Vietnam Revisited

I've been completely crushed with work for the past couple of weeks. I'm currently writing a book review for my U.S. urban history class. We had to read a book entitled Gay New York. It's all about the vibrant gay subculture that existed in NY in the early part of the 20th century. It's really quite fascinating, but unfortunately while reading it on the train I've left myself open to some unwelcomed advances.

Anyway, between this book review and a couple of other papers, I haven't had time to keep you all apprised of what's been going on here in Chicago. So rather than write a half-assed blog entry, I'd thought I'd regale our new readers with a post from the past. Writing about karaoke at the Korean restaurant brought back a flood of memories concerning our trip to Asia. So I decided to post a story I wrote when Lori and I were in Vietnam...

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Good Morning Vietnam!!!!

The title of this popular Robin William's flick has been made into a highly grossing tee shirt for vendors here in Saigon. While this is wonderful news for tee-shirt and souvenir purveyors, far too many tourists here have not been able to resist the urge to don the shirts immediately after purchasing them. To me, this is akin to wearing the tee-shirt of the band that you are going to see (Don't be that guy!). Last night, we saw what appeared to be a boy scout troop (one man, four adolescent boys. I'm not sure exactly what was going on there, but feel free to assume the worst. The American soldiers may have left, but the flesh trade here is still thriving) parading through the streets in matching tees. However, even lamer than the matching boy scout troop was the pair of European men who sat behind me at a cafe. Lori and I traded knowing smirks as they walked by in their identical Vietnam flag tee's and capri pants. After a few minutes, Lori became even more flabergasted by their behavior, stating, "The only thing gayer than wearing matching Vetnam tee-shirts is sharing a Fanta while wearing matching Vietnam tee-shirts."

While we enjoyed the prices of goods in China, things have only gotten better here in that regard. We've continued to live a life of lavish hedonism, throwing our 100 hundred thousand bills around as if it was monopoly money. For example, last night, we purchased a liter of beer for 25 cents. However, before you get too jealous, I should inform you that the beer arrived in what appeared to be a former motor oil container. The taste was equally horrendous. It tasted as if the filthiest dive in Saigon had donated the ass of its warm kegs to this particular cafe. So, for the remainder of the night we decided to splurge and treat ourselves to dollar beers.

With the beer prices being what they are, we can't help but indulge a little bit. After a day of crawling through former Vietcong tunnels, nothing tastes better than a cold beer. And to our credit, some of the locals have taken notice of our beer drinking prowess. One night, the group of middle aged men next to us were impressed by the empty bottles we had accrued at our table (In order to keep track of your bill, waitresses will not clear away your bottles when your are finished with them. So, after a few rounds, your table will be filled with empty beer bottles). After being there a fraction of the time they were, our co-ed drinking team of two had amassed nearly half of the bottles that they had consumed as a 5 person team. After incredulously counting the bottles at our table, the men began raising their glasses to us to cheers every 45 seconds. With each cheers, one of the men would shout "Yo nam!" I thought this was Vietnamese for "cheers" so I responded with a resounding "Yo nam!' in return. After about a half an hour of this, I came to realize that "Yo nam" did not mean cheers, but rather he had asked me roughly twenty five times what my name was (the accent can be tough to decipher at times, even when the local is fluent and sober. This was not the case with this man). Worried that we might have come across as rude, we offered the men some Marlboro light cigarettes to make up for our conversational blunder. Touched by our overture of frienship, the men responded by offering us some Vietnamese cigarettes. So even though there was a difficult language barrier, we were able to start a crude cultural exchange program through the addictive power of cigarettes. With this touching display of understanding, I can't help but feel that peace and harmony is within our grasp...

Big Fun in Little Korea

Before I proceed with our normally scheduled blog, I must congratulate the Gaping O for his award-winning smack talk. Due to his creative efforts, the DePaul faithful will most assuredly get in Hasheem Thabeet’s gigantic head when we play UCONN this Wednesday. And perhaps, as a result, the Blue Demons just might cover the 48 point spread.
I’m thankful that as a student I will be admitted to the UCONN game for free. The much ballyhooed economic recession has hit our household particularly hard (Well not so much Lori, but me. I guess the old Wall Street adage is true: “The apothecary business is vaccinated against recession”). To combat this economic adversity, I’ve adopted some creative eating habits. For example, when attending wing night at a local bar, I employ a tactic I learned back in high school: I order 40 wings and promptly consume 15-20 of them. Then I lick the sauce off the remaining wings and put them in my pocket which I have carefully lined with aluminum foil. These pocketed wings are intended for lunch the following day, but they usually end up being an after dinner snack for Lori on the ride home.
We’ve also taken to exclusively eating at restaurants that really give us a bang for our buck. Out of this group of cost effective restaurants one in particular has emerged as our favorite. OB, a tiny Korean establishment on the outskirts of Little Korea, can be called a restaurant in only the loosest sense of the word. Sure there are a couple of tables, chairs, and food, but beyond that the traditional definition of the word fails to suffice. To begin with, to gain entry into the place you must ring a bell and wait for the old Korean man seated at the bar to peek out the square peep hole (like the ones used in speak easies), and only after sizing you up for a second, allows you to enter.
Despite the ominous entry way and the frigid greeting, you are at once made to feel completely at home by Yung, the busty, middle aged proprietor, cook, waitress, and entertainer. If you are unable to read the Korean menu, she is happy to make suggestions for you. You know you can trust her recommendations because she shows her affinity for her food by eating directly off your plate. Now normally this would be disquieting for the average patron. I was quite put off when I first heard of this practice. But after experiencing it for myself, I can attest to her amazing ability to make this seem completely normal. I think she pulls this off by removing your inhibitions with her disarming charm as well as enormous bottles of Korean beer. While refilling my glass for the 5th time, after taking a swig herself of course, I noticed that this particular brand of beer boasts on its label that it is “Now Formaldehyde Free” in a matter of fact kind of way. It suddenly dawned on me that perhaps it was all the embalming fluid in American beer that makes us so uptight concerning servers indulging in our entrees.
At any rate, I didn’t have much time to contemplate the formaldehyde situation because with dinner complete, it was now time for the entertainment portion of the evening. The entertainment at OB consists of Yung and her drunken regulars belting out some Korean tunes on the Karaoke machine. This suits me just fine. After a few rounds of formaldehyde free beer I’m quite prepared to regale the joint with a resounding rendition of this little ditty. Plus I like Asian Karaoke videos in particular because they are always so literal. For example, when “Cecilia” is shaking the singer’s confidence daily, the video shows a distraught Asian youth vigorously shaking a tree to signify his frustration.
After the microphone has been passed several times, it’s time to bid Yung farewell and pay our check. Dinner, drinks, and entertainment all for under 50 dollars is hard to beat. So for those of you in Chicago I highly recommend checking it out with us. For those of you who are not, it’s just another reason to visit!

A Giant Disappointment

This weekend was easily one of the worst sports experiences of my life. In addition to the New York Football Giants pooping the bed (I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again…if Plax had just opted to sport some practical yet stylish dungarees for his night out, rather than the sweatpants with a defective waistband, the Giants wouldn’t be golfing right now; they’d be preparing to play the Cardinals), DePaul lost the battle for the Big East basement with perennial conference doormat University of South Florida and Fordham remained winless in conference play in their loss to Xavier. As the losses piled up throughout the weekend, I sunk deeper and deeper into depression. In fact, I haven’t been that upset since this show was cancelled. So to tackle this depair, I decided the most sensible thing to do was to self-medicate with a healthy dose of Jameson and this movie. Fortunately several tumblers of Irish whiskey and the hilarious antics of Squirrel Murphy are enough to pull anyone out of the deepest of funks.

With my spirits adequately lifted, I realized that I had important business to attend to. After all, Sunday night signalled the end of the first phase of JC/Robot's first ever smack talk contest. Our staff was faced with the onerous task of sifting through a plethora of fine suggestions to decide on an elite group of finalists. Now it's up to you, our dedicated readers, to decide who will take home the coveted prize and, more importantly, the honor of being named the Smack Talk King of JC/Robot.com.

So thanks to all of you who took the time to post. And to those of you who didn’t make the final cut, rest assured that there will be more opportunities in the coming months to win fabulous prizes and the respect of the JC/Robot faithful.

Your Chance to Help Thabeet the UConn Huskies

I’m writing this latest installment from the comfort of my parents’ house. I arrived in New York for the holidays several days ago, and I could not wait to get here. Prior to landing in Newark, I had gone the entire holiday season without hearing this...


Apparently this little holiday gem has yet to venture west of the Delaware Water Gap. Next December I will not rest until everyone I know in Chicago has experienced the joy of singing and clapping while Dominic begins to dance). But now that Christmas has passed, I’ve turned my attention to one of my favorite times of the year: the advent of conference play in college hoops.

As most of you know, I’m an unabashed and avid fanatic of sub-par, underachieving D-I basketball teams. Fortunately, as a Fordham season ticket holder, I’m rarely disappointed in my quest for perpetually putrid basketball. I don’t understand why you’d want to be a faceless and anonymous person in a massive crowd cheering on some powerhouse of a program when you could be one of just a few die-hards who get to sit in a half empty gym and have the whole place hear you when you tell your friends that, in addition to being a horrible official, the ref also beats his wife.

So when I began applying to graduate schools in the Mid-West, I had to do some soul searching. After all, the Mid-West is home to the behemoths of the Big 10 as well as the home of the largest fupa known to man...



Would I sell out my mid-major conference roots to seek out the immediate gratification of one of the several at large bids that the Big-10 pulls in on a yearly basis? Or would I once again cast my lot with a down and out program, hoping to get in on the ground floor before a meteoric rise to national prominence?

In the end, by choosing to go to DePaul, I obviously opted for the latter. I decided that my first trip to an NCAA tourney game should feel like the grand pay-off to a long and arduous journey, not some trivial honor given annually (like the trophy you would get at Grand Slam for having your birthday party there. Even as an adolescent, I was baffled by this. What exactly did the birthday boy achieve? What kind of coddling culture do we live in when kids get trophies just for surviving the year?). Although I should mention that my decision was made significantly less complicated by the rejection letters that I received from each of the Big-10 schools I applied to. Perhaps, through my statement of purpose essay, they could sense my reticence to join their athletic juggernauts. So with my decision made for me by various admissions boards across the region, I prepared myself for some more of the mediocrity I’d grown accustomed to in the Bronx.

I got my first taste of this mediocrity just a few days ago when the Blue Demons took on the Bible-thumping, rapture-loving, Crazy Christians of Liberty University. Our opponents’ dogmatic approach to higher education proved to be fertile ground for the jeers of the DePaul band and student section. After each DePaul basket, members of the band would shout, “Who’s your Messiah now?” The Liberty bench seemed pretty confused by this chant. Perhaps, like me, they were wondering if the band was aware of the fact that St. Vincent de Paul and the Catholics at my school worship the same God as them. And then, in a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, one particularly slovenly member of the band mocked the Flames for their well-known chastity: “You’re entire bench has never been laid,” he shouted. I suppressed the urge to inform him that this was by choice, whereas in his case, it was most likely due to the flatulence resulting from his tuba and his nachos.

Considering the jeers being hurled at the Liberty players, it became abundantly clear that if my school is going to take the next step towards being a force in the Big East, I would have to step up my game in the stands (The Blue Demon barely held on to win in the waning seconds against this inferior opponent despite a barrage of 3's by Golem's little brother).



If I am able to elevate the level of smack talk, hopefully this will result in quality wins against tough Big East opponents. So when #2 ranked UCONN comes to town in January, I want to be ready with a slew of chants far more clever than ones that were broken out during the Liberty game.

For this reason, I am calling upon the faithful readers of JohnClaytonisaRobot to pool their creative efforts and submit chants that will undoubtedly rattle UCONN’s 7’3” Hasheem Thabeet and his teammates (Staff members at JC/Robot like to use a play on words using the center’s name. “Hasheem Can’t Thabeet the Blue Demons,” is a clean and politically correct example. But you are by no means limited to this style, nor are you restricted to clean and politically correct chants. Here’s the UCONN roster for inspiration as well as a link to the women's roster in case you're feeling frisky). After all suggestions are submitted via the comments section on this site, we will put the matter to a vote. The reader who creates the best chant will win an Addidas DePaul athletics tee shirt and a free ticket to a Blue Demons game (airfare not included).

Civil Servants in the City

I received a lot of comments and inquiries concerning my last post detailing the festivities at the local Brauhaus. So I thought I’d regale you with a story regarding another colorful character in my neighborhood:
A trip to my post office always proves to be a harrowing experience, not just because menacing vagrants camp out in the vestibule, but because one of the postal workers needs a cancer kazoo to communicate (I’m fairly certain that “cancer kazoo” isn’t the technical term for the device that one applies to the throat to be able to speak, but I don’t remember covering this topic in AP Bio. I do recall abusing the ether that was intended to render the fruit flies unconscious so we could study their genetic traits, but anything past that experiment is rather foggy. Perhaps there’s a correlation). Whenever I enter the post office and see that this particular civil servant is on duty, I’m immediately unnerved. It’s that not I’m disturbed by the gaping hole in his throat; it’s just that I’m not accustomed to seeing such a person function as a productive member of society. I usually only see cancer kazoo recipients as I walk past a dive at 10 o’clock in the morning on my way to school, and they are standing outside the bar chain smoking cigarettes. So to see this fifty year old man with a bald head and curly mustache (let’s call him Melvin) serving the public is unsettling because I usually just sidle past such people, with my head down. But in this situation, I’m forced to interact with Melvin, and I must do so without staring at the gaping hole in his throat.
My biggest fear is that I will be so mesmerized by the hole that I will not realize that I am staring. Like in a movie or television show when a man is caught staring at a woman’s cleavage and she saucily tells him “I’m up here, buddy,” I’m afraid that Melvin will have to make a similar statement to me in his creepy monotone drone. Fearful of such an embarrassing exchange, I quickly gauge the movement of the line, trying to determine whether I will be served by Melvin or by one of his co-workers.
The first time I visited this post office, it quickly became evident that my worst fear would come to fruition. After waiting a few minutes, my moment to be served was imminent. The only person in front of me in line was a skinny woman balancing a bevy of packages in her spindly arms. I knew that this customer would take quite a bit of time paying the postage for her various packages, and much to my horror Melvin’s colleague called the skinny woman forward, telling her to approach the counter. This left me at the front of the line. As the woman fumbled with her packages, Melvin was wrapping up his business with another customer. Any second now and I would be beckoned. Immediately I became deeply engrossed by the zipper on my jacket, my cuticles, the priority mail envelopes display, the “Most Wanted” posters, and anything else that would divert my attention from Melvin and his gaping hole.
With my head bowed in careful analysis of my shoelaces, I knew that I would be called at any moment. I would soon have to draw upon every fiber of tact that I possess (which admittedly is not a lot) to get through this delicate situation. It was at this point that I heard Melvin say, “Boy am I glad to see you.” My heart skipped a beat. Why on Earth was Melvin glad to see him? Was he being facetious? Could he somehow sense my apprehension? Furthermore, can one be facetious while speaking through a cancer kazoo?
This comment threw me for a complete loop. I had no idea how to react. I had carefully rehearsed in my head what I was going to say so as to make our encounter as brief as possible. I had not prepared a response to such an unexpected pleasantry. As I began to stammer out a reply, I looked up to notice that Melvin was speaking not to me but rather to another female co-worker who had materialized behind the counter. As the women assumed Melvin’s position at the counter, he told her, “I’m about to get me some lunch. What would you like? It’s on me.”
“No thanks,” she replied. “I’m all set.”
“You sure? There must be something I can do for you,” Melvin said in his robot-like, unwavering drawl with a suggestive glance up and down his colleague’s body.
After witnessing this exchange, still waiting beyond the black line, I was dumbfounded. I had to that point never pondered the concept of cancer kazoo recipients having a sex life, much less flirting with their co-workers right in front of me.
The thing that truly made this a bizarre situation was the voice that emanated from Melvin’s device. Though he was obviously trying to be coy, this was a difficult notion to convey when all his words came out in the same flat tone that he used in every other facet of his life. Addressing customers, ordering Chinese food, speaking to his mother on the phone. In each of these instances Melvin employs the same tone and inflection as when he is trying to seduce a colleague. Regrettably, even the volume at which he spoke was the same. With this lack of subtly, the entire post office was privy to his amorous overtures.
I didn’t stick around long enough to see if Melvin made any progress in his courtship. I grabbed my book of stamps and left swiftly, thankful that the co-worker bore the brunt of Melvin’s attention in my stead. But from time to time, as I prepare for a night out on the town, I wonder if I’ll ever run into Melvin as he’s cruising for chicks. His bold advances in the workplace make me completely reconsider my thoughts concerning the cancer kazoo and its effects on those who have one. Now when I pass by those dive bars in the morning, I don’t scurry along. Instead, I take my time, hoping for another fascinating glimpse into their world and a chance to come to a deeper understanding of the kazoo.
Perhaps with time, and repeated trips to post office, he and I can become friends. I’m sure we have a lot to learn from each other. He can teach me how to avoid sexual harassment suits in the workplace (I think it’s clear he’s an expert in this regard given the fact that he still has a job), and I can teach him how to safely huff ether (There are definitely advantages to dating someone in the apothecary business).

Video Pick of the Week

Courtesy of Jizz Himself...

Video Pick of the Week

An Oldie but a Goody...