My favorite hotel WTF

On November 7, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

See if you can spot the problem here. Hint: it’s not the water or the towel on the floor. I’d just taken a shower.

In which #Nashville redeems itself

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking5 Comments

It is known: if you cast a net and ask “Where shall I eat?” and then you see the same place mentioned by more than one person, and those people cannot reasonably be suspected to have colluded, you should probably try and eat at that place.

To wit: Nashville’s Loveless Cafe. Which is, as it turns out, really far away from my hotel, meaning that if I hadn’t rented a car there’d be no way for me to have gotten there, which justifies renting the car all by itself.

Worth.

It.

I am moving, children. I’m going to move into the parking lot of this restaurant and just live in a tent and eat there every day. The conference has been a bust so far, and I do not suspect that tomorrow will be better than today was. Dinner has redeemed the entire trip.

That is what they call the Southern Sampler Platter, which meant that I didn’t really have to choose what I wanted to eat; I could just say “Bring me everything!”

Ham. Fried chicken. Fried catfish. Hush puppies. Turnip greens in potlikker. Caramel sweet potatoes– oh, my Lord God, the sweet potatoes. Not pictured: some melt-in-your-mouth motherfucking biscuits. And sweet tea, of course.

Seriously, people, I could live off the sweet potatoes– and, oddly, the ham, which I was not expecting to be the star of the meal. “Ham’s ham” is something I might have said before eating that ham. Ham is no longer ham.

Tomorrow we are going for barbecue. I haven’t picked a place yet– I’m leaning toward Martins— but definitely barbecue.

(The conference has been crowded and hot and over way too big of an area and the conference center sorta sucks and the sessions I want to go to keep getting filled up before I get there or there are physical space issues that make me unwilling to stay. I’m not happy with the conference, at all. But oh man, did dinner make up for it. So happy.)

(Despite two straight “oddities” posts, I have no gripes about the hotel. It entertains me in places, but it’s fine.)

(Parentheses!)

Oh, almost forgot– our waiter’s name was Owen. Well, is Owen, as I’m pretty sure he’s still alive. Owen was an awesome guy, the type of server who makes a meal better. Hooray for Owen!

More hotel oddities

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography5 Comments

How many times did this happen before they put the sign up?

And this I don’t even have a snarky comment about. Just pure WTF.

Beginning to suspect this won’t go well

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

I am in the type of place that thinks nothing of charging $13 for a couple of granola bars and a bottle of apple juice but can’t provide functional wireless access. This is not encouraging.

On the plus side, the atrium looks like this:

On the other hand, well, see where pretty gets you.

You’re asking the wrong question

On November 6, 2014November 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I’m much more concerned about your grammar.

On the hotel

On November 5, 2014November 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

The hotel is somewhat suspect.

This is the pool. You may notice that it is in the middle of the damn lobby, which means the entire hotel smells strongly of chlorine. There is a reason most hotels do not do this even above and beyond the ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE CAN WATCH ME SWIM aspect.

This is the rest of the lobby. It’s a big nothing.

The view from my door. No, not my window– my door, because apparently for $10 less, you can book the motel rooms at the hotel, which our travel agency did, which had my boss spitting nails. I look out over the parking lot.

Whee.

The drive down was fairly pleasant, and I ate well in Louisville. Kentucky gets very dark at night.

I’m going to bed now.

One more try

On November 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking5 Comments

I’ve tried this move several times on Twitter, to no effect, and figure I may as well post this here before I live: any Nashville folks reading this? Anywhere I should make sure to go while I’m in town? In particular, I want to eat things I can’t eat here.

Election day, I suppose

On November 4, 2014November 4, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics9 Comments

I was the fourteenth voter of the day at my precinct. I didn’t get a goddamn I voted sticker. I’ve been voting for twenty years in three different cities and I have never once gotten a goddamn I voted sticker. What the hell is democracy even for?

This was a pointless little election. I voted a straight party ticket for the first time in my life, choosing stupid and incompetent over evil. There was little at stake locally; my House election felt (still feels) like a foregone conclusion, there was no senate or gubernatorial election, and most of the state races were fucking unopposed, which makes me vaguely furious. I don’t even want to know what the national returns are looking like.

Then there was the school board election. Our school board, as I think many do, has a lunatic on it. The young lady above is his daughter. She has recently lost a lawsuit against the school board and has taken her revenge, no doubt encouraged by her father, by running for the board president’s seat. There’s a fine tradition in South Bend for some reason of suing public institutions and then trying to run for office to control them when your lawsuit fails. As you can imagine, this often ends poorly. Her campaign signs were her dad’s campaign signs from the last time he ran for school board, with the “re” in “re-elect” covered with duct tape. So we’re running a class operation here. I didn’t have to look hard to find that photograph, by the way; it’s one of the first results when you Google her name and her Facebook page is public. Her qualifications for office (and this is not me being snarky) include being a bartender, having a couple of kids, and being pregnant. I assume at the same time.

I encourage young people to run for office if they feel like they can make a difference; our mayor, as you may recall, is one of the youngest in the country, and was not yet 30 when he was elected. (And I voted for him.) But he was also a Rhodes Scholar. Maybe you at least take the time to scrub the more strippery pictures of yourself off the internet before you run for school board. Or, y’know, maybe not; I am officially an Old now and don’t understand how these kids think anymore.

I will be in Louisville tomorrow, then Nashville tomorrow night through Saturday morning, then Louisville again for a while, then home. Expect some hotel room pictures, but I’m expecting to be crazy-go-nuts busy and there may not be much more. I will be working on the book, though. So there’s that.