4 States in 48 Hours

So before I get into the serious posts on tap for this week, I thought I’d start with something easy.

The theme for this past weekend was “Pack of Lies.” While that may sound negative, it’s really more comical than anything else.

My brother and I got into Champaign at about 6:00 on Friday night, and decided to head out to dinner with some friends of his from U of I as well as my friends Eric and Bickham. We decided to go to Boston’s which, just for clarification, has nothing to do with the city or the band. The entire dinner can only be described with a single word: debacle. It began with the drink orders. After asking the waitress what beverages they served, two people ordered Boulevard: Sunset Wheat. The waitress returned with beers that were most definitely not Boulevard: Sunset Wheat. When this was brought to her attention, she got this extremely confused look on her face (this would be a recurring theme) and went back to check. She returned to confirm that yes, we were in fact correct that it was not Sunset Wheat because they did not have and have never had Sunset Wheat. At this point we probably should have inquired how she had managed to believe she had filled an order with something they did not currently and had never had, but we’re fairly easy going and we like beer so we just said it was fine. Then our food came and, well, pretty much everything was wrong: the turkey-bacon wrap arrived without bacon, the Mexican-tortilla salad arrived without tortillas, and apparently the waitress decided that I could stand to skip a meal or two as my food did not arrive at all. After finally straightening this out, we attempted to order a 2nd round of drinks. We had all ordered large beers, but instead we were brought small beers. The waitress explained that they were out of large glasses. She offered this explanation in willfull ignorance of the fact that we all had empty large glasses in front of us from our first round. If from that amount of information you can figure out a solution, you are officially one step ahead of the Boston’s wait staff. But again, we are easy going so we didn’t worry about it too much. So we just asked for the check. Now, this being a college town and all, and us being with several college students, we had asked for separate checks. I realize that can be somewhat complicated, so I will grant that a little confusion is understandable. However, out of the 8 checks presented to us exactly 1 was correct. That’s not even a good batting average. The most common mistake was that even though there had been no large beer glasses we were still being asked to pay large beer prices. We pointed this out to the waitress, who of course apologized and ran off to correct the problems. 20 minutes later she returned and now 3 of the remaining 7 were correct (so at least she was getting better). She then proceeded to disappear again to once more attempt to correct the problem. Sensing that this might be a while, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, go home, have kids, raise a family, and retire to Florida. When I returned, they finally seemed to have gotten everyones' bills correct; except for the fact that they never brought me one. Well, you can call it a moral failing on my part, but I simply didn’t have the strength to sit their for another lifetime while they figured out the complicated trigonometry of what to charge me for bow-tie pasta and two beers. So we left. This trip to Boston’s collectively represented the first pack of lies.

The rest of the evening went fairly smoothly. We went to a party in Urbana where the older of us were ridiculed for having been to Woodstock and voting for Dukakis while we talked about how in our day the Quad was only a line and we had to ferment our own beer in buckets. We were a bit disappointed that all the parties started breaking up at around 1:45. Apparently, these crazy kids today just don't know how to party late anymore.

The next morning we awoke to do some tailgating before the Illinois-Eastern Illinois game. We picked up some beer on our way to the parking lot. I noted a new type of Old Style that I had never seen before: “Old Style Lite Gold”. Intrigued, we decided to purchase it and give it a try. It only took about half a beer for us to realize that this beer tasted more watery than usual, even for a Lite beer. We then realized, upon closer inspection of the case, that the flowery writing did not in fact say “Lite”, it said “LA”, which stood for “low alcohol.” This was the second pack of lies (actually, “case of lies” is probably more accurate). We cursed our misfortune, drank a few anyway, and headed into the game.

After witnessing the first half of what eventually turned out to be an Illinois rout (47-14), we headed off to Cincinnati. Arriving about 40 minutes before gametime, we checked into our hotel. We were informed that if we were willing to accept a smoking room, they were offering free breakfast. Since neither of us are all that sensitive to smoke, and I actually had a couple of cigars with me anyway, we decided to go for it. However, when we got to our room we discovered that we now had also been downgraded from 2 double beds to 1. This was the third pack of lies and was not going to work. After a call to the front desk we had our room switched, shotgunned a few beers, and headed off to the Cubs game at Cincinnati’s Great American Ballpark. I would highly recommend anyone who enjoys baseball to visit this stadium and, if you do, to sit in the upper deck (preferably as close to behind home plate as you can get). We were directly behind home plate and from that vantage point you look out across the Ohio river and directly at the hills that are the start of the Appalachians. At sunset, on a beautiful summer/early autumn night like it was Saturday it is the perfect atmosphere to watch baseball in (well, as close to perfect as you can get outside of Wrigley). Unless of course, you get vertigo easily, as the upper deck is quite high. It is very strange to always be looking down on the ball no matter how high it is hit. It was also great that Cubs fans outnumbered Reds fans by about 2-1. I’ve been to a number of Cubs road games where Cubs fans have tried to get the “let’s go Cubbies” chant going, only to have it booed down (and rightfully so). But here there was just simply not enough Reds fans to do anything about it. We completely took the park over, and it was awesome, especially since we got to witness Soriano hit 3 HRs and the Cubs cruise to a relatively easy 14-9 victory. As we exited, some impromptu “Go Cubs Go” singing broke out, and we headed back to the hotel to have a few more drinks and get some sleep.

Sunday morning we awoke at 10:30 and headed down to claim our free breakfast at 10:45. Upon arriving at the restaurant we were informed that once again we had been given a pack of lies, because even though no one had informed us of this they stopped seating for breakfast at 10:30. After a bit of bitching and whining, they compromised and offered to give us free breakfast via room service, which we accepted. After breakfast and a quick shower, it was off to Kentucky and the Creationism museum.

We had both forgotten our cameras so we bought a disposable one and thus I don’t have any pictures that I can post yet, but I will. Let’s just say that it was pretty much what I expected it to be. Probably the most surprising thing was that it was less derogatory towards evolution than I thought it would be. A lot of the exhibits had side by side columns saying that this was what evolution theory said, and this was what creationism said. Of course, basically most of the way the creationists “prove” things is by saying “ok, well I think the thing that we can all agree on is that the Bible is 100% correct, so if we just follow that down . . .” And it’s like: whoa, whoa, whoa. It doesn’t matter if steps 2-100 are completely objective, step 1 is definitely not scientific. It may actually turn out to be correct, but it’s not a proof of anything because it’s not scientific. One of the most difficult things to do was to have to keep reminding myself that most other people there with us were taking this stuff completely seriously. I kept having to catch myself from pointing and laughing and instead just uttering a subdued “hey, look at this Joe.” I will pretty much let the pictures speak for themselves (since I can’t do them justice with my descriptions) but my personal favorite was the explanation for why there is no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible: the word “dinosaur” was not invented until 1841. Apparently, the concept that language comes from (“evolves” if you will) our need to explain our world, thoughts, and actions and not the other way around is yet another concept lost on the creationists. I will say, however, that one interesting take I wasn’t expecting is that they thought the idea and myths of dragons came from men fighting dinosaurs (of course, they don’t connect the dots and then explain why the word “dragon” doesn’t appear in the Bible either). So all in all, it was a good time, I’m glad I went, and I would recommend it to anyone passing through the Cincy area (particularly if you can get in free like we did). But I’m still categorizing it as the final “pack of lies”.

Not gonna say too much about the Sunday Cubs/Reds game. Our seats were worse and the Cubs blew the lead in the 9th to send a whole lot of Cubs fans back to their cars and to the expressways in a foul mood. We pulled back into Evanston at about 8:45 in time to see the 2nd half of the Bears surprising season-opening victory, so at least I got to go to bed happy (or at least happier).

So to recap: Boston’s – bad. Illini rout – good. Old Style LA Gold – bad. Great American Ballpark – good. Creationism Museum – fun but wrong. Cubs blowing a 9th inning lead – very bad. Bears beating Indianapolis on the road – very good.