Forensics: CP in the City

Big weekend coming up. CP visits NYC. I gather that Mayor Bloomberg is giving him the keys to the city, and that Cardinal Dolan is giving him the keys to St. Patricks. He'll be stay chez moi, but I'll be damned if I give him the keys to that! Next thing you know, my cat will be pregnant and—

Enough of that. Mostly we intend to sightsee. The poor child of Boston is only vaguely aware that the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, and we will do our best to correct that. O'C will join up with us, and perhaps JV, if he's not in Las Vegas doing whatever it is he and O'C are doing for the NFL in Las Vegas. Needless to say, while CP is around, I'll harass him about tabroom.com as it goes into its final pre-August reload. Last time I looked at it I couldn't find anything. Maybe it's a plot...

I did go over the Yale invite with JV, and we reported back to the Pups in Charge that, uh, some things needed changing. For one thing, I'm not quite sure where LD will be. Last year it was some new school that was okay, but we never did get comfortable. We got kicked out of tab by some cooking class on Saturday morning, which would have been all right if they had given us a cupcake or something, but not even a lick of the bowl, and the next thing we knew we were tabbing with some guy doing Parli. Nice guy and all, but, well, Parli this, if you know what I mean. I don't share well.

On the other hand, given our digs this year at Jake, I'm happy to share. For reasons buried in the dark past, we had previously chosen a tab room near a central table, but anyone who has been to Jake knows that it's too big for anything to be central, so this year we've opted for a room with couches and a microwave. In other words, we're settling in. I wouldn't have trusted them a few years ago without me breathing down their necks; now the foe is on the other shoot, and they can breathe down my neck. I'm not saying that the Foods of the World Unite were exactly lukewarm, but last year we started a small fire just to bring the ziti up to room temperature. Oh, wait a minute. It's not debate ziti at Jake, it's "tastes of the Mediterranean." I think they have George Orwell writing their invitation. Then again, O'C just posted an old article from the New Yorker on his Facebook page about the event back in the 80s, when the tab staff spent their days in the morgue dissecting random cadavers just to get in shape for pairing the rounds. I miss that about Jake now. No cadavers. It's just not the same.