One GoodThing About Philly

It's this guy: David Leonardi, the Sign Man.

(Photo copyright Getty Images.)

He's been doing this since 1972, when he got season ticket seats in the second row. The article and a link to a video interview are here on the Flyers website. (The video is worth checking out, it has his footage from the Flyers locker room when they won the cup in 1974 and shots of him and his wife showing up in their wedding clothes.)

He even came to Pittsburgh last year to mock the Pens in person during the Eastern Conference Finals (though he was presumably not involved in this legendary signage incident, one of my favorites). He taunted Fleury for "spin[ning] like a ballerina" during stoppages, among other things.

I love stuff like this. It takes effort. Unlike Philly's modern favorite, "Crosby sucks," you actually have to know the game and the players to come up with this kind of quality put-downs.

Vince Lascheid had it. The Civic Arena organist who died last month at 85 had a large repertoire of musical taunts, as well as pun-related theme songs for most of the Penguins stars. When the ref made a bad call, he threw out a few bars of the carol "Do You See What I See?" or, in extreme cases, "Three Blind Mice." (Back in those days of one ref and two linesmen this was an especially good choice.)

So it's great to see Leonardi going strong. This is old time taunting. The modern NHL could use a few more like him.

Great Balls of Fire

A few of my readers (well, actually I only have a few...at most) might remember that this blog title is based on a catchphrase used by Pittsburgh Penguins announcer Mike Lange.

Well, you can hear the illustrious Mr. Lange deliver his line here:
http://www.myxer.com/partner/7975109/
You can even buy it as a ringtone for your cell phone (though I'm sticking with the South Park Underpants Gnomes song, thank you).

In case you were curious. And never listened to Mike Lange call a Penguins game.

Confusingly, the URL is a different catchphrase, which isn't one of the ringtones. You can get the whole story here, in a strangely dated post from a time when the Penguins didn't make the playoffs:
http://sellmymonkey.blogspot.com/2006/02/she-wants-to-sell-my-monkey.html

Or-Durves

Why the heck do we use that phrase, hors-d'oeuvres? It's really hard. Every time I have to write it I have to look it up - and I actually know French.

Isn't there some other word we could call those things? Snacks? Sounds too "after-school". Appetizers? But that implies that more food is coming later, and usually if you invite someone for hors d'oeuvres you're not feeding them anything more.

What does that even mean? I think oeuvre is like a work of art. (I vaguely remember some pretentious use of this term to describe the entire body of work of a film creator, but film criticism has always had these French land mines like auteur and mise-en-scene.) Hors doesn't mean what it sounds like, it means outside.

So hors d'oeuvres are outside art. Does that mean they suck?

Seriously. It's just un-called-for.

Office Food Safety

Important rules from the Mythbusters workplace.

Lessons from LA

What I learned on my April vacation:

At "classy" hotels you have to pay $15/day for internet access. At "budget" hotels it's free. This is why nobody heard from me for three days while I stayed at the Biltmore and then I resurfaced when we moved to a Holiday Inn in San Diego.

Two-Headed Turtle
Originally uploaded by erink

Apparently two-headed turtles are not terribly uncommon. There's a little freak show on Venice Beach (an official one, I'm not just talking about the general ambiance). For $3 you can go into a little room with lots of displays of animals with extra limbs and such. They had a nice collection of cabinet cards, a bunch of skeletons (some gaffes) two two-headed turtles, a two-headed snake, a naked mole rat, and a dog with an extra foreleg. Oh, there was a sword-swallower too.

Seat covers are "provided by the management for my protection" - but against what?

Pinkberry is way good. They sell frozen yogurt with your choice of toppings, but the best thing is the yogurt tastes like yogurt! And it's not too sweet. Can we have one? I wouldn't mind a World Market in western PA either....

I've watched too much Kitchen Nightmares. Gordon Ramsey inhabited my body for a few minutes when our waiter (at a slightly pretentious place in San Diego) used some sort of torture device to decant our wine. It was a huge production. You had to put the wine in this frame, and light a flame underneath the neck of the bottle, and then turn a crank to make the bottle horizontal. (I'm not sure what the flame was supposed to accomplish, since it was on for about 60 seconds while the waiter decanted the whole bottle into a glass carafe.) The closest I can find is this. I just kept hearing Gordon's voice in my head - and he was saying, "Fuck me!"

Vaud and the Villains - way cool. Not sure they will translate well on a recording and I'm pretty sure they can't tour, but if you are in LA any time soon you must go and see them.

Our zoo is pretty good, but the San Diego Zoo is much better. All the enclosures are nice, they have more types of animals, and the critters are a lot more fun to watch somehow. I think they trick them into being active on Saturday afternoons just for us. There were a lot of baby animals, which helps, and a lot of "enrichment activities" going on - so the animals have things to do and that's a lot more fun than watching them sleep all day. One relative failure, though, the signage and documentation is better at Pittsburgh.

In southern California, rain is weird. It rained a little while we were in the slightly pretentious restaurant, and the staff warned us to "be careful" because of that when we left.

Pike Place roast sucks so much. It keeps me away from Starbucks in the afternoon. At Dulles I walked a mile to get to Starbuck's and all they had was Pike Place Roast (even though it was 7 a.m. - what's up with that?) But we got breakfast from Five Guys and it was very yummy.

Bird-of-Paradise
Originally uploaded by erink

Bird of Paradise flowers can grow in the ground. I thought they came from flower shops (for $15 a stem).