Rob's services will be held today, Thursday, in Savannah; we figured we'd post a bit of incriminating evidence from last year's Wreckyll in Jeckyll, the one time we were fortunate enough to meet the man in person.
The winners of the Jeckyll Island Poker Classic: Catfish, Barbie, and Acidman, with a panty on his head.
The Usual Suspects: Dax, Eric, Catfish, Rob, Guido (Zonker's Parole officer), Recondo32 (with bullwhip), Rube, and Fiona, the Straight White Missus.
Catfish, Rob, Zonker's Parole officer, and Recondo32.
Rob, with a panty. I believe this particular panty was the prize in the poker championship.
Ann's lovely piggies, painted specially for Rob. No, I'm not jealous. Much.
And now, a little tune, sadly abridged, with Jim, Eric, Denny, Rob, and Rob's brother, Dave
Third Rate Romance, click to play
We would love to be in Savannah, today, to pay our respects and say goodbye. But we can't, so we'll just have to send our best wishes to his family, friends, and to Rob, bon voyage. It was great to know you, and we'll miss you.
Ann and Rube.
P.S. there's some more stuff laying around that I'd like to put out there, so stay tuned!
The first light fell on the magnificent castle upon the plain of Limbo. Ovid lay groaning in his bed. My freakin' head! he moaned inwardly, and turned off his alarm. He lay still for a moment, staring at the stone ceiling, waiting for it to stop spinning. Gingerly, he swung his feet to the cold stone floor and rooted around for his slippers.
He scuffled out of his small, tidy bedroom, and stood on the second floor railing, which overlooked the castle's central living area, and surveyed the damage from the night before. Squinting his eyes against the hangover, he briefly considered turning around, closing the door, and going back to bed.
Empty bottles, upset ashtrays, and general desolation reigned. The record player in the corner turned, forgotten, the needle bouncing endlessly against the inner groove with a soft clunk clunk clunk. From every iron candelabra about the room hung an item of women's underclothing; black stockings here, a garter there, and a bright red thong covered with the wax of the burned-down candles. Rubbing the stubble on his chin, Ovid frowned and stumbled his way down the stone staircase.
Turning left, he made his way past the mounds of peanut shells, tiptoed past the snoring carcass that had, until recently, been Horace, and entered the dark kitchen. Feeling the wall next to the doorway, he found the light switch and flicked it upward.
"Oh, man, cut the lights!" It was Plato, covering his eyes, sitting at the table over a bubbling glass of Alka-Seltzer. All about him lay playing cards and the butt-ends of cigars. At one end of the table was an enormous mound of ivory chips, piled high around an untouched glass of whiskey.
Ovid grimaced. "Dude, you look like Hell."
"Very funny," answered Plato. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm working on a new Dialogue. Unfortunately, the dude with the jackhammer in my head won't let me get a word in edgewise."
Ovid relented, and dimmed the lights. Clearing a path, he grabbed the nearest empty chair and sat at the table. "What the blazes happened last night?"
Plato looked up from his glass and said, "The New Guy."
Oh, yeah, thought Ovid, The New Guy. "Man, I thought Limbo was supposed to be for the virtuous heathens!"
Plato grunted indifferently, and downed the glass of fizzy grey liquid at a gulp. He belched wetly, and for a moment seemed unsure if it had been a one-way trip. Once he became convinced, he looked at Ovid and asked, "Have you seen Elektra?"
"No," he answered. "But I'm pretty sure she's around." He couldn't imagine he'd missed seeing her. Elektra was a six-foot redhead with long legs, round hips, and a voice like an angel. Ovid looked thoughtful. "Hey Plato," he started. "Did you notice that she'd painted her toenails red yesterday afternoon?"
Plato shrugged. "Yeah, I did," he said. "Wonder what that was all about."
A loud crash outside the kitchen door caused both men to grab their heads and moan. Homer came into the kitchen. "Dudes," he said, "I can hear y'all talking all the way out in the stable." He felt his way to the refrigerator, opened the freezer door, and pulled out an ice pack. He smashed it clumsily onto his head, knocking his sunglasses sideways. Stretching out his free hand, he found a chair and sat at the kitchen table with the other two poets. "I got a four-alarm hangover, doggs." The others grunted in agreement.
"Hey, Homer," Plato said, "did you see The New Guy?"
Homer straightened his sunglasses, and rubbed his chin. "Well, that depends," he said. "You mean when he was clearing y'all out at the poker table? Or do you mean maybe when he was leadin' a hootenanny with my lute at all hours of the morning? Or maybe when he, Elektra, and Scheherazade were out playing Twister by the hot tub?" He waved his hand frantically in front of his black shades. "'Cause no, I didn't see him."
Plato and Ovid grimaced sourly at each other. "Well, anyway," said Ovid, "I wonder where he got off to."
Homer furrowed his brow. "I think he and the girls went to meet somebody out in the woods."
"Why do you say that?", asked Plato.
"I heard 'em heading out a few hours ago, giggling like schoolgirls, and I asked 'em where they was headed. The New Guy just said, 'Roscoe's baaaaaaaack' like he was all happy about it. Must be a long-lost friend of his." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "The girls sounded pretty excited about meeting him, too."
Ovid pondered that for moment. "Well, they'll show up eventually, probably with this 'Roscoe' character." They all nodded. "Oh, and Homer," he continued, "what were you doing in the stable, anyway?"
Homer broke into a wide grin.
Plato shuddered. "Oh dude!"
The smug hipsters at Boing Boing are all awonder! 'How to open a bottle of beer the Scandinavian way'; which would mean, with another bottle.
I figured these guys had been around a lot more than that. That's not the 'Scandinavian Way.' It's more like, the 'Places That Don't Have Screw-Capped Bottles Way'. They do it here in Germany, too. They also use cigarette lighters, ballpoint pens, and just about anything else you can think of. Really, if they think opening a beer bottle with another bottle is spectacular, they'd probably have a seizure if they saw 1000 Arten ein Bier zu öffnen (1000 ways to open a beer). They're all the way up to 971, at last count.
The coolest bottle-opening method I've seen was Glacier Bay's (sadly discontinued) opener-in-the-bottom-of-the-bottle trick. Each bottle had a real opener in the bottom of it; so, when your beer was out, you just grabbed the next bottle and zisch! pop open the replacement. I drank an awful lot of Glacier Bay during my Georgia Tech days.
In a sad coincidence, in college I was walking through a shopping mall, and one of those survey people came up to me. She offered me $5, checked my age, and asked if I'd do a taste-test of foreign beer brands. Being 21, poor, and a borderline alcoholic, I had no choice but to comply. I followed the nice young lady to a small room at the end of a hallway, and they had about 12 different kinds of beer, stacked up in crates all around the room. Among the Heinekens and Beck's, I noticed an unfamiliar brand, whose red and white label struck a familiar chord. It was called Arctic Bay, and the bottle looked exactly like the Glacier Bay bottle I'd known and loved, albeit not in the familiar blue and silver. I asked the lady if that was a new beer from the same brewery, perhaps. She then told me that Glacier Bay was no more, and had been bought out by a competitor. Shocked, I hefted this usurper beer Arctic Bay, and cautiously checked the bottom of the bottle. No opener. Just flat and smooth, like every other cheap Canadian beer on the market.
I tried 7 different bottles of beer, just a swig from each. The others, though imports, were not unknown to me, and tasted pretty much as I suspected. The Arctic Bay, though, was like ashes in my mouth. After they were opened and sampled, I asked the survey lady what would happen to all the beer. She said she'd throw it out. We kind of looked at each other, and then drank all the beer. Then we had another round of taste tests, but under a different name. I think we stopped after the fourth, by which time I was filling out the forms with names like 'Philip McCracken' and 'I.P. Frehley'.
So there you have the story about how one time, in college, I actually got paid $5 a round to get 'faced in a room full of imported beer with a bored young coed.
