Warning: Impending disappearance predicted

As I mentioned casually in this post, tomorrow marks the start of two nights of heavy drinking. Add in two days of painful recovery, and one night of after-weekend working. Pretty soon the calculus of the matter is self-evident: I won't be posting again until at least Monday. Try to survive until then. I'm pulling for you, we're all in this together.

The details of the drinking fun have still yet to be determined. If O'Byrnes Irish Pub is in the plans, it will certainly be in the early hours of the afternoon: after that it shall be too late. One girl at work is getting off at midnight tomorrow and wants to go to O'Byrnes. Well, she looks like a porn star and will wear a tight miniskirt and push-up bra, so I imagine she'll be fine.

The drink of choice, of course is Guinness. I have 3 bottles of it in the fridge still, so some Irish priming is possible. Kilkenny is another choice...one of our friends has gone from a Guinness enthusiast to a Kilkenny enthusiast, though he finds that the hardest part of being a fan of Kilkenny in Edmonton (and Alberta in general, I imagine) is when he shouts over the din^* which beer he wants, the bartender almost always gives him a Kokanee instead. Female bartenders are still batting .000 when it comes to bringing the correct beer. It reminds me of the time in NYC when I was at a bar while a (male) bartender was trying to teach two new girls the perils of serving. Since they may be expected to get some of their own drinks on busy nights, he wanted to test them. So he offered me a free drink (ahhh, New York, where they can do that...I think I got about 8 free drinks over 7 days in NYC) if I would be so kind as to try something to stump them a little bit. Not feeling particularly imaginative, I believe I asked for a Jim Beam or Johnnie Walker. Naturally, the girls failed at having any idea what I was talking about. I think I at some point asked for a Crown Royal too, which I believe is what my free drink turned out to be. These bar stories would be a lot more impressive if I remembered them all. Damn you alcohol!

^* On a side note, why is there so much din anyways? Bars are constantly cranking the music louder and louder lest there be the sound of conversation filling the air. Mostly this is bars with dance floors that do this (Funky Buddha, Filthy McNasty's and Squires on Whyte coming to mind) even though places like Blues on Whyte don't seem to be worried. I know you think you need to justify the expense of this DJ mixing dance songs together (hey Squires, Blur's Song #2 is only 2 minutes and 0 seconds in length...I'm sure the kiddies in the bar have a long enough attention span to listen to the entire tune. They seem to handle Bon Jovi and Gwen Stefani songs at full agonizing length) rather than the old system of the bartender putting on a mix CD every 74 minutes. But please leave the sound volume alone. Of all the bars on Whyte, I think only The Attic and Billiards Club have this figured out. Thirsty Turtle needs to work on that, but first order of business might be closing the door whenever the temperature drops below -10.

Though the plans are not finalized (I've heard frightening rumours about Saturday), the itinerary certainly is: I'm driving to the airport at 9:45 in the morning. This means straight to bed after work tonight, which means no blogging. Which means that this is serious, after this post you're on your own.

Rather than give any straight-up links, I'll give you some basic browsing in my absence:

First off, don't forget about the baseball pool! 11 days left to sign on!

Fark.com. Also available in sports, entertainment, technology, political, and pornographic versions. I apologize for not making it to the Edmonton Fark Party on March 11 but it was freaking cold and snowy out there.

Slashdot (/.). There are tons of flavours of /. (and you have to check each of them to get all the stories) so I'm not even going to link to them here. I will link to the last /. post I've made to date which was ranked Score:0, was at the very bottom of the page, and is mostly off-topic.

Western Standard Shotgun blog updates fairly regularly. Right now the top article is where I cribbed the "Evil Americans"^TM posting from.

Small Dead Animals (SDA). Kate is on vacation so there are a variety of weird guest-bloggers. Multiple voices make blogs weak. Learn this. Learrrrrrnnnnnnnnn...

Finally, Colby Cosh. It's updated roughly daily (I wonder how his posting frequency matches up against mine? He has way more posts than I do though, dating back far further. Te matchup is mostly a curiosity thing. He also makes a post for each note rather than <HR>ing between notes. He also sometimes will reprint his previously-published works (since he, you know, actually has them) and this skews it all as well. Regardless, go read it.