After a quick meal at Wendy's, I got to Rich O's at 8:45 or so. The place was packed. Seemed to be an even mix of regulars and strangers.
Oh yeah, they finally got their order of Schlenkerla beers in. This was good news, but it caused me a bit of a problem right off the bat.
See, Rogue Chocolate Stout was still on tap. And I have a contractual obligation with my liver to drink Rogue Chocolate Stout whenever it's available. But I really wanted to have a couple of Schlenkerlas at the end of the night, and I knew that there'd be much clashing of flavors if I had the Rogue first.
So I broke my contract, and I had a couple Dirty Helens (202). I sat at the bar and talked to some dude who should probably get a nickname, I got a text message from NotHideousGirl featuring the drunk womanese word wrAnfo and deciphering that word occupied a good part of my brain for the rest of the night. I still haven't figured it out.
I talked to MusicalYuppieDude and TremensGirl for a bit, and some people cleared out from the sofa so I moved over there. I talked with a chick who I shall call FirstGirl. Not, as one might suspect, because she was my first girl, but rather because she was the first person to ever talk to me at Rich O's after I started hanging out there. Anyway, FirstGirl was puzzling over her own little mystery.
She'd found this napkin on the table, and her brain was about to explode from trying to figure out its meaning. We spent some time trying to figure out the napkin, and we spent some time trying to figure out NotHideousGirl's wrAnfo, but we never did decipher either one of them.
My next beer was a Schlenkerla Weizen (222), and I overlapped the last part of that with a Schlenkerla Marzen (547). I wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of the two. I don't think that I can really declare a winner. The Weizen is certainly lighter, and it would make a better session beer than the Marzen. But the Marzen is flat-out yummy.
Even though the Marzen was flat-out yummy, I only drank about 8 ounces of it before I cut myself off and then snuck out and came home. I don't think I missed much, because they'd declared last call at 11:30 even though the place was still totally packed.
I'm not sure if I'm proud or perhaps a bit disturbed by the apparent ease with which I have deciphered the napkin. Perhaps I went to crazy school with the authors or something.
Technically, my educated guess is still just that, but after looking at it for ten seconds it seems to be a display of handwriting. The author is clearly saying:
"You see, if you make your ones with the bar across the bottom, and the angle at the top, they do not look like sevens."
"Ah," comes the retort, "But I put a hash through my sevens so it's not an issue."
"Bad plan," Says the Graphologist, "As then your sevens could easily look like 4's. Not fours like this one at the bottom...but fours like this with the closed angled top."
"Oh please they're not that similar."
"Really? Perhaps you will feel foolish for doubting me should I circle them both.....See! Ha! I mean come on here...(draws arrow between the examples for emphasis) and just LOOK."
"Well whaddya know. Yeah. Fours, sevens and ones are just too damn similar."
The Graphologist, satisfied with that win, is not yet finished for the night. "You know what? I'm leaving this here, so perhaps others will think about their handwriting. Then, maybe then, the madness of confusing numbers will stop."
"Perhaps we could type, and use better grade paper than a napkin?"
"You are cut off. Give me the rest of that beer."
"Fine, let us be off."
That, at least, is what the napkin says to me.
I have no idea how to translate NotHideousGirl's drunken text.
posted by: OddlyfamiliarGirl | July 19, 2007 8:01 PM
A little bored, were you?
Your analysis seems perfectly reasonable to me. After FirstGirl read it, she suggested that both of the characters in your story are probably women.
posted by: dave | July 21, 2007 12:02 PM