Dave Returns! With the Usual Drivel . . .

My wife and I escaped from the children this weekend and enjoyed some unscheduled time in the City of Brotherly Love . . . and while we certainly experienced some love, it was mainly of the segregated and gentrified sort-- 13th Street near McGillin's pub is no longer gritty and urban, it's now a wonderful upscale strip of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops catering to young hipsters . . . here's a quick and dirty rundown of some of the stuff we did and saw:

1) after hiking over to the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, which is a bit of a haul from center city but definitely worth a stop, we wandered into a Trump Rally, which was fairly small (apparently it got bigger and wilder as the day went on) and while it was pretty tame, it did have the usual jingoistic chanting, an African-American representing Black Lives Matter with a megaphone in an argument with a bearded Trump supporter, and some people off to the side with a fantastic sign condemning everyone; the sign read:

LUKEWARM CHRISTIANS LIKE TRUMP 

WILL BURN IN HELL WITH ALL LIBERALS

REPENT AND OBEY JESUS 

which is a statement I've got to admire in its candid comprehensiveness and straightforward sentiment;

2) we saw the horror movie Get Out, which is funny, scary, and satirizes race relations in America-- I highly recommend the film, it's totally entertaining . . . and soon after, when we were walking through a slightly sketchy area that harbored some prostitutes and homeless folks, a rather tipsy African-American woman yelled, "White people stink!" at my wife and me, and I told her she should go see Get Out, which would certainly confirm her hypothesis;

3) we ate at some excellent places: Lolita, Pub and Kitchen, Sampan, Dan Dan, and Misconduct Tavern.