Hot dog! We’re gonna have a ball tonight….

Who put the Chic in Chicago? Who put the Ram in the Ramalamadingdong?

Well I went there anyway. (Chicago that is, not the fictitious land of Ramalamadingdong). People I was with had tickets to see The Pixies there so I tagged along. Apparently The Pixies sucked so that was good. I on the other hand when faced with an evening of staring at a TV in a hotel room (and not a witty and erudite one like the one I had in New York) decided to do something I NEVER do and go and sit in a bar on my own and see what happened.

I went to this bar…

Now looking at it you might wonder what exactly about it out of the the several dozen bars I could have chosen attracted me to this godforsaken looking place? (And deep breath. That was a hell of a sentence. Well done for getting through it.) Well the sad but true reason is that when I walked past it the first time, there was a bartender and one customer in it and that customer had black clothes and a Velvet Underground circa 1969 type haircut. The idea of going into a trendy looking bar full of jolly young people listening to modern music (it’s all bang bang bang and you can easily tell the boys from the girls, not my sort of thing at all) filled me with dread so after a brisk walk in the wind and rain to the hotel to get me ID, into the Hot Dog Bar I went. First there was a stilted conversation about American Football, they tried, I failed. Then we moved on to what we did for a living, again my answer tends to annoy people more than anything. Finally we got on to a safe subject, music. The bartender was a drummer in a band he’d started and liked much the same dodgy music that I did, Allelujah! 3 hours passed in the blink of 6 beers and 5 shots of Makers Mark bourbon. Remember what happens when I drink bourbon?

Yeah well it happened again. It was a great night though. Patrick the ace bartender, poured many beers and gave many free shots and tried to charge me a paltry amount at the end of the night (like about £4.50 seriously). We chatted and laughed, agreed about most things musical, set the world to rights politically, and exchanged email addresses in order to hear each others musical efforts.

Now some might laugh at my going into a bar attached to a hot dog shop and spending all night drinking with the bartender in an empty bar but those people would be mistaken and evil. They can laugh at this instead…

Well you need shades with a hangover the size I had…

While in Chicago, I also bought one of these…

Dunno why but they are another thing that I am inordinately obsessed with from my childhood along with Sea Monkeys, X-Ray Specs and Charles Atlas body building courses for 9 stone weaklings like myself who get sand kicked in their faces by tough guys. Perhaps all those old imported Marvel and DC Comics I got given as a kid warped my mind in some way?

There’s a very good St Etienne song called Zipcode which deals with my childhood in a bizarre parallel way. I did have the wrist radio, and if you replace apes with pigs then pretty much the whole song happened to me. So there.

Hmmm what else now I’m in a posting kind of mood? Well there’s other pictures like these…

Food with a Greek what? (first spotted by N)

Are you sure that’s safe?

Huh?

And finally in other news… What would you say is going on here? Please use the comments bit to post your picture caption if you can be bothered…