"I never take painkillers from a beautiful woman. It's a little too 'on the nose.'" - me when offered free Advil by a babe on the street

No pictures today because I am too fat and lazy to plug in the camera.

Today we thoroughly explored the area of Philly I would live in if I lived in Philly: South Street. It's that neighbourhood - your Queen West-ish type place. Nicely endlessly busy and packed and fun and lots of good stuff in it, like a hatterer and a magic shop. And after some frustrating big box shopping yesterday we found Bay Street Video's opposite number here in town, i.e. the place we'd buy DVDs from if we actually lived here. And guess what? They were having a sale on Criterions. Like, Criterion disks for $25 American. Which works out to about $26.50 Canadian right now. I bought six.

I also rolled some videotape today. Not sure if anything in it will come to anything - I got some nice stuff in a graveyard and more than a few pieces of footage of the quasi-erotic art of Philadelphia, but the idea of doing the historical plaques movie sort of fell apart once we were actually on the ground looking at the things. I still might be able to squeak a shadow "secrets" movie out of the deal, or I might use the aforementioned erotic art for a Final Cut Pro editing experiment when we get back, but mostly I just enjoyed using the camera. It's been a while.

We toured the historical areas for most of the day. You know, real wrath-of-god declaration-of-independence midnight-rides-on-horseback type shit. I bought a replica Declaration of Independence to use as rolling papers when I get back although there's probably enough benzine in that fake parchment to flash-fry a buffalo brain. We were merrily entertained by a Jewish storyteller who gave us a Canadian-relevant tale of intrigue from the Revolutionary War, saw the house of the guy who invented soda pop, and walked all the way from the Rocky steps back to City Hall and then down to the Italian Market which is, like, the entire damn run of the place.

Oh: and Philly Cheese Steaks. We had two apiece as the day went on. The first was at Jim's and that was pretty fucking spectacular. Jim's is the place where the lunch-hour line is literally about 30-45 minutes, and it's the place that the locals go, so it didn't disappoint. Later in the day we went to Geno's which is the place that all the tourists go to, and I was significantly less pleased with both the food and the attitude. Actually that place really pissed me off. There was a noticeable racist vibe about the joint, a "never forget" style plaque naming an Arab cop-killer from a murder almost thirty years ago, and a gag photo of Geno himself getting blown by a porn star while two bare-breasted femmes looked on, which was proudly displayed on some of the tables - which, given the three little girls happily eating their sandwiches with their parents at the next table over, was sort of the last straw for me. I was not sad to kiss that fuckin' place goodbye.

Tonight I made what can only be described as a catastrophic gustatory error tonight, sending us out for dinner in spite of the fact that we’d each had the 2 philly cheese steaks apiece, along with a nice breakfast, and on my part anyway, a “peanut butter sandwich” chocolate square that might very well have been the Allspark. The good news is that staring down at a pound of pasta apiece, Matty Price and I proceeded to throw ourselves into a giggle fit that will define the art form for years to come. So that's good times.

Tomorrow's the Fourth of July, which will either be the best or the worst day we'll have here.