[Guest post by Stevie Wilson of the LA Story blog] If you aren’t familiar with me, this is Stevie Wilson and I post very intermittant posts here and on Marketing Conversation.com .

Chris Abraham has been on my blog many times–both in podcast and in reference (where have you been?). If you read this blog you know that Chris Abraham, attends– and speaks at– many major social media events and conferences. He’s an interesting person to know because he’s a multi-dimensional person with an inquisitive mind and lots of interests. If you want to know about the posts on my blog, head over there and do a search on my blog or head over to www.chrisabraham.com or marketingconversation.com and search for my posts there. This might be a bit redundant for this blog but hang with me people, it gets better!

Chris Abraham (looking pretty dapper here and he was dressed pretty much like this the night we had dinner)

Before we get into the podcast, you need a bit of back story. I interviewed Chris Abraham at least 3 years ago– about a statement he made about his life. (Like I said, it’s a podcast, hunt it down in my blog or his). I was able to connect to him and he was willing to talk to me and so began a series of irregular podcasts and contributions to blogs that sort of created a friendship of sorts. Given the range of topics, we have no problems laughing at each other’s jokes or finding out that we both like to do target practice. Yet during all this time, I had never met Chris. The only way I had seen him was his photos or if he was in a video–really– in at least 3 years.

So as Chris Abraham made this sojourn across the country, making pit-stops in all kinds of places (and being stuck in ice storms), we eventually put together a “meet-up” and when all was worked out, we met at the Beechwood Restaurant in Venice. Not the easiest place to find for an Angeleno who doesn’t know Venice but so much easier for someone from out of the area — he beat me there because I got lost and circled the area twice! Patient man that he is, he recognized me as I can flying in the restaurant door and we headed out to the patio for dinner — and to get me a cocktail.

We ordered up some appetizers– and this man has a taste for the exotic and I went with it. Great idea too! Fried edamame, fried spicy chickpeas (YUM!) and some sashimi type fish.

This podcast was done LIVE in a busy restaurant. I have tried to amplify and clean up the sound but parts might be a bit faint so turn up the volume or plug in a headset and turn up the volume. It is very very funny. We had a diverse range of topics to talk about.

We did order dinner– and you will hear it in the podcast along with 2 people who were sitting next to us. The person who mentions Steve Martin’s book is the wife and the man talking about dying his hair red is the husband.. and they were interesting people–VERY interesting people.

Here’s my dinner– and me! Photo by Chris Abraham.

(sparkly eyes thanks to the Jack and Jill cocktail and a lot of laughte. Recipe at the end. )

I didn’t take a photo of Chris because he was back-lit and he would have either been dark with a halo (hmmm Chris does that mean you are an angel in disguise?) or I would have/should have used my flash and then worked it a bit in photoshop! Why didn’t I ? I thought it would stop the flow of conversation and the people on the other side were listening to our conversation too. I guess we were pretty interesting or we were having a better time than them.

Beechwood Jack and Jill Cocktail

• Lairds Applejack
• Pomegranate Syrup
• Fresh Lemon Juice
• Orange Bitters

Served on the rocks, topped with Prosecco.
Yummy drink and the Prosecco adds just the right amount of fizz.

Thankyou to Chris Abraham for being willing to podcast in that environment. I think he may not remember all that was said. I certainly didn’t. Also the couple next to us were very chatty and very funny. Thanks to Chris for dinner too.. he was willing to fight me for the bill. So I deferred to his better judgement as he is over 6 feet tall and I am about 5’3″. We both have the similar taste in cars– fast, German and BMW are 3 key words. What they will be next year.. could be entirely different.

Chris Abraham has left LA now and headed north. So by the time he sees this I am not sure where he will be. However maybe, if we are very lucky, he will head back down into LA and I can corral him into another podcast about social media topics or affects or whatever topic he chooses. “The princessification of girls” is on facebook and his blog.

Thanks again Chris. It was really fun. Hope we can have coffee or show you something other than Venice as part of a tour of LA. I think you would like to see more of So. California.

Stevie Wilson, LA-Story.com

What an Evening of German Study Looks Like, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

A course book, a workbook, a notebook, and a bottle of wine make for a night of study.

I have had too many Big Slices and Jumbo Slices for my own good, generally after a night of drinking up in Adams Morgan, Washington, DC.  Well, I always assumed the Jumbo Slice was a variation but it is an official regional pizza style! Huzzah! At least according to A List of Regional Pizza Styles via digg

While this one sounds like it’s merely a style based on size, I’ve seen arguments for it in the comments (here and here) and over on Boing Boing.

While I’m not sure it’s going to be a widely recognized style, It’s in the interest of Slice readers to know about it, even if it, so …

Yes, the jumbo slice of D.C. is mainly known for its size. There are many competing places offering this style. The link to the article below tells about the development of the jumbo slice, the competing claims of who has the “First Oldest Original Jumbo Slice,” a laboratory-based nutritional analysis, and the fact that people only eat it when they are drunk.

Jumbo Slice Lore of D.C. [Washington City Paper]

Here’s the Washington City Paper Article (and, it is totally exactly like this):

When bars close on a Saturday night in Adams Morgan, cops usually can gauge the impending mayhem by the length of the line at Pizza Mart.

On a night in mid-October, the unruly column forms in front of the pizzeria right on cue, at 2:45 a.m., just after most bartenders have shouted their last call. Never mind that it’s the first cold weekend of the season, or that the nightlife district along 18th Street NW seems filled to only half-capacity tonight. Just about everyone on the strip has come here to bump elbows and jostle himself one step closer to a single slice. It’s so tight that served customers have to make their exit with their slices over their heads, negotiating them like clumsy waiters.

Amid the catcalls and the laughter come the night’s first genuine fighting words.

“You bitch!”

And the rejoinder: “You ho!”

The crowd forms a circle. A formidable young woman in a blue tank top lunges at her braided foe, and the pair go tumbling onto a sidewalk strewn with greasy paper plates and leftover pizza crusts. Some patrons break out of the line altogether to get a better view, and ecstatic men shout whatever catfight clichés pop into their heads.

“Rip her shirt off!” screeches an overjoyed meathead, his right hand pumping the air in a fist, his left forearm cradling a slice of pizza.

As the swaying throng bumps up against cars parked along the sidewalk, a man in a teal Mitsubishi decides it’s time to get his sporty ride out of harm’s way. He is blocked by revelers who are hanging out in the street. First, he nudges the riffraff with his front bumper. Then, unwisely, he decides to lay on his horn. Someone cocks a slice of pizza back to his shoulder and hurls it, like a circus clown in a pie fight, clipping the rear wheel well on the driver’s side. The driver brakes hard, thinks better of it, and then moves along.

Back on the sidewalk, a volunteer referee has managed to tear the women apart. But the circle hasn’t broken up just yet; now two dudes are swapping unintelligible insults and throwing wild haymakers. It’s not even 3 a.m.

There are two easy ways to find yourself in the middle of an early-morning slugfest at Pizza Mart: Hit on someone else’s significant other, or try to cut in line for pizza.

After all, owner Chris Chishti’s crew isn’t serving up just any kind of slice. His renowned “jumbo slice,” a greasy slab that requires two paper plates to handle, runs nearly a foot-and-a-half long, and weighs in just shy of a pound. Novices at the counter often have to ask how to go about eating such a beast. As any jumbo-slice veteran will tell them, you just fold it like the morning newspaper and go to work.

In the five or so years Chishti’s been dishing out his trademark, it’s become a staple for late-night bargoers who are looking to coat their stomachs before the long cab ride back to the ’burbs. As for the Tijuana-cockfight atmosphere, one can’t help but notice that the excess commotion merely reflects the excess of Chishti’s slices.

But they weren’t always so monstrous. In fact, when the Pakistan native opened his modest carryout in 1997, he had no intention of stretching his pies far beyond their initial 18-inch diameter. That is, until one of his neophyte cooks left behind a mangled dough ball after a busy night in 1999.

When Chishti strolled into his shop the next morning, he figured the misshapen mound was unusable. But then he took a fresh dough ball from another tray. “What I did, I took that dough ball and put it with the other dough ball,” says the mustachioed Chishti, clapping together his cupped hands to illustrate the epiphany. He kneaded the oversized ball, dropped it on a baking screen, and sent it through his conveyer oven dressed with cheese and sauce.

What came out the other end was jumbo indeed, and its creator saw no reason to stop there: “I said, ‘Let’s go bigger.’”

Three different pizza shops on the main drag of 18th Street now serve the city’s famous jumbo slice. Each proprietor asserts his own form of jumbo-slice originality:

•Chishti, owner of Pizza Mart: “I’m a pizza maker. I was calling mine the jumbo slice. Then he went over there and starting calling his the jumbo slice.” “He” refers to Jawed Khan, owner of Pizza Napoli.

•Khan: “We came in with the biggest slice.”

•John Nasir, owner of Pizza Boli’s: “I don’t know how you can ‘invent’ something….Maybe [Chishti] took the idea from one of our stores.”

As the first cook on the block, Chishti stakes the only legitimate claim. He was the first pizza maker on the block to widen his pie beyond 20 inches, and he also bestowed the now-famous moniker on his peculiar slice. But his brainchild has been hijacked over the years—by his former pizza associates, no less—so the genial Chishti gets a bit prickly over the issue of jumbo-slice legitimacy.

“You don’t need a coat and a tie to make pizzas,” says Chishti, arguing that his competitors are businessmen rather than cooks. He says a secret recipe for his jumbo slice accounts for a taste superior to the other pizzas on 18th Street. “I’ve been doing this for 23 years—that’s my experience.”

The most visible spat unfolded last year, when Nasir, owner of the 75-store Pizza Boli’s chain and a former business partner of Chishti’s, greenlighted one of his franchises to open just three doors up the street from Pizza Mart. The franchisee, Kerry Guneri, made the jumbo slice his featured product. He and Chishti quickly found themselves in the middle of a neon-sign war:

•March 2003: Guneri opens his Pizza Boli’s. He installs a neon “Jumbo Slice” sign in the window on the southern side of his store. It’s facing the Pizza Mart, where Chishti’s window holds a mere plastic “Jumbo Slice” sign.

•July 2003: Guneri compounds the insult by installing two additional neon signs. These read “Original Jumbo Slice.” Chishti decides to respond the very same day Guneri’s new signs go up. He calls Xin Guan Signs near Chinatown, Guneri’s supplier, and orders a neon sign that reads “Real Original Jumbo Slice.”

•July 2003: Guneri tells the Washington City Paper (“Pie Fight,” 7/25/03) he’s through installing the neon signs, which cost about $700 apiece. “This place is lit up like a whorehouse as it is,” he says.

•August 2003: Chishti installs a final neon sign, designed by one of his regular customers on a piece of scrap paper. It reads “First Oldest Original Jumbo Slice.”

Anyone who bothers to parse the vying shops’ respective strings of adjectives surely would see that Chishti invented the jumbo slice. But what escaped both proprietors was the fact that nobody cares. In reality, many self-proclaimed jumbo fans couldn’t tell you whether they’d eaten a slice from Pizza Mart or Pizza Boli’s the night before. It’s like trying to remember whether you stopped at an Arby’s or a Hardee’s on a road trip.

When Khan, once an employee of Chishti’s, opened up the rival Pizza Napoli just down the street from Pizza Mart in late 1999, he knew the game wasn’t about creating a special sauce or even serving a marginally better pizza. It was about making a bigger slice.

“They had an 18-inch pie and then went to a 22-inch,” Khan says of Pizza Mart. “[But] we came in here and started with a 30-inch. That was the biggest.” Chishti disputes that Khan’s pie was ever larger, but the point is clear: Size trumps everything else.

In spite of Chishti’s talk of a secret recipe for his jumbo slice, the customer demands only that his belly be full in the end. The gluttony imperative was lost on Bill Thomas, owner of the Blue Room club on 18th Street, and proprietor of the now-defunct Kung Fu Pizza, which once occupied a portion of the same building. When he opened his kitschy, martial-arts-themed pizzeria in 2000, Thomas and his team had spent months working on recipes for gourmet pies, even experimenting with spring water in their dough.

“We actually thought quality would sell, and we were stupid,” says Thomas. Kung Fu Pizza shut its doors after a four-month run. The eatery stayed open late and attracted a small following from the wait staffs of surrounding bars, but the Adams Morgan party crowd never took to the Asian finger food and modestly sized pizza. “At the end of the day, it was all about the big slice,” he says.

When your slice’s supremacy is predicated entirely on size, the only way to improve it is to make it larger. So Chishti has expanded the diameter of his pie at least five times since he opened, finally arriving at the 32-incher he cooks today.

The pies on 18th Street have stopped expanding only because there’s no larger pizza oven on the market. Khan has considered buying an oven designed primarily for large cakes; Chishti, who’s already upgraded his oven once, has started cheating with the one he has, sending his pies over the burners stretched in one dimension. This method results in slightly larger, if oval, pizzas.

Such evolution has made the slices unwieldy—and not just for the customer. Both Chishti and Khan grew their slices right out of the delivery business. Chishti decided years ago that he wouldn’t even try to bring his No. 1 product to your front door. “You put it in the box and send it, by the time it gets to the customer it’s soggy,” he says. “We don’t want that to happen to our jumbo.”

Khan, however, was more determined. He ordered custom cardboard boxes that measured nearly 3 feet across, just so he could deliver the entire jumbo pie in its original form, rather than stack the slices on top of one another in a single box. When the boxes buckled under the sheer weight of the pies, sending all the grease to the center, he looked into heavy-duty cardboard boxes that cost three times as much as the pizza itself. He even special-ordered an insulated, jumbo-size delivery sheath; it could have doubled as a toddler’s sleeping bag.

But in the end, most of his drivers couldn’t even fit the pies into their cars.

Khan had to scrap the delivery venture after just a year. Which was fine with him, because all the action comes in off the street.

Like any overhead-conscious carryout proprietor in D.C., Chishti likes to keep the inside of his business spare. The eatery includes a handful of stools and a pair of steel counters, but there are no chairs and no tables. No customer bathrooms. No artwork. And certainly no nutritional-information charts.

Even though your average clubhopper loves to crack a joke about fat content as she paints her face with tomato sauce on 18th Street, she doesn’t really want to know just how much energy is stored in that jumbo slice.

The Washington City Paper sent three cheese jumbo slices, one from each of the jumbo-pizza makers, to the ABC Research Corp., a food-testing laboratory in Gainesville, Fla. Calculated on the basis of the lab’s calories-per-gram analysis, the single slices from both Pizza Mart and Pizza Boli’s soared over the 1,000-calorie threshold.

Pizza Boli’s trounced the field with a whopping 1,309 calories, and Pizza Mart settled for silver with a respectable 1,117. That’s roughly equivalent to two Big Macs, or, for active women and most men, about half the calories the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends for an entire day’s intake, let alone as a Friday-evening nightcap. By comparison, Pizza Napoli’s slice made for light fare at a modest 917 calories, but it weighed significantly less than the competitors’.

None of the slices necessarily jibe with today’s low-carbohydrate diet fad, either. Each sample stored more than 115 grams of carbs alone, including the comparably dainty slice from Pizza Napoli, which had a disproportionately high carb rate. The slice from Pizza Boli’s again led the pack in fat content; its roughly 53 grams just edges out Pizza Mart’s 47.

The growth of the jumbo slice may have been foiled by the undersized ovens, but not before it became the city’s lone culinary icon, the District’s own take on the supersize phenomenon. It was an unlikely turn, given that the jumbo slice has nothing to do with America’s growing waistline. That petite, Bally’s-going little tart who comes pinballing out of the club, dying to get her hands on a slice of pizza that could probably be wrapped around her torso—she’s not the same woman buying the latest meal deal at McDonald’s four times a week.

No, the jumbo slice sprang from the very same beast that sustains it: drunkenness. Any jumbo-slice owner will tell you that the majority of his weekly sales are made over the course of about eight hours on the weekend.

“Sometimes people throw a slice on you,” says an exasperated Chishti, who tries to clock in exclusively during the daylight hours now. “They’re drunk, they fight with each other, they argue… Sometimes you’re serving pizza to guys who are so drunk they’re hard to handle.” In a painful show of irony, Chishti was once the target of a flying jumbo slice, hurled by a loaded patron who said the pizza was too large to eat.

There’s an old joke that says everybody’s eaten a jumbo slice but nobody remembers it. The joke gets told quite often, mainly because it’s true. Most people, when they consider the sheer size and uncontrollable grease, can’t stomach the thought of eating a jumbo slice during the day. Drop an open napkin on a jumbo slice and it disappears.

The sober and sensible tend to stay clear of the big slice and, for that matter, the 18th Street pizzerias altogether. Over the course of a weekday lunch hour in Adams Morgan, the staff at Pizza Mart might sell just a few slices. But once the bars close and everybody’s sauced, the jumbo becomes the centerpiece of 18th Street’s pre-dawn circus. And priced at $4 or less, it’s a perfectly affordable, even expendable, toy. That’s why so many slices wind up in the street, on top of cars, and, often, in people’s faces. It’s an insane spectacle for a neighborhood where many people still beg for change each day.

“The funny thing is, now people know about them,” says Adams Morgan resident Mindy Moretti, baffled by the jumbo’s popularity. “You see people taking pictures of other people eating them. They’re almost a…tourist attraction.”

And like any tourist magnet, these slices require their own police protection. Officers Andrew Zabavsky and Dustin Roeder, two D.C. bike cops assigned to Adams Morgan, have made the area in front of Pizza Mart something of a default post during their weekend-night shifts. Most cops would rather handle parking complaints all night than work a strip full of obnoxious, drunken brawlers, but Zabavsky and Roeder have staked it out as their beat. Riding mountain bikes, they spend much of their night dodging drunks who stagger out into the street.

“Most of the fights tend to gravitate around the pizza joints,” says Zabavsky. “Some days it’s off the hook, one after another after another.” It doesn’t matter where a scuffle has its roots—out in the street, inside a club, or way back in childhood—the fuse often gets lit in the jumbo-slice line. Roeder talks about the pizza servers as if they have the most treacherous job in town: “With the bars, at least they can send a bouncer out to flag us down for help. But the pizza guys, they’re pinned in back there.”

The cops have collared many bruisers on 18th Street, but it’s often the less violent jumbo-slice incidents that stick out in their minds. “Craziest thing I ever saw with the jumbo slice,” starts Zabavsky: “This guy up near McDonald’s drops his slice right on the ground—cheese-down and everything. He picks it right up and starts eating it like nothing happened. He’s smiling.”

On a Friday night, the sauce on your Pizza Mart jumbo slice comes out of what’s commonly referred to as a “garbage can.” There’s nothing necessarily unsanitary about this storage method; it merely indicates the massive amount of pizza that will be moved in a single night.

The volume of cheese is similarly industrial. On a Friday afternoon in mid-October, Pizza Mart receives a shipment of roughly 900 pounds of a mozzarella-provolone mix. That’s nearly half a ton.

“And I’ll probably be back on Monday,” sighs 55-year-old Thomas Carroll, a deliveryman for Nino’s Pizza Dough, sweating as he schleps the 30 boxes with a handtruck. Asked if that’s an extraordinary amount of cheese, Carroll laughs. “You see all them boxes?” he asks, gesturing to about 1,500 stacked and bundled pizza boxes on his truck, each destined to hold just a single slice. “Those are for [Pizza Mart], too.” Of the 40 or so regular deliveries Carroll makes, only a Maryland pizzeria takes in more product than Pizza Mart. And right behind Pizza Mart on the list is the Naval Academy.

Inside the Pizza Mart kitchen, there are no chef hats, no high-flung dough, and no handlebar mustaches. The rush-hour spectacle is more a lesson in ergonomics than in Italian culinary tradition. This is where, on a busy weekend night, an assembly line of cooks will manufacture upward of 800 pounds of pizza in a matter of hours. There’s nothing romantic about the process:

One guy takes a gooey dough ball off a plastic tray. Tonight there are about 80 dough balls ready to go for the late-night blitz. He kneads and stretches the dough to its 32-inch diameter, drops it on a screen, and passes it to the next cook.

This guy dresses the dough. He ladles his sauce from the plastic can with what looks to be a family-size salad bowl, and he sprinkles mozzarella-provolone mix from packages pulled from 30-pound boxes. When the pie’s ready, it makes its slow crawl through the oven on a conveyer belt, out the other side to the last cook.

This guy cuts the pie, places the slices onto aluminum-foil-covered plates, and drops them onto a metal tray with a thud. He needs to fold the bottom third of each slice back onto its upper portion just to make sure it stays on the plate. “Sometimes, during the day, they’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t want this. You folded it. That’s no good,’” says Munir Butt, working the register on a Friday night. “But not right now.”

Finally, the slices go under the heat lamp. From start to finish, the journey lasts less than 10 minutes. Pies ride on through the oven, shoulder to shoulder, throughout the night.

Out front, three workers serve the slices and man the register. They’ll handle the slices with metal tongs, in order to keep the grease off their hands and clothes, and they’ll bang the counter with their tongs when they’re ready for the next customer. They work three, four, sometimes five people deep in the line, just to keep up with the 2 a.m. rush. A tiny fraction of the slices—maybe 2 percent—are so mutilated that they don’t make the cut. Of the slices they do serve, some look as if they’ve been sat on. Regardless, every slice will be pounced on.

“The pizza guys really have cultivated this post-nocturnal feeding frenzy,” says Scott Bennett, owner of the newly opened Amsterdam Falafelshop on 18th Street. “The way I see it, when the tide comes in, all boats float. God bless the pizza guys.”

But no one in tonight’s kitchen, nor its owner, will be getting rich off the jumbo slice. In favorable weather, a jumbo joint might sell anywhere between 600 and 1,000 slices on a strong weekend night; priced between $3.50 and $4 a pop, that might bring in somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000 in an evening. But after covering rent, ingredients, and the pay for seven staffers or more on the busy shifts, the owners will be left with pocket change on each slice.

So if you can’t pack more weekends into a year, you may as well pack more pizzerias into the city. Nasir, for one, says he may be serving his big boy out of a new Pizza Boli’s on U Street NW by the end of this month. Khan has already started dishing his own monstrosity out of his kebab house, also on U Street.

But Khan sees no reason to contain the jumbo slice within the District. Early next year, he expects to open a pizzeria in Florida. After researching locales in South Beach and Key West, he says he’s just about settled on the City Walk area of Orlando.

“It will be all about the jumbo,” he promises.

The mess left behind after the weekend pizza craze has put the jumbo slice and its purveyors at the very top of the Adams Morgan NIMBY list. Moretti, a member of the local advisory neighborhood commission, says an uncanny wind tunnel carries greasy paper plates up 18th Street, across Columbia Road, and all the way to her Adams Mill Road apartment building on gusty weekend mornings.

“Several of us have joked about going and collecting all the paper plates, putting them in a trash can, finding out where the [pizzeria] owners live, and dumping them in their yards,” says Moretti.

When bars and clubs become a nuisance, residents can force owners into line by threatening to withhold their support for a liquor-license renewal. But when it comes to the pizza joints, none of which serve liquor, the residents hold no bureaucratic aces up their sleeves. Essentially, the pizza places reap all the benefits of a nightlife business without being held to the same standards. “We can hold up against bars because of the [alcoholic-beverage] commission,” says Bryan Weaver, also a neighborhood commissioner. “But there’s no Shitty Sauce Commission where we can go and say, ‘Hey, these guys are making bad pizza.’”

The commission has supported a neighborhood liquor-license moratorium since it was introduced in 2000. Some members, resigned to fielding cheese-and-crust complaints at each monthly meeting, say they would be willing to place a similar moratorium on the jumbo, if only it were possible.

“Our hands are tied as far as the big slice goes,” says Moretti.

The public-health implications of the jumbo are on full display on a recent Sunday. In the hours before dawn, the mess on the sidewalk in front of Pizza Mart forces squeamish passers-by onto their tiptoes, hopping from one small patch of visible concrete to the next. Greasy plates and pizza boxes, too many to count, blanket the sidewalk. Maimed slices sit on top of cars and inside flowerpots. Fat pigeons peck their way through tomato sauce and cheese.

The inside of Pizza Mart looks the same as the outside, only no pigeons. At 4:30 a.m., cashier Butt shuts off the neon, locks the front door, and mouths an apology through the window to a few tardy stragglers hoping to get a slice.

The last jumbo customer of the night, now satiated, looks over both shoulders before dropping his empty pizza box between two cars parked at the curb. What’s one more bit of cardboard added to the mess? He takes a final sip from his soda, leans over, and places the empty cup on top of the box.

On the sidewalk, a bored bouncer gets his kicks by shining a flashlight on the rats that have come out to feast on more pizza than they can handle. These rats live a good life, and this is their prime feeding hour—a short window of time after the heavy foot traffic has died down but before the sprawling slices have been scooped up. Aside from the bouncer, their only company is a lonely sot dry-heaving beside a parking meter, his chin covered in spittle.

Butt says a homeless guy agreed to clean up the storefront after close tonight for 10 bucks, but by 5 a.m. it looks as if he’s a no-show. As usual, this morning’s pizza detail will fall to just one man: Anwar Tate, a 29-year-old Department of Public Works employee, who works his way up 18th Street every Saturday and Sunday morning armed with a metal rake, a heavy-duty shovel, and a ride-on vacuum. Tate’s chipper today, and he’ll need to be. He’s got only two hours to knock off the entire block before Adams Morgan’s early risers come out expecting a pizza-free street.

“You try to get it off the sidewalk as quick as you can,” he says, handling the slices with either the shovel or his gloved hands. “It’s just part of the job.”

There’s plenty of pizza refuse beyond Tate’s jurisdiction. Slices have been flung into the yards of residents along Euclid Street NW and throughout Adams Morgan. Paper plates and napkins dot a path all the way over the Duke Ellington Bridge and up to the Woodley Park Metro station, over half a mile away. And because plenty of slices found their way into cabs, surely some of the 800 jumbos dished out at Pizza Mart have traveled over the Potomac into Virginia by now.

Butt says Pizza Mart, despite brisk business, didn’t have a single fight last night. But when he turned his back for just a second during the blitz, some asshole made off with the tip jar. It was only $15 or $20, to be split among the staff at close. “Not much,” he acknowledges. “But you work hard for it.”CP

Late Night Menu at Tunnicliff’s, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

Yes, I have been spending way too much time at Tunnicliff’s Tavern. Meeting buddies like Ollie and Andrew. Used to spend even more time. Sometimes really late, taking advantage of this hallowed Late Night Menu. Amen.

A Beer at Tunnicliff’s Tavern, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

After did a rare in-person pitch I stopped for a beer at good ‘ole Tunnicliff’s Tavern, an Eastern Market tradition.

I had an excellent boy’s night out tonight: Brian, Ben, Andrew, and Jon. Spending time at the Chinatown Red Roof Inn bar, The Irish Channel.

A very sound night, a very dive bar, and the requisite asshole who demanded our attention. How did I know he was an ass? Well, he used the word irregardless Fuckwit.

One line I made up and asked Jon to write down for me — since Brian, Jon, and Ben are Very Successful Lawyer working for Very Prestigious Firms — was, “whereas ad-men, PR executives, and marketers like me have to sell bullshit, lawyers turn bullshit into bible and it sells itself.” In other words, the power of Rabbis, Priests, and Lawyers is that they get to define what is Holy. So worthy of admiration. Lawyers are the modern-day paladin.

IRREGARDLESS

[Q] From Randall E Larson in Tucson: “I have more than once seen the corruption irregardless used in some standard writings and with a straight face. Has it become acceptable????

[A] The word is thoroughly and consistently condemned in all American references I can find. But it’s also surprisingly common. It’s formed from regardless by adding the negative prefix ir-; as regardless is already negative, the word is considered a logical absurdity.

It’s been around a while: the Oxford English Dictionary quotes a citation from Indiana that appeared in Harold Wentworth’s American Dialect Dictionary of 1912. And it turns up even in the better newspapers from time to time: as here from the New York Times of 8 February 1993: “Irregardless of the benefit to children from what he calls his ‘crusade to rescue American education,’ his own political miscalculations and sometimes deliberate artlessness have greatly contributed to his present difficulties???.

But, as I say, it’s still generally regarded by people with an informed opinion on the matter as unacceptable. The Third Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary states firmly that “the label ‘nonstandard’ does not begin to do justice to the status of this word??? and “it has no legitimate antecedents in either standard or nonstandard varieties of English???. Some writers even try to turn it into a non-word, virtually denying its existence, which is pretty hard to do in the face of the evidence. The level of abuse hurled at the poor thing is astonishingly high, almost as great as that once directed at hopefully. It seems to have become something of a linguistic shibboleth.

That’s strange because, as Professor Laurence Horn of Yale University points out, the duplication of negative affixes is actually quite common in English. Few users query words such as debone and unravel because they are so familiar. In earlier times there were even more such words, many recorded from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: unboundless, undauntless, uneffectless, unfathomless and many others.

Grammarians of the eighteenth century and after—who had a greater sense of logic than feel for the language—did much to stamp them out. They argued that, in language as in mathematics, two negatives make a positive: putting two negatives together cancels them out. This has been the basis for condemnation of statements like “I never said nothing to nobody???, which aren’t standard British or American English. But in many other languages—and in some local or dialectal forms of English both today and in earlier times—multiple negatives are intensifiers, adding emphasis.

Irregardless has a fine flow about it, with a stronger negative feel than regardless that some people obviously find attractive. Indeed, the stress pattern of the word probably influenced the addition of the prefix, as the stress in regardless is on gar, which makes it sound insufficiently negative, despite the -less suffix.

So the precedents are all on the side of irregardless and—despite the opinions of the experts—I suspect that the word will become even more popular in the US in the future. For the moment, though, it is best avoided in formal writing.

I popped in to join Holly and Shannon at Sonoma Restaurant and Wine Bar for a quick drink last night and ended up hanging out with these great girls and really enjoying my time at Sonoma until the strike of 11. Fancy that.

Gorgeous crowd with pretty people all gussied-up. Lots of single guys and girls in an environment where you can actually breath and you might not feel too obvious if you mustered enough courage to actually talk to one of these pretty people.

Of course, Holly and Shannon were mighty pretty themselves, so the manager, the bartenders, and the staff were very generous.

That said, the prices are steep, the wine is delicious and well-maintained, and the pizzas were delectable and cheap: red, greed, or white.

I should have ordered mine with white anchovies.

Here’s the menu in pdf.

I admire Mr. Citrano. I met him at the The Fairfax at Embassy Row, where he was staying, at about half-7 on Friday. I had a great time.

We grabbed a drink in the lounge (I had a couple 12-year Dewars neat) and then walked to Lauriol Plaza, where we opened the cosmic tap while enjoying Mexifood (and I had a Margarita on the rocks with salt).

The good news, guys, is that “Washington girls are much better looking than Boston girls.” The bad news is that “girls in New York and LA are much better looking than Washington girls.” I paraphrased.

After eating, we walked to the Beacon Martini Sky Bar to say hey to Adam Dubitsky as he welcomed his birthday. I ordered a dirty martini and I have to admit that although I am not a martini drinker, that was one hell of a tasty drink.

That was one tasty martini.

Athony is one hell of a cool dude and a great friend. It was great to see him. Not often enough. Check out his blog, Cosmic Tap, and get ready to have your mind expanded.

Or maybe it was just the dirty martini.

One of my dearest friends and clinical psychologist, Monique, popped me a Power Point presentation she researched and presented to her class on the topic of “Hooking Up.” She allowed me to publish the results here and they are rather quite compelling.

“Post hookup feelings of regret” was most interesting, “women’s feelings of regret centered on shame and self blame, compounded by not knowing their partner and lack of further contact with partner” while “men’s feelings of regret centered on a unattractive choice of hookup partner.”

Clinical Psychology Research on “Hooking Up” in College courtesy of Monique Moore

Definition
Hooking up (Paul, McManus & Hayes, 2000):

A sexual encounter which may or may not include sexual intercourse, usually occurring on only one occasion between two people who are strangers or brief acquaintances.

Frequency of Hookups
Paul & Hayes, 2002 survey of 187 college students (155 women, 32 men)

- 70% overall had participated in at least 1 hookup. (75% of men, 84% of women). Of that proportion, 91% had had more than one.

- Average number of hookups for both genders 10.28 (SD 11.22) during their college career
No significant difference between men/women in frequency of hookups

General statistics on hookups
Paul & Hayes, 2002

- 55% of students said that hookups involve anonymous partners

- 49% report that hookups are planned in terms of occurrence but not choice of partner

- 60% believe that either men or women are the instigators, whereas 28% believe that men are the instigators. 3% believe that women are the instigators

During hookups
Paul & Hayes, 2002

- 58% report that alcohol or drugs are typically present, 35% only alcohol, only 6% neither drugs nor alcohol

- 69% believe that hookup partners do not communicate, 25% think that partners engage in small talk, 4% say partners talk about what’s happening, 2% talk about future meeting, 1% talk about sexual history

- 16% of individuals who hooked up felt pressured during the hookup, whereas 34% felt out of control during the hookup (Paul, McManus & Hayes, 2000)

Post hookup
Men and women differed in what their feelings of regret consisted of (Paul & Hayes, 2002).

- Women’s feelings of regret centered on shame and self blame, compounded by not knowing their partner and lack of further contact with partner

- Men’s feelings of regret centered on a unattractive choice of hookup partner

Post Hookup
Other research suggests (Paul, McManus, & Hayes 2000) that post hookup

- 28% of participants that ‘hooked up’ but did not have intercourse and 49% of those that did have intercourse never saw their partner again

- Only 12% of all hookup participants indicated that a hookup evolved into a romantic relationship, that average length of which was 4 months.

Pluralistic Ignorance and hooking up
Pluralistic ignorance (Allport, 1924):

- When each individual in a group believes that their private attitudes are discrepant from the standard displayed by the public behavior of others. Accordingly, each group member conforms to their perception of the group standard, while believing that they are the only ones who don’t privately uphold it.

Research suggests (Lambert, Kahn & Apple, 2003)

- College students evaluated their own comfort level with hooking up as significantly lower than their estimate of same sex peer (F (1,262)= 7.55, p<.01). This effect was more pronounced for men.
Both men and women significantly overestimate the other gender's actual comfort with various hooking up behavior

Pluralistic Ignorance and Hooking up
Pluralistic Ignorance may be compounded by the communication surrounding hookups

- Many individuals say they discuss ONLY their positive hookup experiences with their friends, which may create a glorified norm that doesn’t accurately represent many hookup experiences. A vicious cycle ensues where if the hookup doesn’t meet the positive standards, students self blame and hide the experience, which just reinforces the positive standard (Paul & Hayes, 2002)

Personality and situational variables’ influence in hookups
What distinguishes individuals who don’t hookup (N-HU), from those who hookup without intercourse (HU), and who those who hookup with intercourse (HU-S)? (Paul, McManus & Hayes, 2000)

- Alcohol intoxication and fear of loss of individuality increases across hookup groups (N-HU HU-S individuals are differentiated from other groups by high impulsivity, low concern for personal safety, low dependency, and desire for high autonomy

Personality and situational variables’ influence in hookups
HU-S individuals are distinguished from HU individuals by a game playing love style (sexual conquest rather than connection)

- N-HU individuals prefer not to be the center of attention, are not fearful of intimacy, are least likely to have a game playing orientation toward partners, and are highest on self-esteem and have significantly longer romantic relationship commitments (M = 28.3, SD=19.95.) versus other groups (MHU=17.41, SD = 16.37 M HU-S=14.3, SD =14.3)

The Washington Post has a four-page article on the Wingman. Only one wingman? Amateurs! In high school and college, I was a member of wingteams. Via Wonkette, Gawker, and the Washington Post.

I had a wingteam in high school. We would go out in teams of three or five. Three to five guys together looks less desperate than two guys lurking.

Let’s say there are only two cute girls. The three guys move in and engage, making one another look funny and cool. One guy is predestined to disappear into the night after things gel. In a team of three or five, there is a simple system of “dibs” sometimes used, although most often the most senior, the most cool, or the most alpha come first while the newest, youngest, or lamest is predestined to break off.

Calling dibs is a serious business when men go out — very serious — and breaking dibs is a serious offense that may result in getting drummed out of the team, also known as “being excommunicated.” Dibs last as long as the the dibsholder likes. We men are never catty and rarely fight over women to say nothing of backstabbing or stealing someone elses dib (of course, it is open season outside of the team).

A single wingman? How pathetic. When I was in high school and college, going out was an orchestrated mission with strategy, with tactics, and with easily-definable goals with success and failure metrics and defined exit strategies.

Women didn’t have a chance.

After posting Coca-Cola Blak Advertisement on American Idol, I have already received some comments, “Isn’t it exciting? I’ve already seen ads for it but I can’t find it quite yet. :(“ and “Let’s hope it does better than Pepsi Kona.”

If a typical Diet Coke-addicted Washington girl were to have my baby and if that child were actually a soft drink beverage then I would say that baby would be in the form of Coca-Cola Blak. Via Coke, The Beverage Network, AMonline.com, Drinks Business Review, Motley Fool, AdWeek.

COCA-COLA BLAK TO MAKE ITS WORLDWIDE DEBUT

France will be First of Many Key Markets to Launch in 2006

Atlanta, December 07, 2005 – The Coca-Cola Company today announced that it will launch Coca-Cola Blak in January in France, the first of several countries – including the United States – that are expected to introduce the new Coca-Cola and coffee fusion in 2006.

Coca-Cola Blak is an invigorating and stimulating blend that has a perfect balance of the effervescent taste sensation of Coca-Cola and natural flavors, with real coffee. The lightly carbonated, mid-calorie beverage, which is designed to appeal to adult consumers, is yet another example how The Coca-Cola Company reaches out to new audiences and addresses new beverage occasions.

“Coca-Cola Blak is not just a flavor extension. It is a blend of unique Coke refreshment with the true essence of coffee and has a rich smooth texture and has a coffee-like froth when poured. We believe we have created a new category of soft drink – an adult product in a carbonated beverage – and a whole new drinking experience. This brand is ideal for any part of the day when people are looking for renewed energy or simply to take a break,” said Marc Mathieu, vice president, Global Core Brands, The Coca-Cola Company.

The launch will be supported by television, print, outdoor and in-store communication. Advertising and creative for Coca-Cola Blak will be developed locally and regionally.

About The Coca-Cola Company
The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company. Along with Coca-Cola, recognized as the world’s most valuable brand, the Company markets four of the world’s top five soft drink brands, including Diet Coke, Fanta and Sprite, and a wide range of other beverages, including diet and light soft drinks, waters, juices and juice drinks, teas, coffees and sports drinks. Through the world’s largest beverage distribution system, consumers in more than 200 countries enjoy the Company’s beverages at a rate exceeding 1 billion servings each day. For more information about The Coca-Cola Company, please visit our website at www.coca-cola.com.

Rumor has it that Zack bought the Greek Taverna for big bucks and that Zack’s shall return.

Guys, if you are too cheap to actually subscribe to Match.com for a month or two and if you think that a wink will give you any traction with the ladies then you’re sadly mistaken.

Saying “I am ending my free trial by tomorrow so please email me at cabraham at gmail dot com” is tantamount to meeting a girl at a bar and expecting her to pick up your tab. The same goes for winks.

Winks are created so that women can more safely reach out to us men without exposing themselves too much (or feeling too desperate). Its surely not a tool that we men should ever use.

Its a sign of bad breeding, I would go so far as to say.

Send a message. Take a risk. Be a man, man.

“Lionel Richie is so concerned over his scary skinny daughter Nicole’s health that he has hired her an eating coach, reports the new issue of In Touch Weekly.” Via OH NO!

Enjoy my complete coverage with The Nicole Richie Diet, Nicole Richie is Wasting Away Beautifully, Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, LEAVE NICOLE RICHIE ALONE !!!!, I Love Nicole I Want to Look Like Her, Any Suggestions?, and Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating. Enjoy!

Nicole Richie Coverage: Nicole Richie’s Workout, Nicole Richie’s Diet, Comprehensive Nicole Richie Diet Coverage, To the Richies: What the Hell is an Eating Coach?, The Nicole Richie Diet

Most Popular Articles on ChrisAbraham.com, Nicole Richie is Wasting Away Beautifully, The Only Reason I Blog: The Continuing Nicole Richie Saga, Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, LEAVE NICOLE RICHIE ALONE !!!!, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating is Most Commented Article, I Love Nicole I Want to Look Like Her, Any Suggestions?, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating

From a lovely and helpful reader of this blog, Bree, in the comments section of Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, “OK here it is all those looking for Nicole’s Diet, I havent tried it yet but Im definitly going to!!! hope this helps….” Thanks Bree!

Nicole appears to be shrinking before our eyes. The 23-year-old has hit the gym with a vengeance (2+ hours a day) and now weighs an astonishing 91 stone.

The Diet
Breakfast: 2 Egg Whites; 1 Scoop of Protein Powder mixed with Water.
Lunch: 4oz. Chicken, Mixed Greens, 1c. Orange Juice
Dinner: 4oz. Fish, Steamed Veggies
Dessert: Fruit

The Workout
1 Hour Weight training
90 Minutes of High Impact Cardio
…….although they say……..
Her recent transformation is a prime example of how drastically a balanced diet and increased physical activity can change a person’s appearance. Nicole exercises four times a week and does something different during each session. Besides integral training (cardio and weight work combined) the newly svelte starlet likes to use the indo board for balance and leg work. Furthermore, according to her trainer Adam Estner, “Richie now eats more food than before, but she eats the right kind.???

I will share my secrets to a fantastic relationship anyway because I think dating in Washington — and cities in general — has become a Mexican standoff.

Everything I have learned that applies to making happy and healthy friendship relationships also hold rigorously true were it not for the fact that when we people enter into sexual love relationships, we all get wicked mental.

(I just want you to know that none of this will get you laid or probably into a relationship, but if you are able to effectively bait-and-switch a woman by being a complete unattainable asshole for a couple months and then doing the following things, you should be on your way to a fantastic, sustainable, and healthy relationship, kicking and screaming.)

Okay, it comes down these simple rules:

· Be nice to her

· Giving her more than you (think you) get

· Assuming her good intent

· Give her the gifts she wants not what you want to give her (think both literally and figuratively here, guys)

· Always say please and thank you

· Don’t gossip

· Don’t assume sex

· Don’t take her for granted

· Keep some of your angst to yourself

· Be a man: its your job

· Don’t take advantage

· Don’t poke at her weaknesses or vulnerabilites (the more you get to know and love and trust each other, the easier it will be to pick at her weaknesses — control yourself)

· pick up after yourself

· Compliment her on her looks, her hair, her nails, etc.

· Put down the toilet seat

· Replace the used-up toilet paper

· Buy her flowers more often than seasonally

· Don’t get her drunk to take advantage of her after the first month of dating

· Two words: foot rub; two more words: back rub

Oh, and if you do any of these things and are treated like a Nice Guy or are disrespected, she is a mess and needs a lot of therapy and probably doesn’t believe she deserves anything and anyone but abuse and an abuser.

Dump her because she is currently unmarriageable and will make you forever unhappy. And at the end of the day, choosing to be in a relationship is about two people going out of their natural self-interested zero-sum state and giving a go at the entire “mutual benefit” and “making each other happy” non-zero-sum game.

What’s her dad like? That’s a pretty reliable way to tell who she’ll be into. It has nothing to do with her short- or long-term happiness, you know, its about what you were brought up with as comfortable and reliable and knowable: and if that’s an emotionally distant asshole who used to call her fat, well then she will marry a guy just like that, at least for her first marriage.

Alternately, the short answer: Come from a healthy family and find a girl who comes from a healthy, supportive, and loving family OR lots and lots and lots of therapy for each of you and then more therapy as a couple.

I don’t know what else to say right now… More later.

Next Installments: Secrets to Getting into a Relationship & Secrets to Getting Laid

Salon has an article for you ladies on how to find someone warm to bring home to the folks this Holiday Season. Gossip columnist Cindy Adams gets some helpful hints from a matchmaker. Via NY Post.

Advice includes the obvious. Of course, by quoting the following lines, I am going to be on the shit list of all of my female friends and girlfriends, but I’ll do it anyway (and I will say “duh” first):

The first of Ronis’ bright ideas, according to Adams, is “look pretty. Package the femininity. Hair done, makeup done, lose the weight, manicure a must. Never walk the dog without lip gloss.”

Yes, men do notice when your hands look like shit. The only words we have, though, is, “she really didn’t work very hard for the date so I am not going to follow up.”

“Occasionally getting drunk is a core part of national identity for most Australians, according to new research.” Via Huffington Post & Yahoo! News

I could only handle a month on Match.com. It wasn’t you, it was me.

Why? Well, it has nothing to do with the dates or the women. It was not you, it was me.

After all is said and done, for me it has to do with the chemistry, the je ne sais quoi.

Something that I can only find and not discover. All of my friends have multiple stories of not only successes but marriages.

Besides, it is expensive (to do it right, you need to spend more than $50 and oftentimes more than $100), it is time-consuming (it really is a time-sink), and what’s more — and this is the big one — it really made me begin to commoditize women.

You heard me: commoditize. Not objectify, I already did that, but seriously women became fungible assets.

To quote a friend from LA,

“if one date didn’t do as I wished, I wouldn’t call her back, if it wasn’t perfect, there was a queue of willing dates that could fill every night of the week with at the very least company. And there was often much more. And there was rarely a second date. How could there be? No one really ever stood out. They all blended into the next. And there was often some type of sex available. When it was all said and done, I felt at the very least dazzled, but generally overwhelmed and completely untouched by any of the women that I dated. At the end of the week, I couldn’t remember any of their names and few of their faces. It all became tawdry, disingenuous, pethetic, and desperate.”

Whether a woman “puts out” or not, there is zero incentive to treat any one of the dates like anything but shopping. In such a ready economy of scale, and when its such a seller’s market for single men, especially in DC, there is a sad and jaded misconception that the perfect women (the perfect thing, to make all my dreams come true) is out there and you just have to do the work to find her.

I really don’t think she exists if you try to find her in that context. At least not for me.

Mind you, I test drove a bunch of cars and finally drove off with the sweetest little ride ever. And I love her to death. And she is sexy and fast and capable and beautiful and I have committed to her for a very long time. On the other hand, none of these test drives were done over the Internet. The one car I discovered online was “great on paper but disappointing in real life.” The rest were discovered by wandering the lots and talking to people.

The good old fashioned way.

On a final note, if I ever do online dating again, I am going to go JDate all the way.