The only purpose of a toilet is to dispose of our waste, but I’m not sure it is the most efficient way to even do that. Think about it, they break all the time (jiggle the handle!), they get clogged, they require a lot of cleaning, etc. Most of them don’t have enough flow but then having too much flow is a pretty big environmental problem, especially for heavily populated areas or areas that already are short on water. They require a large infrastructure of sewer pipes and filtering facilities. I could go on and on!
And despite all of these problems, we haven’t had a new invention in this area for like 50 years! (This is excepting of course the #1 and #2 button idea, which is genius but still not commonly available, nor does it really revolutionize the concept). It just seems like we just stopped working on it. Especially you foreigners and your disgusting dry dock toilets. Yeesh, you really gave up didn’t you? I would really hate to think that in the future, we would all step out of our flying cars and use one of these pieces of junk.
So until someone figures out how to use the 3 seashells, I want scientists working around the clock on this, our most important of inventions.
Wikipedia gives us a few definitions for a Hipster:
“The term became a blanket description for middle class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local beer (or even brewing their own), listening to public radio, riding fixed-gear bicycles…”
Alternately, Hipsters can be defined as young people with:
“… mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes,… strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags.”
And if you are interested in becoming a Hipster yourself, it only takes 5 easy steps. Finally, you can check out the Hipster Olympics:
Okay, so now that we are all on the same page as to what exactly a Hipster is, we can discuss the mystery that brought up Hipsters in the first place…where are the Hipsters in Fort Wayne? And more specifically, where do they eat breakfast?
Allow me to explain. We had recently gone to a couple of really awesome breakfast places including Over Easy , a place in Philly, and another place in Grand Rapids whose names I can no longer remember (Sara and Anna? Can you comment?). These places were awesome and had really interesting unique items, for example basil omelets and blue berry pancakes with granola to make them crunchy, egg and bacon breakfast sandwiches on spicy focaccia bread, etc. I was sure that there must be a unique breakfast place in Fort Wayne with the same kind of vibe, but I didn’t know how to describe that exactly, other than to say that Hipsters would eat there.
After much discussion over the course of the weekend, we determined that not only were there no Hipster breakfast places in Fort Wayne, but the Hipsters seemed to be missing altogether. Chris was especially bothered by the fact that Grand Rapids had Hipsters and at least one Hipster breakfast spot, meaning that Hipsters are not confined to large cities. I even asked someone at the local health food store, and they didn’t know where to get a good Hipster breakfast.
So, Fort Wayne, where are your Hipsters? Are they there but hiding, longing for a breakfast spot? Do they leave and go else where? Is there anywhere to get breakfast that is a little more unique than your standard bacon / eggs / pancakes?
I should say for the record that we ended up getting breakfast at Flatop Grill, and it was really good. I didn’t know they had breakfast, but they do and in particular my toffee-butterscotch chip-almond pancakes were sooo good.
Okay, this was aparently a commercial during the superbowl, but I don’t remember seeing it.
High life!
I know what you’re thinking, how could I possibly miss it? Maybe I blinked. I think it is awesome, if I had seen it I would have declared it the best commercial of the superbowl. Sure it’s a gimmick, but it couldn’t have cost much for 1 second of air time and yet it is more memorable and more brand specific than any other commercial I saw.
They actually made a bunch of 1 second commercials and they are worth watching. Hilarious! Just hit play all on the left. Come on, how long is it going to take you to watch them all?
I took this picture on the way home yesterday and, judging by how it felt while I was getting gas, I’d say that was correct.
I was home over the weekend and I cleaned out a closet from my childhood. I found a lot of things that brought back memories, although most of it went in the trash because I’m not overly sentimental about such stuff. We found some old cassette tapes with recordings we had made when we were little, and it was fun listening to them (though I was reminded how awful it is to find anything on a tape: fast forward, hit play, fast forward, hit play, fast forward, hit play, rewind, hit play, etc.)
Some of the highlights were a friend and I making a “radio station”, Nathan “calling” a fake baseball game including one sequence that went, “Strike one! Strike two! Strike three, he’s out! But he tried hard so we gave him a home run anyway!”, my mom calling into a radio show (a real one this time) on Valentines day trying to win a $25 gift certificate to some restaurant for the most interesting “how they met” story*, a tape made for my dad in which a very young Rachael makes up a song that roughly goes, “I love dad, I don’t want him to be sad, I don’t hate him even though I said that.” Finally, the gem find of the day was a tape my mom made of herself singing to see how she sounded. We listened to it for a while before she found out and came running in to destroy it. She was very embarrassed even though it sounded good, so we got to tease her all day about her “demo tape”.
I took a giant box of papers and stuff to go through when I got home. As I was unloading the box from the trunk of my car, the bottom ripped out. All the papers from my life fell into the snow with a hardcore wind swirling around. I think I grabbed everything except one paper which blew away, but I scraped up my hand on the pavement and I think I pulled a muscle trying to get the box and the other box I put under it in the house.
Okay, time to go through that box (or what’s left of it)
*My parents actually had a kind of cute “how they met” story. My dad was a bouncer in a bar and my mom was there for her birthday. She had a balloon and the people with her were trying to pop it as a goof. She had to go to the bathroom and she asked my dad to hang onto her balloon so they couldn’t get it. While she was in the bathroom a fight broke out in the bar and my dad had to break it up. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw him breaking up the fight with one hand and holding her balloon high above his head with the other hand so it wouldn’t get popped.
Last Sunday we went out for breakfast at the Over Easy Cafe on the North side.
Soooo good! It was a little on the pricey side for breakfast, but well worth it in my opinion. We had a pesto omelet and banana french toast, both of which were superb. I even ordered coffee for the first time in my life (don’t think I’m too adult, I tried to order chocolate milk first but they didn’t have it). It is a little out of our way, but Lake Shore Drive on a Sunday morning is an extremely pleasant drive, with the lack of traffic, the beautiful lake on the right and the picture perfect Chicago skyline in front of you. Over Easy was kid friendly too; almost everybody there had at least one and the wait staff were all waiving to Evie and complementing her on her outfit. I’m sure in the summer there is probably a decent wait and parking might be more of a problem, but worth the wait.
There were literally a dozen more things that sounded good on the menu, so we will probably be back.
Shane Halbach 