Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Saturday morning, Tom’s Diner.

After staying home sick and playing with my computer for about 15 hours on a rainy, CNN-soaked Friday, it was nice to get up Saturday morning and head out for brunch with Katherine, Rachel and Bobby, and Rachel’s sister Rebekah and her husband Stephen. It was sunny and warm and basically felt like late May. But since it’s not, the bright plastic flowers and foiliage of Tom’s, which is all wrapped up in sparkling tiny white lights, you could sort of suspend your disbelief and go with the Spring fantasy. Going to this diner during the winter, I found it claustrophobic and tacky. But this morning, it felt like (what I’d imagine) Xanax must feel like. And my Cherry Lime Ricky and fruit pancakes put me on the verge of tears of joy…

I’d kinda planned to spend the rest of day doing the usual Saturday errands: laundry, grocery, drugstore, etc. But I ended up going to the Aquaduct racetrack in Queens for no particular reason except you’re with people who want to go and know how to get there on the subway. On the way there, we stopped at this amazing old Brooklyn time-warp grocery store.

The track was just as seedy as I hoped. Everyone was smoking and looking at racing forms and screaming at the monitors. The median age seemed to be about 65, but there were some kids running around trying to entertain themselves. The whole place smelled of slow-cooked hot dogs.

Favorite horse names:

Artistic Awareness
Cancel The Suite
Fistbump (the popular favorite)
I’m A Goer
Infinite Justice
Quietly Elegant
Rose Punch
Say Cousin Lenny

Afterwards, we ended up in DUMBO at Between the Bridges and drank until the sun went down.

Stop repeating the ‘Chinese Restaurant’ episode!

One of my favorite things about living in Brooklyn is all the interesting trash. I make out like a bandit usually grabbing up all the free books left . It’s amazingly random what you can find sometimes. And very occasionally you find a usefull piece of furniture. Like I picked up a good chair recently. The above though was just plain weird. I wish I knew what the origin of this piece was. This was spotted on Flatbush Avenue on the way home from O’Connors.

Speaking of weird, I went to Benihana tonight for dinner, which I am told by my more experienced Hibacchi-goers, does not live up to its southern counterparts. I liked our chef, though. He was an Indian guy from South Africa and was funny and self depricating, even if he hadn’t mastered some of those tricks these guys do. I liked how in the course of preparing a meal for seven people he threw out references to James Joyce’ Ulysses, a style of Renaissance perspective painting and allusions to Rosa Parks in contemporary hip hop, all to the deafening silence/bafflement of our table. I thought he was the coolest until Jeremy said that these guys usually set the entire teppanyaki grill on fire, which would have been nice. I’ve been making a strong effort to not keep amassing a bunch of cute useless junk lately (I even managed to visit Toy Tokyo without getting anything), but I couldn’t resist this knife-weilding Pillsbury dough boy collectible Tiki drink glass. My beverage had no discernible alcohol in it, which was nice because most often these drinks taste like Robotussin.

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