course. Those poppers are amazing. And porterhouse steak topped with melted cheese? Brilliant.)

-More Trivia Art, this time in the Metro.

-Mitch Williams to AJ Daulerio of the Phillymag blog: Keep Curt Schilling away from this team.

-Yesterday I posted that things were going from bad to worse in Atlanta: First Joey Harrington, then TI, then the water shortage. Well, finally some good news: they’re getting a WNBA team!!!

-The rankings are in, and the toolbags who fill out polls for Travel and Leisure have spoken. Philly sucks at pretty much everything, which is great. That means the squares who fill out these polls and their friends will stay away. Perfect. Oh, and we were the ugliest out of 25 cities. Um, hello. That’s exactly why I moved here. In the land of trolls, I look like a prince.

D-Mac and I started out on Friday at about noon, bound for Toronto. After stopping in Old Forge for their famous pizza (their not so secret ingredient: onions), we drove hard and fast for the border. Flew past Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. Were allowed into Canada and then drove by Hamilton and toward Toronto, rolling into Canada’s largest city at around 9:30 p.m. Dropped our stuff off at the Comfort Inn and headed for the Players Ball. As soon as I walked in the door, I had people challenging me to money games of RPS. I walked out later that night $35 richer. The Players Club was just off of College street, and the women walking around were quite cute. After winning some money and having a few beers, I headed back to the hotel and crashed hard. Spent the next day walking around Toronto. The first thing I noticed was it’s cleanliness. We were sort of wandering aimlessly and found an area that was sort of a cross between 8th and Market and 22nd and Market: A few record stores, some adult bookstores, some regular used bookstores. And even this sort of sketchy area was clean. Impressive.

That night, I dressed to the nines and headed to a bar called the Steam Whistle for the RPS World Championships. D-Mac is doing a story on it for the Philadelphia Weekly, so I won’t give a whole lot of details about the RPS, but I did fall in the first round on the final throw. Very disappointing. Hung around, saw the first ever female RPS Champ get crowned (also, the most unexcited winner of $7,000 ever), got shot down by a few more Canadian women, then headed with the Philadelphia contingent to a bar called Goodtymez, which was a dive bar near our hotel.

Buffalo, Cooperstown, and lots of photos after the jump.

Continue reading “What a Short, Strange Trip It’s been” →

-An awesome letter to the editor in last weeks Metro, after the Metro made a joke about Beanie Siegel behaving obnoxiously, acting like he was a South Jerseyite in Old City. The angry letter from a South Jersey native reads in part: For your sake, sir, we’ll try to stick to our own class of people down here in the gutter. We won’t force you to suffer the indignity of having to allow your eyes to fall upon such low-class trash, or god forbid, have to hear the vile conversations that fall from our mouths… On behalf of Philadelphians everywhere: Thank you.

-A guy who is running for City Council near Miami is running under a fairly astounding slogan.

-Great line from Stephen Colbert in a NY Times column about Gore’s chance of the presidency: …winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

-Just when you thought that Joey Harrington was Atlanta’s biggest problem, along comes this: Downtown Atlanta is about to run out of water. See, T.I. was just stocking up on guns for the coming apocalypse.

Got back in to Philly last night. Will have full details of the trip this afternoon, after I write my Metro column. In the meantime, do some reading on the Cardiff Giant, which I was in the same town as yesterday (Cooperstown) but didn’t get to see. Today was the day the Giant was discovered in 1869.

Well, an interesting weekend, to say the least. I’ll have more details and a lot of photos a little later. Currently in Syracuse, getting ready for the highlight of the trip: going to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Can’t wait. Haven’t been since I was 10 years old. Anyways, I’m gonna post pics of last weeks winners and the questions under them will be about people who went to Syracuse or who lived there. One guess per person.