The World's Most Dangerous Polka Band

Minneapolis: It's not just for Scandinavians. In fact, it has such a large Polish population that the Northeast section of Minneapolis is referred to as the "Nordeast," in the same way that "the Bulls" are "da Bulls."

Neither B or I are particularly Polish, but this past Friday (August 26) we ate dinner at Nye's Polonaise, a Polish restaurant in the Nordeast, anyway. B's mom was in town, along with her friend Susan. B and her mom had done some sight-seeing the previous weekend while I was at Gen Con, but alas, they did not document their fun for this here blog. So I went to Nye's with camera in hand.



This place is straight out of 1968. In addition to "Enjoy Yourself Polish Style," Nye's website boasts of "a lounge atmosphere that hasn't changed in over 40 years."

The place was a little smaller than we expected, given how freakin' huge most bars and restaurants seem to be in Minneapolis. We were seated in the Chopin Dining Room, presumably so named because it has a piano bar. You can actually sit and drink your drink practically next to the piano player. I would've taken pictures but the place was dim dim dim, in that old-school way that I'd only ever seen in Vegas before.

Dinner was heavy but good. We shared a so-so spinach and artichoke dip as an appetizer, along with a "relish plate" of raw carrots and a few pickled vegetables. I also had a cup of cabbage soup that I really liked. For dinner the 4 of us split two "Polonaise Plates," which feature samplings of sausage, spareribs with sauerkraut, potato dumplings, perogies (potato, cheese, and prune(!)), and cabbage rolls. The cabbage rolls were my favorite, and the prune perogies were surprisingly good. The sauerkraut was outstanding and everyone remarked about how they didn't expext to like the sauerkraut as much as they did. We topped it off with mazurka for dessert, which is a dessert "bar" -- basically a fruit spread sandwiched between two pieces of pie-crusty-good shortbread, with ice cream on top. Yummy.

Thus stuffed, we then proceeded to the main attraction at Nye's -- The World's Most Dangerous Polka Band. They had started up about midway through our meal, in a bar area next to the Chopin Dining Room. The band consists of 3 members -- a singer/trump ter, a drummer, and of course, an accordian player. The accordian player, named Ruth, also sings a bit, and literally barks like a dog for one number. One of their claims to fame is that they are the band for the Comedy Central show "Let's Bowl," in which litigators settle their differences in the bowling alley instead of in court.



How to describe the music? It was polka. It was fun. There was a small dance floor and at one point Susan got out there and polka-ed away. When they took a break B snapped this photo to commemorate the evening:



Citypages review of Nye's Polonaise.

Gen Con

I'm behind in my blogging and need to catch up. First up, I was in Indianapolis last weekend for Gen Con, the nation's biggest gaming convention. Thousands of gamers converge on the city for four days to play board games, roleplaying games, collectible card games, computer games, miniatures games, war games, poker, and any other games they can get their hands on. I was there with my company showing off our latest board games.



I'm gonna skip over a lot of the nerdy gaming details and just give you the highlights.

I didn't get to see a whole lot of Indianapolis -- just the downtown area around the convention center. Unfortunately it was very hot and muggy most of the time we were there, and the downtown streets smelled of, to put it bluntly, raw sewage. Yuck. As far as I know Minneapolis streets don't smell that bad!

The convention center itself is an enormous building, which is good because Gen Con is a very big convention. The convention center is also right next to the RCA Dome, where the Colts play. They had a preseason game on Saturday the 20th and I got to witness a sea of blue-jerseyed fans flowing into the stadium.



Also to walk from my hotel to the convention center I passed by both Dungy Avenue and Peyton Place, which gave me a chuckle.



We lucked out with our hotel room -- Friday night the A/C went out, and it being so hot and muggy, we let the front desk know. They ended up moving us to the presidential suite! It was a very swanky room with two floors, a spiral staircase connecting them, a big skylight, two bedrooms, three bathrooms, and two balconies. Woo-hoo!



A few other random notes:

Indianapolis has a skyway system, though not as big as Minneapolis's:



Also Indianapolis, like Minneapolis, will not allow restaurants to serve you a burger below medium unless the restaurant grinds its own meat. (How's that for a non sequitur?)

I had a lot of fun, but the convention was rather exhausting for me. I basically demoed games for 8 hours, then stayed up too late playing games. I lost my most of my voice on the second day. It was a heck of a lot of fun, but it's good to be home.

MinneNAPolis

Minnenapolis will open in the Mall of America in September. It will feature themed nap rooms where weary shoppers can sleep for 70 cents a minute: Read more here.

Bloglines

Hi everybody,

Just wanted to assure you that we still plan on being very active with this blog -- we've just hit kind of a busy period. B was out of town and I had a crazy big work project that kept me working this past weekend. I meant to get out and take some pictures of the Mississsippi River, but it didn't happen. Then next weekend I am out of town, in Indianapolis for a convention with work.

But the weekend I'm gone, and the weekend after, B's mom is in town, so we definitely plan on seeing some sights. And after that is Labor Day when we will revisit the Canterbury. So we should have some interesting stuff soon.

Anyway, I encourage everyone to set up an account at www.bloglines.com, which lets you subscribe to blogs, totally free. You can log into Bloglines, and if there are new messages on this blog (or any other that you subscribe to) that you've missed, Bloglines wil tell you. You can also download a Bloglines notifier that will, um, notify you when there's a new post here. Kinda beats going to the actual website every now and then and being disappointed there's nothing new, or on the other hand not visitng the website for a long time and then missing a bunch of posts. I myself have subscribed to more than 100 blogs via Bloglines, although it is hard to keep up with all of them!

Anyway, please stay tuned, we'll be blogging again soon.

Update: As Brian mentionsin the comments, you can also subscribe to blogs in other ways, such as via a personalized Google or Yahoo home page.

Byerly's

OK, so after posting about the mediocrity of the big grocery store chains a couple posts ago, I finally checked out one of the higher end stores in Minneapolis: Byerly's. It has all the things I said the big stores don't: Nice aesthetics, wider aisles, a good meat department, cashiers who help you bag your stuff, and a deli section where they slice the meat as you order it.

It also has a restaurant. Not just one a little cafe area where you can order soup and sandwiches, but an actual walled-off from the store, please-wait-for-the-hostess-to-seat-you restaurant. Whoa.

Prices were generally, um, worse than in the bigger stores. Except for soda. 12-packs of Coke products were 3 for $9. To my mind, this is a good deal. However, this may be due to a separate theory we have about soda prices. For some reason, soda is cheap as hell in and around where my family lives outside Philadelphia, PA, and was never that cheap in Rhode Island. So we think it might be a regional thing, so maybe soda is just cheap in Minneapolis like it is in PA. Fascinating stuff, I know.

Anyway, then when I went to check out, not only did they bag my stuff, but after I paid and went to get my bagged stuff from the bag boy, my soda wasn't there. I actually had to ask him where it was: "I sent it out already," he said, "that seemed like a lot to carry." He had already sent it rolling down a little track, along which he also sent my other groceries in a big rubber tub. He then gave me two license-plate-sized pieces of plastic with numbers on them and explained that I could pick my stuff in my car. I dutifully went out to my car and pulled around to the pick-up area. There was one car in front of me, which opened its trunk to let a nice Byerly's employee load groceries from off the tub into the trunk. Thank goodness for this warning. I quickly scrambled out of my car and tidied up our mess of a car trunk. Then I pulled up, handed the employee (a woman, which made me really feel guilty about this whole system) my number plates, and she loaded my groceries into my car. I debated about tipping her but then decided against it, since I would have been happy to carry (or rather roll) my own groceries to the car (and I hadn't seen the car in front of me tip).

So the moral of this story is that while the big chain stores in Minneapolis are not as nice as we're used to, the higher-end stores (at least Byerly's) is nicer than we're used to. We'll be shopping there on a regular basis for cold cuts (it's near my work) but will try to be good and get better prices on the rest of our groceries.

However, I will feel guilty as hell about that Byerly's employee standing out at that car-loading port come Feburary. I'll probably just skip the soda then.

City Pages Review of Byerly's

And Another

The Canterbury Card Room

B and I are poker players, and one of the things we'd been most looking forward to about moving to Minneapolis was playing at the Canterbury. The Canterbury is a racetrack located about 20 minutes south of Minneapolis. Several years ago they legalized card rooms in Minnesota, and the Canterbury opened one. As a "card room," the Canterbury spreads both poker and table games such as blackjack and Let It Ride, but only the poker interests us.

Nationally, the Canterbury poker room has a very good reputation -- so much so that Wynn Las Vegas, the newest casino on the Las Vegas Strip, was hiring for its card room they hired a lot of personnel from the Canterbury. Pretty nice.

So B and I headed down there this past Saturday (August 6). I already blogged the details of the trip in my other blog -- for anyone who doesn't know, I started a poker blog about a year and a half ago called "Cheap Thrills." Below I'm cutting and pasting my posts on the Canterbury from my poker blog to this blog. These posts are strictly about the poker room -- B and I will be heading back to the Canterbury on Labor Day weekend, digital camera in tow, and I'll put up a separate post on the Canterbury racetrack complete with pictures.

First Post on the Canterbury from Cheap Thrills:

First Trip to the Canterbury. Cha-Ching :-)

So after a full month of living in Minneapolis, B and I finally got down to the Canterbury Racetrack and Card Room to play some poker. Although I was totally joking in my previous post about needing to win more than Mrs. Cheap Thrills in order to defend my masculinity, I am happy to report that I did come out on top in our little competition. I played $2/$4 and won $194, which is the most big bets I've ever won in a single session of live poker. B, on the other hand, lost money. Mwah ah ah ah ;-)

We got there at like 9:45am. This was partly because I'd heard from other Minnesota poker bloggers that the waits at the Canterbury can be really bad, and partly because we were meeting my friend from work, K, and he also insisted we get there by 10 at the latest.

10am seemed just a touch early there was no wait for $2/$4, and the one $3/$6 game was short-handed, but by noon waits were an hour+, so I can see how you'd want to be better safe than sorry.

I had planned to play $3/$6, but K was not comfortable playing above $2/$4, so I said what they hay and sat down at $2/$4 with him. B sat down at the short-handed $3/$6 table and very soon had her pocket aces rivered by T9o, costing her half her buy-in. I wont say that this put her on tilt (cause shed smack me), but it certainly did put a damper on her day.

I stayed about even at the $2/$4 table with K, while K slowly lost. He seems to be a very smart guy, but is a textbook example of how being good at no-limit tourneys can ruin you for limit cash games. He kept trying to raise people out with marginal handson the turn or river, and kept getting called (because people don't fold at low limits). Then he would raise with a really solid hand pre-flop, and get drawn out on (because people don't fold at low limits). Which led him to conclude that it's all luck at the low limits, whereas I feel that really it's just very different from both no-limit and tourney play. (It certainly requires more post-flop play than the average fast-structured NL tourney.)

Oh, and then I took a bundle off K with pocket Queens that flopped a set. Kinda felt bad about that.

Anyhoo, K busted out and left, but I stayed at the $2/$4 table. I liked the table -- it was mostly older guys there just passing the time. Visions of my future aside, I liked that they liked to play every hand and didnt like people who raised. Calling stations are my favorite type of player. Duh. Also, all the players were polite and one guy was pretty funny, so it was pleasant enough. (I think one big leak in my live game is that if there's one or more assholes at the table itcan really distract me.)

I must now document one of the funny guy's best lines. He was sitting between two fellow older guys and they were all joking about "being too old to take beats like this" and such. At one point, one of the play-any-two older guys got rivered and started whining about it, and the funny older guy said simply:

Don't you know that life is painful? And poker is like life.

That's gold.

I proceeded to go on quite a run, which in a self-fulfilling prophecy led me to play well and with more confidence than if I had started out badly. Since I haven't ridden the online horse much since the move, it felt great to get a victory under my belt.

Oh, and I bet the ponies a bit too. I hit my exacta in the first race. The exacta box bet cost a total of $4, netting me $18 in profit. That was enough betting money to carry me though the day, ponies-wise. I know enough about horse racing to know that I'm not very good at it, and therefore I only bet small amount. Still, it was very enjoyable to handicap the races in between folds. I finished up $8 on the ponies.

All in all it was a really fun Saturday morning and afternoon. In addition to the win, though, a big part of our enjoyment came from how nice the Canterbury is. That will be the subject of my next post.

Second post on the Canterbury from Cheap Thrills:

As I hinted at in my previous post, I really liked the Canterbury. Maybe I'm just excited about being in a new state -- and maybe I'm just bitter about my last loss at Foxwoods -- but here I present:

The Top 10 Reasons Why the Canterbury Is Better Than Foxwoods

1. Better dealers. The dealers actually enforce the rules of the game, such as "show one, show all," and don't talk about what you folded during a hand, and no foul language.

2. Better floor staff. The floor staff is friendly and helpful -- for example, you can actually a get a table change to the specific table you want. At Foxwoods getting a table change always seemed not worth the trouble. Or maybe I'm just not pushy enough.

3. Nine-handed as opposed to ten-handed tables. With more space between the tables. If you're gonna sit for 5+ hours straight, the value of leg and shoulder should not be underestimated.

Tangent: Numbers 1, 2, and 3 have the same root cause: Foxwoods is just so overwhelmed by the crowds that the service suffers as a result. The same could be said about the entire Northeast, but I digress . . .

4. The ratio of polite Midwesterners to NYC hard guys is much higher. What can I say, I like polite people.

5. The Canterbury lists your first name and last initial rather than just your initials. This, coupled with fact that you can actually hear what's being said over the microphone, is a plus since it leads to people giving more creative fake names. On my first visit to the Canterbury I heard "Sparky," "Las Vegas Joe," "Mailman," and "Jackie Chan." Nothing to bust a gut over but anything that provides amusement while you're sitting there folding is welcome.

6. Chip runners. And track-bet runners.

7. Better food for less money. I had baked chicken with carrots, mashed potatoes, and a roll for $5. Unusually wholesome for a gambling establishment. You might be able to get a meal for less at Foxwoods, but it will definitely be fried.

8. Automatic shufflers. Most of the tables at the Canterbury have them, which means more hands per hour.

9. More TVs. About twice as many TV as Foxwoods for about half as many people.

10. Better wait service.*

Number-11-that-doesn't-really-count: The Canterbury is closer to our apartment (20 minutes) than Foxwoods was to our old place (1 hour).

*Because although you can *get* a drink more easily at the Canterbury, and non-alcoholic beverages are free, alcoholic beverages are not. Doh! However, I may have won at my first poker session at the Canterbury largely because there was no temptation of free drinks :-)

My own weakness for free, delicious beer aside, even if we count the Canterbury's lack of free booze as a triple negative, it's still up by 7 points over Foxwoods. Go Minnesota!

Oh yeah, an underlying assumption here has been the crowds at the two card rooms are equally fishy. At the lowest limits I think this assumption is valid but only time will tell.

Grocery Stores

Well, score one for the east and west coasts: California and the Northeast have much better grocery stores than Minneapolis. We've tried 5 or 6 of the major stores around here (mostly Cub Foods and Rainbow Foods) and have been left rather unimpressed. Our peeves are:

1. Narrow aisles. Which leads to the recurring feeling that someone else's shopping cart is in your way. Which can lead to shopper's rage, an ugly thing.

2. Lousy deli sections. They don't have much variety of either deli meats or prepared salads and sides. And they don't slice the deli meat for you -- it's sitting there pre-sliced. And it's not sliced very thin. I found this a little surprising because it's not like the deli sandwich is not a big thing out here -- I've already eaten at 3 or 4 very good sandwich shops during my lunch hour. But evidently Minneapolitans do not enjoy the luxury of the quality grocery store deli counter, and maybe this is an area in which folks on the coasts are just spoiled. Apparently, in order to get good, cut-to-order deli meat, you have to go to a fancy-schmancy store.

3. Mediocre meat section. Meat prices are, on average, the same or worse than they are in the Rhode Island, which I found off given that we are geographically closer to our nation's slaughterhouses. But my big peeve was the some meats are listed in price per pound -- as one would expect -- while others are listed in price per ounce. Which is just bizarre. I actually found myself mutiplying by 16 in my head just so I could compare prices on pork. Weird. B managed to find one Rainbow foods in Uptown that puts up signs noting which products are on sale, making it the best grocery store we've seen here.

4. General lack of aesthetics. Unfinished warehouse-type ceilings, extremely no-frills look. This is not such a big deal, but it makes me feel like I'm shopping in a Costco or Sam's Club rather than a major grocery store chain. On the other hand, the high-end stores are entirely about aesthetics. Nothing in between.

5. No help bagging one's groceries at the big stores. I've bagged plenty of groceries in my life, but honestly, I don't think I've ever had zero help from the cashier. If you buy a lot it can be pretty hectic to bag it all yourself before the next person in line's stuff starts flowing off the belt into yours. But this is the norm -- it's not like we just got 1 or 2 unhelpful cashiers.

There, I got those complaints off my chest. Normally I like to accentuate the positive in this here blog, but the mediocrity of the grocery stores really stands out in contrast to how nice most things are here.

Folks have recommended some higher-end stores -- notably Lunds, Kowalski's, and Byerly's -- for deli meat and prepared foods. And they are very nice (think Whole Foods but with even more ambiance), we just can't really afford to shop here for very much. And of course some people like the co-op markets for veggies (the Seward Co-Op by us doesn't really sell meat--unless you count the frozen, free-range, organic buffalo), especially if you only buy organic and such. So the norm seems to be to shop at different food stores for different items. Which is fine. I guess we're just more used to one-stop shopping.

There are a couple nice points about the grocery stores:

1. Great produce section. Good prices, great selection, high quality stuff. Which makes sense given that we were are in a more agricultural area of the country.
2. The grocery stores sell beer -- albeit only "3.2 beer."

But 3.2 beer is a topic for another post. . . .

Update, August 9, 2005: Byerly's