Things that are making you crabbit! [5]

Eru wrote:Thish (hic) thread hash been bleshed by Eru.  

(hic) Praiff shbee!

Somebody's been at the eggnog on another thread!

And it weren't just plain eggnog either.

Forest Shepherd wrote:And it weren't just plain eggnog either.

Varda's Valinorean eggnog is indeed legendary. How do you think Tulkas slept for so long after his wedding with Nessa? The Eldarin loremasters don't talk about the reception very much in the histories -- something about it distracting from the dignity of the Valar -- but let me tell you.... 'Course that was back in the Almaren days, but it all starts to blend together after a while, especially when you're as hungover as I am right now.

As of a few hours ago I was supposed to be sitting in a bar (I was angling for the carousel bar in Hotel Monteleone) in New Orleans having a reviving drink (I was squared up on a sazerac).

Instead I'm sitting in one of the airport hotels outside Charlotte, North Carolina.  It has a bar, but it is not an auspicious looking bar.  Forlorn and uninspired is how I'd frame it.  The sort of bar you'd go sit in to remind yourself of the dreary pointlessness of life.

What happened?  The weather happened.  New Orleans got hit with snow and freezing rain.  This almost never happens so the airport isn't set to deal with the situation.  The second leg of my flight was cancelled.  The reason I'm going to New Orleans is for the largest Earth Science conference in the world, which means the flights are packed and their ain't no room to take a later flight.

So tomorrow I fly into Baton Rouge, then take a bus, arriving a full day later than I planned.  Not only do I miss that full day in New Orleans, but since I cancelled the hotel within 24 hours I can't get refunded for it.  The only bright spot is that all the local airport hotels went into a bidding war and I'm paying about 2/3 what I should normally pay.  If I had been reimbursed I wouldn't mind, but this is on personal time, before the conference.

So yeah, Crabbit.  With capital 'C'. For I time I had toyed with the idea of visiting downtown Charlotte, but then I remembered the freezing drizzle.

Part of the reason I'm taking a bus instead of a rental car is the whole region goes schizoid when so much as an inch of snow hits.  Everyone is scrambling for transportation.  Adds another 2 hours to my trip.  

I feel you, Halfwise. Being stuck in a boring hotel in the middle of nowhere when you should be somewhere interesting sounds remarkably dull. Yet, even not an auspicious looking bar might have something interesting on tap or bottle in the back of the shelf. Trudge true the drinks menu and see if you are in luck, and if so, there's few better things than to have a quiet drink of something interesting while you consider the universe. After all, you are on enforced free time, might as well take advantage.

You think they have a drinks menu?

Seriously this is one step up from a folding table pulled up to a shelf nailed to the wall, with a bare-bulbed pull-string lamp for ambience.

Well, perhaps not a drinks menu, but perhaps a menu?

But, I get it, you are in the digs. Problem with our day is the out of way has all been streamlined. It is all MacDonald's etc all selling the same shit all over. Locality and interestingness has become a selling point and as such, where you find it, expensive. Before when you went somewhere different things would differ, local stores, local anything. Now everything is a boring streamlined monotony.

But, hey, where are the pics? Let us see this paragon South Carolinian excelence

I think the main problem here is a lack of love for the project of creating a bar. It's related to your concept of streamlining, but even that can work if there's some interest in it; some sense of community.  A hovel with folding chairs can be a great place to be if the people running it actually care - a rickety small town bar full of locals will beat any glitzy bar in a big city which doesn't believe in itself.  This place doesn't believe in itself.

I may take pictures, but the bartender will wonder why. It's not like he can't notice - nobody else is there but him and perhaps one customer. That customer won't even be there contemplating suicide -- you need ambience for that.

Probably for the best that you didn't leave the hotel. Remember what happened when North Carolina got hit with unexpected snow in early 2014?

I don't quite remember that!

But I did make a trip to the bar, and actually, that came out pretty okay.

I got down there and several people were there at the bar for dinner, gently teasing the much younger bartender with those southern accents that wash over you like a warm moist breeze.   Maybe the lighting had changed, or the I had gotten over the injustice of what had happened to me, but the bar didn't seem so bad anymore.  As more people came in and wavered between the bar and the tables we kept waving them over to the bar.

The first couple ordered drinks to take up to their room when they left, which struck me like a bolt of lightning.  Why did I never think of that before?  And the lone man who tried out his spanish on the bartender before wandering out with a promise to see him again in a few weeks set me off on a rumination about southerners and immigrants.

~ Halfy's Rumination on Southerners and Immigrants ~

The prevailing opinion up north is that southerners are hard on immigrants.  This isn't quite true: they may be hard on immigrants as a concept due to the border with Mexico, but they tend to be fondly protective of their immigrants; the ones they know.  This is the part of the southern tendency towards social group dynamics - they may say anything about you if you are not part of the group; but they also tend to pull you into the group so fast that northerners are left wondering how they happened to find themselves on somebody's front porch drinking iced tea that's way too sweet while talking about family.

So it goes with immigrants: some hackles may go up immediately, and Trump excels at keeping the social barbed wire raised; but once it's penetrated it's all good.  People will say they're not against immigration, just against illegal immigration...and they mean it.  They'll take immigrants right to heart if they see them as part of the group.  

I just wish we could get to discussion of what we want our immigrant policy to be without everything turning into fighting words.  It may be too tilted towards family connections right now, and not enough towards the merit based admission that Trump favors.  But the main thing immigrants bring is ambition, and there's objective no way to measure that.

~ end of rumination ~

So there actually was a drinks menu, though just a list of spirits and you'd have to specify how you'd want them mixed (or not).  I noticed every category had something called "Aristocrat", in whiskeys, tequilas, and cognacs.  it was the cheapest in each one probably due to non-specialization.  I hazarded I'd take such a whisky and soda up to my room.  The young couple next to me (mixed race: the south has changed) strongly advised against the Aristocrat experiment.  I did a taste and thought I could handle it, but found upon mixing the alcohol content had dropped enough that it ceased to pummel the low-grade taste off the tongue.  I decided it would make me drink slower so am now working through it.

{{Proof, were it needed that even the most crabbit situation can be salvaged by a pub! Even a shit one- as the alcoholic truth is once you start on a few buckies any pub automatically gets better and better

Hope you enjoy the rest oft he conference Halfy- assuming you ever get there. }}}

For decades Charlotte has been my favorite airport (doesn't extend to the hotels) because in the main atrium there's a line of potted trees with a line of white rocking chairs beneath them, very Southern. There used to always be a piano player in the center; and you could buy a platter of BBQ and sit in the rocking chairs under the trees while the music flowed over you. I actually looked forward to a layover in Charlotte.

But for the past decade the piano was always vacant, cutting the magic in half. This has been a source of sadness to me. Yet this morning as I came through the atrium after my sad delay, the music was playing! I wasn't planning on breakfast but ran to get a breakfast burrito and snagged a rocking chair. And as I sat there with my old favorite airport experience revived, I forgave Charlotte and the weather, and was at peace. It was almost worth missing a day of New Orleans to recapture the old magic.

My morning flight was cancelled and I wasn't notified ahead of time. Now I'm flying standby like a million others. Wish me luck.

Good luck on your adventure! Personally I think modern traveling has become almost unbearably safe and boring. You need some random shit like this thrown at you from time to time to shake you out of your Teleportation Trance and wake up the old Traveler Vagabond genes that have been lying dormant, waiting for just such occasions.

{{Great Arlo story by the way. You should drunk post more often! }}

Earth Sciences, as in the weather? cos that would be ironic.

Good luck making it to NOLA in time, halfy!

Well, I was the last guy to get on the flight standby, and only after I was on they realized they had overbooked by one person and started offering $500 to be on the next flight 3 hours later.  If I wasn't already a day late I would have jumped on it, but I wasn't about to give up my good luck.

Then at the airport shuttle I was the last guy to fill it up so it literally left 1 minute after I got on. In fact the driver had first said my hotel wasn't on his list and waved me on, then started calling me back 30 seconds later when he realized he was wrong.  And I was among the first to be dropped off.

So I got to my hotel feeling rather pleased, but the carousel bar was packed so I went to get the best hamburger in Louisiana instead, and was very happy.  

My plan for today was to go on outings then come back to my hotel to work in between so I wouldn't burn myself out too quickly.  I somehow didn't factor in the difficulty of getting work done after a drink; and I'm only one drink in so far and it's being really difficult.

But at the moment when I nodd off now I'm not dreaming about dancing girls:

That's a healthy looking burger

Well, to slightly change the topic, I need to leave new york and move to new orleans.  People kept asking if I was native.  I love this city like no other.  I've never been here before christmas, so never realize how pariticipitory this city was.  It's not about christianity, it's about community.  I tried some videos but never captured it.

So i went to Lafitte's Tavern, where the genius piano player made up rules on the spot based on the 20-something crowd that he would do music requests by year for free, but specific requests cost something.  I gave him a challenge to do doo-wop and he managed Blue Moon, so I tipped him $20 for pulling it off.  But it was defininetly a 20-something crowd (very cute at my age) so I eventually ceded my seat.  They where largely too socially concious to follow my lead and plant the ear against the piano to really feel the bass. They'll grow up and eventually not give a shit what they look like.

Then I ended up in a bar with a great blues band, where they thought I was local.

then a dueling piano bar where all the christmas costumes showed up.  I tried to capture it on video but never really succeeded.

Anyway, New Orleans is where I want to be.  New York is just a diversion.

Wouldn't putting your ear against the piano be too loud?

Anyway, sounds like a great time, despite all the hipsters.


I came here to rant a bit, actually, so I'll just do that now.

There's this farm-hand who's been living here for a month or so. He's actually an old, old friend of my mom's. Anyway, he's fighting cancer with homeopathic medicine which includes, among other things, putting a lot of baking soda in his maple syrup. I don't understand it myself, but let it be.

Anyway, I had no idea the syrup had baking soda in it and I used some while mixing up an apple crisp last night. This is proper maple syrup we're talking about, not that crappy table syrup, and I can tell you that when you add baking soda to it it smells awful. At the risk of embarrassing myself, it smells like nothing so much as really funky-smelling dick (my sister agrees with me on that, I tried not to read too much into that). Truly retch-worthy in a sickly-sweet way. Like some guy did something naughty with his member and then let it lie around for a couple days.

Blech, it's making me crabbit that I even have to describe the smell in this way.

The smell baked out, thank goodness!, and the crisp is only slightly over-risen from the extra soda.

How could anybody do that to maple syrup?!! I suppose if baking with it the baking soda would mix in anyway.

Laying your head down on a piano is no worse than what some people do with headphones. But it makes the tones richer and the direct vibration adds a whole new dimension. I highly recommend it if you find a setup that lets you sit around a piano. The only other place I know with a setup like that is the Driskill Hotel on Austin's Sixth street.

halfwise wrote:
Laying your head down on a piano is no worse than what some people do with headphones.

Ah, so it causes irreparable hearing damage?