On Friday night, a thought occurred to me: beautiful weather, and just a couple weeks left in Philadelphia. It's time to ride bell-to-bell.

Bell-to-Bell means from Philadelphia's Liberty Bell to the Justice Bell in the Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge. It's about 50 miles, round-trip. I had talked about planning this as a group ( Read more... )

If you've shopped at the Pennsylvania Wine & Spirits shop on 12th and Chestnut in Center City, Philadelphia, you may have run into Max G. He's incredibly tall, skinny, and friendly. His knowledge of wine is vast, which is particularly impressive because he is still a young man, but not surprising for wine is clearly his passion ( Read more... )

This morning, tawdryjones and I rode our bikes to Pennypack Park in NE Philly. The roundtrip from Center City was about 40 miles (Google says 38, but we had a few detours). The park itself is beautiful, a great paved trail that runs alongside a creek, lots of ups-and-downs and twists-and-turns to keep the trail interesting. We heard many birds and saw ( Read more... )

I wasn't even really sure I was going to go to this show--I wanted to, but the tickets were expensive ($35) and I've had a bad track record lately seeing bands I saw 20 years ago. But when I saw R5 Productions tweet that there were only 20 tickets left, I had to make a decision. I gave Nicola a hard time about making me go to see Jay-Z but ( Read more... )

I just discovered that The Spice Terminal is closing! Their last day is January 29th, but they are still almost entirely cleared out. The signs say, "Thanks for 30 years of business ( Read more... )

Earlier today, Nicola and I went to Maoz. Maoz is basically a fast-food place that serves a limited vegetarian menu: falafel (and toppings) and French fries. Given the other fare within a few hundred feet (a Five Guys, Mirabella Meatball, etc.) you can be fairly certain that Maoz attracts a bit of a hippie/granola element ( Read more... )

Yesterday evening I went to Brickbat Books (1.3 miles each way) for a book signing for Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79-’83 and Why Be Something That You're Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985. I got there a few minutes late and the author was just standing around chit-chatting and drinking beer. I guess reading a selection from a zine ( Read more... )

Student 1 - A typical overconfident b-school student.
Student 2 - A lanky b-school student with shaggy blond hair and pimples.

Student 1: So, you were at a hedge fund over the summer, right? [Envious]
Student 2: Well, the thing is, I would've had to split my time. You know, I just felt it would take too much from all the other things in my life.
( Read more... )

There was another fire in our building last Friday evening. We were part way through dinner when the alarm went off, so we grabbed Miss K and shoved her into her cat carrier and went downstairs. There she got to "meet" another cat through the bars of her plastic prison. Prince Caspian, who lives on the 6th floor, took rather a shine to Miss K. Miss ( Read more... )

( This year I volunteered as a tax preparer )