Colonel's Log: Stardate 20090608

Lost at Trivia Night again! I swear to creation, this bar in Ithaca has the most god-damned competitive trivia night I've ever attended. It's pretty crazy, but you got to love the challenge. Our team was The Interrobangs‽ and my starring performance included getting the answer to "what song did Bill Murray wake up to every day on Groundhog Day?" (answer at the end of the writeup).

Earlier today I took the bus from the city where I was visiting my brother for the weekend. He just moved in to this apartment he's subletting for the summer in Chelsea while he's there for an internship and I brought him some stuff for it. We went two (count'em) outdoor Shakespeare productions: Merchant of Venice in Inwood Park (Shylock converts to Christianity: hurray for happy endings!), and King Lear in Central Park. We also hit some Chelsea art galleries (nabbed some nice-looking postcards for my wall) and breezed through a special Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met, which apparently closes early on Sundays.

I hit my new favorite deli in the city for breakfast, called Johny's Luncheonette at 25th and 7th: it's cheap, it's friendly, and it grills a good sandwich. And then I caught the 10:15 bus to Ithaca. On the bus I caught some zeds and read about 50 pages of The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa, which I'm reading in preparation for my trip to Peru this August. It's a slow read, but I'm enjoying every minute of it now that I've gotten a grip on how the major characters relate.

When I got home, I unpacked, took a hot bath with some salts and read on in my book. I thinned my hair out with these thinning shears I got. I think I'm going to have to do this between haircuts about every four weeks, otherwise my hair gets too thick and puffy. This wasn't a problem when I sported short hair years ago and it wasn't a problem while I was wearing long hair, but since I let my freak flag go a couple months back it's been an issue.

Then I cooked dinner: stir fried vegetables and rice with fresh basil and parsley from my window sill, delicious. And ate it while watching the Netflix movie that was waiting for me in Ithaca: Luis Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire. I'm not sure what I think of it yet. It's certainly curious that Bunuel had a background of random terrorist attacks punctuate the caprices of the female lead. Is he making a parallel? And then it was to Trivia.

Overall, not a bad day. I give it 6/10. (The answer, by the way is Sonny and Cher's "I Got You, Babe".)