Bloggerata:

Last night I got to meet my brother’s girlfriend’s parents. Matt and I and my parents and my brother and his girlfriend and her parents (whew) went out to dinner at Frank’s, a steakhouse in the Meatpacking District (how appropriate). The food was tasty, but the experience was strange. The place was cavernous and didn’t seem very crowded, but it took forever for the waiter to take our orders. Even weirder was that in the back part of the restaurant, several employees spent at least half an hour trying to set up a black curtain to wall off a particular section for a private party. It took them forever, as if they’d never done this sort of thing before. Eventually, this big crowd of obviously hetero guys who’d been standing at the bar (as my brother said, they all looked like “Joey from Long Island”) walked back to the private area, and we figured out that it was a bachelor party. We kept an eye out for the strippers and correctly identified them when they walked in the door, because one of them was wearing a top hat and the first thing all three did was stroll into the ladies’ room. But we were done with our meal before the show got started.

I’ve been listening to the Altar Boyz cast album, which arrived in the mail yesterday. The boy-bandish music is as infectious on CD as it was in the theater. Not only are the songs hilarious, but they’re also very creative musically. I’ll be listening to this one a lot.

One TiVo trick I learned from Matt is that you can speed-watch a program by putting the playback on double-speed with the closed-captioning on. Yesterday I caught up on the last three episodes of “Smallville” that way, because except for a few scenes they were too boring to watch at regular speed.

I had my six-month dental checkup yesterday. No cavities or problems. Hooray!