Score!

REM concert on Friday evening. Liked a couple of songs but most of it was lost on me. That dude is seriously depressive. Who wants to pay up cash to get depressed?

Ethopian food at Demera on Saturday evening. Love it! It is suspiciously like South Indian food. The Ingera tastes like Dosa, the Sambussa is the Samosa and the Dor Wat tastes like Chettinad Chicken. And they eat with hands! Ethopians have a strange look - not African, not Aryan, a little North African, trim and athletic, complete with Cleopatra-esque noses and frizzy hair. I must say that this combination of genetic factors made the waitresses pretty pretty. To think about it , I can swear I know some Malayalee types who share 70% of the look. Strange. The effects of ancient trade routes persist many a thousand years.

Went to the Printers Row Book Fair on Sunday evening. Picked up these 7 books:

Keep The Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell
The Rubaiyat - Omar Khayyam
The Beautiful and Damned - Scott Fitzgerald
Norton's Book of Personal Essays
Feynman's Rainbow - Leonard Mlodinow
Macroeconomics - Richard Froyen
The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham

Guess how I paid for them? 28$!! I actually bought the Macroeconomics book for 1$ (obviously sold by someone who was totally lost on it's real economic value or just didn't care).

Then went across the street to the Chicago Blues Festival. Music was great but rain + mud + lots and lots of people = not fun.

'tis the season to be married!

More precisely, it appears to be the weekend to be married. The city seems to be overflowing at the gills with couples getting hitched. Every hotel I walked past had at least 3 marriage receptions going on. Michigan Avenue and Grant Park had like 20,000 couples looking to frame their greatest moment most beootifully. Limos everywhere, from sedate black Lincoln town cars to out and out outrageous stretch Humvees with screaming inhabitants. Every other passerby on the street was either a bridesmaid in flowing primary colors or a black suited best-man. For a little bit I wondered if I was having a delusional hallucination of deep hidden issues that really have no other way to find the light of day, but my friends corroborated my observations. Either they are having similar hallucinations as well, or it is indeed true that everyone everywhere has decided to get married at the same time.

One for the road

Urbana-Champaign
The Blind Pig

Chicago
The Grill Room
Pepper Canister

London
The Volunteer
The Long Acre

Guess who?

Was walking past a theater back entrance on State and Lake on my way home from work and a cop stopped me on the sidewalk to let someone pass. Guess who ? Dolly Parton!

Joke of the day

What is the easiest way to launder money?

Throw a banker into a washing machine.

Funny

I find it amusing that both "The Dark Knight", the new dark and angst ridden Batman movie, and "Wanted", the new Angelina Jolie movie about a band of assassins, are both centered in Chicago. Whatever happened to fun happy jazzy "Blues Brothers" Chicago?