Fat Camping

Tomorrow being Thurdsay, it's time for Fat Camp. This week we are really and truly going mountain biking. Well:

• Except for StinkyJ, who has a broken leg. But no matter, he only talks about going and never really goes.
  
• And except for AndyP who has to coach his son's little league team.
• And except for BrainkyP who didn't have an excuse right up until 3:00 today when he got scheduled to run a meeting from 5-7pm tomorrow.
  
• And except for The Spankster, who called in sick today after having a fever for a couple days.
• And except for ScottyM, to whom I give credit for the oddest excuse. "I rode my bike to work on Tuesday." When pressed, he quickly switched to his daughter having little league. I liked the Tuesday one better.
  
• And except for Dr. Adlerberg who alternately claims to have a bad back or a bad bike, depending on how he's feeling about his vowels at the moment.

Other than that, it's All Hands on Deck! Meaning I hope TommyO doesn't cancel, or I'll be going by myself.

One of the nice things about actually biking is that it ends up to be a much cheaper night. We stop at a little pizza joint at the bottom of the hill afterwards where a pitcher of beer is the same price as two pints at The Duke, and where you can stuff your face with pizza and pretty good wings. Me, CherkyB, being originally from a little town just on the northern border of Buffalo appreciate good wings. Now, in Buffalo what Jake's serves would be considered kinda average-to-below-average pizza joint wings, but it is by far the best thing you can get around these parts since The Pacific Steamer shut down a few years back.

Reminds me of my first encounter with wings out here. This was like the second fat-camp ever, when it was just two of us back in 1995. AndyP (who is also from Upstate, though a lot farther east than I, CherkyB) and I were at a bar that a guy at work had said was a great sports bar. We had both just recently moved to the area, so we were depending on locals to tell us where to go. It was Monday Night Football. This place was called something like "City Sports", but that was about as much sports as there was. It turned out to be right across the street from Apple Compooter, and those Apple guys turn out to be a bunch of high-brow artsy-fartsy types.

It's not just the users.

Anyways, the first bad thing happened was that they didn't have beer by the pitcher. This was a foreign concept to me at the time. The only other bar I had ever been to that did not have pitchers of beer was a place called Ryan's in Ft. Erie, Ontario, which was a dance club that catered to the 19-20 yr old crowd from Buffalo. Drinking age in Ontario is 19, whereas it's 21 in Buffalo. I didn't particularly care for Ryan's, what with it being a dance club, but sometimes the womens wanted to go there, and they had 10cent wings on Tuesdays, and it was 10cents Canadian, which was like free to us. They didn't have pitchers of beer cuz they had no draft beer at all. But they had the Molson's in the brown bottles that we all craved, since in the US of A you can only get the green bottle stuff. And a bottle was like $2.50 Canadian, so practically free.

Ft. Erie has similar discounts on the ballet, if that's what you like. For those of you not from Upstate NY, you don't know that we're talking about strip clubs. Hee hee.

Anyways, this place in Cupertino (which is now gone. The place. Not Cupertino.) that did not have pitchers of beer did actually have beers on tap. So they had no excuse other than that they were upitty. Then, AndyP asked the bartender if the wings were any good. And the bartender says this. I swear it's what he said. You can check with Andy.

Yeah. We've got the best wings. They're better than everyone else's because we use tender strips of chicken and batter them before deep frying and then we use a tangy barbecue sauce.

Uh, dude, those aren't wings. What you have just described is chicken fingers. And chicken fingers are a crap school cafeteria lunch kind of menu item, not an upscale version of wings.

We finished our beers and left. Luckily, the dude at work had given me two great sports bars to go to. The second one turned out to be The Duke. Which is a terrible sports bar, given that it's a British pub so all they care about is darts and soccer, but it's a nice pub that we go to still to this day. However, we ended up going to The Sports Page for most of our Monday Night Football viewing (back then fat camp was on Mondays). I used to see this dude there a lot that I recognized as being from work but I didn't know who he was. Later, he turned out to be StinkyJ, who even later turned out to be my boss. Small world. To this day, that's the only time StinkyJ has showed at Fat Camp.