Reviews of the weekend

Undertoad · 07-02-2006, 10:35 PM

J and I had the sort of active weekend that precludes IotD posting.

"The Devil Wears Prada": thumbs-up in general to this one, another really fine Meryl Streep performance. To me, she didn't come off in this one as "Meryl Streep acting".

The Baltimore Aquarium: I had been through it before but was happy to go again. For 2.5 hours, the price of admission (just over $20) is really worth it. It enriches your life, I think, to see these kinds of things. The weird square mouth of a manta ray, the horrible teeth of the shark, the weird wild colors of tropical fish. Beautiful tiny little frogs that, if you touched them, would kill you. Big silver dollar fish, so silvery and flat. The dolphin show... as seen from below the surface, from the perspective of the dolphins. All very awesome, even if you haven't slept much.

It is not recommended to go to the B.A. on a Sunday in July-August, and certainly not on a holiday weekend. To make up for this, we went at 9am. This was totally out-of-character for me and required a small amount of sacrifice, to wake up at 6 on a Sunday morning and attempt to haul ass down 95 while watching the staties pull over every other vehicle.

While at the Inner Harbor (motto: "It's a shame about the rest of the city"), we took in the "ESPN Zone", the 2nd most absurd way to repurpose the ESPN brand. This is a Chili's style restaurant which assumes that if you enjoy eating the soup of the day and a burger, and you enjoy SportsCenter, perhaps you will enjoy combining the two for an additional dollar per entree.

We were seated in an area which resembled the sports book section of a casino, which I might enjoy if there was a game I would like to see on one of the 14 different feeds or the massive low-def projection screen. Food for such places is designed by the same outfit that gives you Chili's and Applebee's and Tuesday's and Friday's and pretty much every other goddamn restaurant in the country now, which generally means: same shit, different shingle. Which was why I was surprised to find the food at this one to be really bad. Then our waiter forgot to put our order in, lied about it, and kept us waiting for about 20 minutes longer than normal. Nice goin' ESPN -- I'm wondering whether Applebee's can deliver sports clips with humorous writing.

07-02-2006, 10:35 PM	#1
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	Reviews of the weekend J and I had the sort of active weekend that precludes IotD posting. "The Devil Wears Prada": thumbs-up in general to this one, another really fine Meryl Streep performance. To me, she didn't come off in this one as "Meryl Streep acting". The Baltimore Aquarium: I had been through it before but was happy to go again. For 2.5 hours, the price of admission (just over $20) is really worth it. It enriches your life, I think, to see these kinds of things. The weird square mouth of a manta ray, the horrible teeth of the shark, the weird wild colors of tropical fish. Beautiful tiny little frogs that, if you touched them, would kill you. Big silver dollar fish, so silvery and flat. The dolphin show... as seen from below the surface, from the perspective of the dolphins. All very awesome, even if you haven't slept much. It is not recommended to go to the B.A. on a Sunday in July-August, and certainly not on a holiday weekend. To make up for this, we went at 9am. This was totally out-of-character for me and required a small amount of sacrifice, to wake up at 6 on a Sunday morning and attempt to haul ass down 95 while watching the staties pull over every other vehicle. While at the Inner Harbor (motto: "It's a shame about the rest of the city"), we took in the "ESPN Zone", the 2nd most absurd way to repurpose the ESPN brand. This is a Chili's style restaurant which assumes that if you enjoy eating the soup of the day and a burger, and you enjoy SportsCenter, perhaps you will enjoy combining the two for an additional dollar per entree. We were seated in an area which resembled the sports book section of a casino, which I might enjoy if there was a game I would like to see on one of the 14 different feeds or the massive low-def projection screen. Food for such places is designed by the same outfit that gives you Chili's and Applebee's and Tuesday's and Friday's and pretty much every other goddamn restaurant in the country now, which generally means: same shit, different shingle. Which was why I was surprised to find the food at this one to be really bad. Then our waiter forgot to put our order in, lied about it, and kept us waiting for about 20 minutes longer than normal. Nice goin' ESPN -- I'm wondering whether Applebee's can deliver sports clips with humorous writing.

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