Return to Pittsburgh

It's really weird not being in Chicago. So much so that I'm writing this listing to Chicago news for inspiration in writing this, though I don't think it will help too much. My hopes aren't up, anyway.

So here's the life of the Blogger.

I noticed the other day that a very large amount of the food I eat has lots of meat in it. Considering that standard options for lunch at work are a BBQ place, a place called the Chicken Shack, a few sandwich shops and, when someone happens to be driving down around California and Roscoe, the greatest place ever, which is to say Hot Doug's. As an aside, if you're ever interested in what kinds of meat/mustard combinations you should be eating if you were in Chicago, go to their Specials page. They continue to serve foie gras (in the form of the last update's "Foie Gras and Sauternes Duck sausage") despite Chicago's much hyped foie gras ban, which, as far as I can tell, just made people eat a whole freaking lot of it right before the ban and hasn't actually been enforced, what with Daley calling it the silliest law" the city council has ever passed. Not that it's made in Chicago or eaten by all that many people, but now I've digressed for quite some time and it's better, probably, to get back to what I was talking about.

So enough about the sausage.

Anyway, I noticed, recently, that I eat quite a lot of meat. I began to wonder about how many vegetarian friends I have (a few), and that dammit, if these toolbags can do it, then for one week, I should be able to do thet same. Incidentally, I still don't really understand why the hell Anti-Flag is famous. I just never really liked them, I suppose. Anyway. Digressing again.

It turns out that if you're very much in a steady rhythm with what you're eating, and forget every day to bring in your own food, and are therefore forced to eat out in Evanston, it's really quite difficult to go for seven straight days on a strictly vegetarian diet. Actually, it probably isn't, but I wasn't able to make it. I did go five days before giving in to an italian sub, and figured out that the soups in some of the nearby eateries are pretty good, and I will probably try this again, but I just wasn't able to hold out my will for something I didn't actually believe there was any really strong reason to continue other than to be able to post that I was able to do it on here. Still, I'm somewhat more conscious of when I'm eating meat now, and maybe that'll be healthy.

Other things:

If you have any reason to care, you probably already know that the Majestic Star casino chain succeeded in its bid to open a slots parlor in Pittsburgh, beating out the Isle of Capri casinos that had pledged $290 million toward a new arena for Pittsburgh, which weighs heavily on the Penguins and might force a move. But I'm not going to pretend I have any clue what's going on or should be a source that's consulted on this. For that, go to ThePensBlog, which has been covering this like a sonofabitch.

And is hilarious.

Slate's got a slideshow of things that you can get at CVS at 10:30pm on Christmas Eve that you can think don't look incredibly cheap and like you waited until the last second, prompting your journey into a completely fabricated version of reality in which things are the opposite of what they actually are. It's not the height of reporting, and is kind of what I would try to do if I were actually trying to write an article for a local newspaper, but this suggestion is too bizarre for me to not mention it. Because if Frogz are going to give me nightmares, you're going to have to deal with them too.