Categories
Enjoyed

DOH Chronicles: Cluckin’ Bell

There’s been a number of posts already done about the overlap of GTA IV and the reality of New York City, such as Serious Eats’ series on the restaurants of Liberty City.

But let me share my favorite restaurant joke, one that not a lot of people might have found because this doesn’t actually register on the map.

Once you get to Algonquin – the Manhattan of GTA IV – head to the corner of Wardite Street and Exeter Avenue. It’s up on the northern part of the island, right by the Tw@ internet cafe. If you don’t want to drive or grab a cab, take the A, C, K, or J to Frankfort and walk the last block.

DOH'd Cluckin' Bell 1

Looks like a regular old Cluckin’ Bell from this side. (Cluckin’ Bell, for those unfamiliar, is an amalgamation of KFC and Taco Bell.)

DOH'd Cluckin' Bell 2

But wait – why can’t you go in? What are those signs on the window?

DOH'd Cluckin' Bell 3

That’s right, folks. The “Liberty City Institute of Food Hygiene” has shuttered it. This seems oddly familiar.

I’m grateful that Rockstar’s HQ is in the city, because they captured so many details about the city so well.

(With apologies to the Eater crew for the title of this post.)

Categories
Happened

Metrocard Telepathy

Approaching the subway turnstiles this morning, I realized that I had pulled the wrong card out of my wallet. Seemingly ready to swipe my debit card through the turnstile, I snickered at my stupidity and pulled out my Metrocard, quickly swiping it through the turnstile.

INSUFFICIENT FARE

Oh. *Ohhhhh.* I see what I did there.

As I doubled back to buy a new card, I deposited my dead Metrocard in the recycling slot. And while normally I wouldn’t pay him much mind, an older gentlemen was there, furiously swiping discarded cards in the hope of finding a leftover fare.

Poor guy. If only he had my gift of unintentional psychic Metrocard reading.

Categories
Best Of Enjoyed Narrated

Last Train To Astroland

One of my favorite pieces of writing is David Foster Wallace’s collection of short pieces called _A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again_. There’s a piece inside it called *Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All*, a piece that “takes on the vulgarities and excesses of the Illinois State Fair”, if you’re the type to believe Wikipedia. It’s very reflective of the big-city-to-state-fair experience, but there’s one abstract paragraph that I love:

One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only *For Me*. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory) is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the *responsibility* it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open?

Astroland