SATURDAY, JULY 5th (Part IV) - Hattiesburg, MS

As I stated from the outset of this trip, my goals largely center around getting college gear at the college towns I pass through and sampling cuisine in each city. Anything that occurs beyond that such as finding the future ex-Mrs. Pendergast or solving some struggling Kentucky town's budget crisis, I'll consider gravy.

With that in mind, I ventured to Hattiesburg, MS, to pick up some Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles gear. Sure, Southern Miss is not a BCS school, but I felt like I needed to make a statement that even though my alma mater's total revenue from athletics is higher than the GNP of some third world countries, I am all about the little guy. So I ventured to the Southern Miss campus, which on a Saturday in July was kind of like New York City in "I Am Legend". Lots of big buildings, lots of weeds, and no other living, breathing organism within 20 miles. The only thing separating me and Robert Neville were a dog and some pigmentation.

Hopeful that there might be a live person selling Southern Miss t-shirts somewhere on campus, I made my way to the bookstore. There was only one problem -- it was closed.

Honestly, I'm not sure what I was thinking. I mean, we're talking about a state in which literacy is basically optional during the school year, and I'm expecting them to keep a store that sells BOOKS open in the summertime? How brain dead am I? Luckily, I made the mistake of driving the wrong way down a one way street on the Southern Miss campus, forcing a campus police car to pull me over, and therefore giving me exclusive access to the only other living, breathing person on campus so I could ask him where in the hell I might be able to get a Golden Eagles tee shirt. So as I sit here dangerously on the precipice of boring you to tears with this story, I will sum up by saying I was able to secure a nice Southern Miss Under Armor tee shirt at an off campus location.

Everyone knows that the physical toll your body takes from sitting on your ass in a car all day can make you hungry, so it was time to find a Hattiesburg staple to call home for the next hour or so. One of the lovely young ladies at the tee shirt store told me that if I'm in town for one meal that I needed to get a burger at Mugshot's. So far be it from me to eschew the advice of a pretty tee shirt selling, fair haired lass. "TO MUGSHOT'S!!", I shouted and then I gallavanted out of the store like a warrior poet.

My first reaction when I pulled into the Mugshot's parking lot was, from the outside, this would easily be the nicest restaurant in Louisiana. My second reaction was how ironic it was to be eating at a place called Mugshot's in somewhere other than Tuscaloosa. (I later found out that Tuscaloosa also has a Mugshot's, thereby restoring cosmic order to my universe.)

Apparently, burgers are sort of the Mugshot's specialty -- kind of like wings at Buffalo Wild Wings, calzones at Nick's Place, or salmonella at White Castle. (Just kidding, White Castle.) Their signature burger is called, of all things, the "Mugshot". Go figure. It's like three burgers tall, with a couple different buns, and lots of fixings. You can see it in the picture here next to the lovely, doublerods-administering Dixie and Shawna. Knowing that the Dreamland Barbecue in Tuscaloosa was in my future on Saturday night, I decided to go for something a little more compact. I went with the Gamble Burger (one burger, lots of chili, queso, jalapenos, and sour cream). It had the word "gamble" in it, so that sounded about right. I was quite satisfied with my choice. My only complaint would be that it was so lathered in chili, queso, and such that it turned into a fork and knife meal about halfway through, and there's something about eating a burger with utensils that makes me feel like a little less of a man. So major points on the food and it's taste, but slight minus points for making me feel like a foo foo cake boy while eating it.

MUGSHOT'S - HATTIESBURG, MS
FOOD: GAMBLE BURGER
GRADE: A-

SATURDAY, JULY 5th (Part III) - Just outside Kiln, MS

If you're like me, you (a) have barely enough money to make it to your 40th birthday, and (b) spend roughly 23 hours a day trying to figure out how to become independently wealthy, hopefully without having to try very hard. You rack your brain trying to find something special within your skillset that would yield a product for which people would pay handsomely. Handsomely enough to at least retire before you own a colostomy bag. Handsomely enough to at least make sure your kids college alma mater doesn't contain the word "Community" in it. Your head hurts from concocting business plans in your mind, and maybe even transcribing them on the proverbial cocktail napkin.

And then you drive through Mississippi, see a billboard, and realize that the best business plans sometimes are beautiful in their simplicity, and you lament "Why didn't I think of that?"....



















BUSINESS PLAN -- Cheap beer. Cheap tobacco. Without leaving your car.

Bravo.

SATURDAY, JULY 5th (Part II) - Desperately Seeking Favre

I'm not sure if any of you have heard lately, but there's this guy Brett Favre. Used to play quarterback for the Green Bay Packers. You remember him, right? Number 4? I know it's been a while, he's the dude who threw the crucial pick in overtime of the NFC Championship Game and then a couple months later retired -- wait, sorry .... "retired" ... there, had to put quotes around it ---from the game in a tearful press conference. Coming back to you now? Now I know this sounds crazy, but according to published reports, he is rethinking his decision to walk away. Favre has dismissed those reports as "rumor". Are you sure you haven't heard this? I mean, it has been mentioned on a couple of websites sporadically (and by couple I mean thousands, and by sporadically, I mean every 4 minutes).

Why do I bring up Brett Favre? Well, the second leg of my trip on Saturday took me into the great state of Mississippi. The itinerary I had carved out had me heading up Interstate 59 toward Hattiesburg. However, I took a second to scour the atlas and noticed that I could go a few minutes out of my way and take some back roads to get to Hattiesburg and go right through Kiln, MS -- hometown of BRETT FAVRE! I could put my neophyte journalistic skills to use and try and find out right from the horse's mouth if indeed Brett Favre was coming back! YEEEESSS!

So the audible was called and I took State Road 603 to Kiln (population 2,040). Upon pulling into town, I passed Mojo's Bar and ___LL ... well, I think it's actually supposed to be "GRILL". All that was on the sign was two L's. Check it out....



















And then pulled into this gas station. The __T_O. More missing letters.


















This gas station was right across the street from the _H___ _I_______ ___ ___H. (To be fair, you can actually make out the letters on this one. Barely.)



















I'd like to say that there is an establishment in Kiln that has all of its letters on its sign, but these are the only three buildings I could find in Kiln. So driving through Kiln and trying to ascertain the name of a business was essentially like playing a giant game of hangman. Or perhaps a game of redneck "Wheel of Fortune" (or as they call it in Kiln, "hangman wit' prizes!") I mean, I know that reading will probably not fall into any Mississippian's top 1000 list of leisure time activities, but can you at least appear to make an effort and replace the letters on your signs? If you're not sure which letters are needed to fill out the word "GRILL" just call someone in any of the other 49 states. You know ... those other states that are all ahead of you in public education, Mississippi?

Anyway, I digress. Distraught that I could only find three commercial establishments in Kiln, I decided to pull into the __T_O and see where downtown Kiln was located. I went inside and the young man working behind the counter looked like a miniature version of Eric Devendorf (Syracuse guard, pictured at left), which is ironic because the actual version of Eric Devendorf will probably be the weekday cashier in that gas station sometime in 2011. Working under the assumptions that (a) Brett Favre is the only Kiln native to ever actually escape Kiln and (b) Mini-Devo actually knows his way around his hometown, I asked him how to get to the center of town. He proceeded to tell me that I was already there. Yes, the Mojo's/Citgo/car wash intersection is Kiln's "downtown", which means that there is a one in three chance that town hall meetings are actually held at a self-serve car wash (which is just as plausible as holding them in the gas station or Mojo's Bar & ___LL). I thought about asking Mini-Devo where they hold the town hall meetings in Kiln, but fearful that a discussion of local politics might cause his head to explode, I opted to just say "Ok, so this is all of Kiln pretty much, huh?" Mini-Devo, perhaps slightly embarrassed that this ol' city slicker was disappointed in how little Kiln had to offer, quickly pointed out that the curve in the road I had just come around was "where Brett Favre's dad died from that heart attack he had".

"ALL RIGHT!! Now we're getting somewhere!!", I thought. The aforementioned curve is pictured to the left, and I can only assume that in Kiln this is the equivalent of the north side of Elm Street in Dallas, sans the grassy knoll.

Trying to milk as much information as I could out of Mini-Devo's brief flirt with lucidity, I asked him if Brett Favre's ranch was in Kiln and how to get there. He said that it's not in Kiln but it's "that way", pointing at .. well, pointing at the cigarette rack behind him, but I think in his mind he was pointing due northeast. Ready to venture to #4's home, I asked Mini-Devo for directions. However, when the first fifteen seconds of his instructions did not include one discernable street name but did include two different animals ("take a left by the field of cows and then go right at the dead squirrel"), I decided that it probably wasn't worth it. Instead, I would just go ahead and find the nicest ranch I passed in Kiln, snap a picture, and tell all of you "there you go, that's Brett Favre's ranch".

So .... there you go, that's Brett Favre's ranch ....



















In the end, I'm glad I made this side trip to Kiln. It's given me much greater insight into why Brett Favre might be pondering a change of heart regarding retirement, and maybe now I won't be so quick to criticize him. Because the fact of the matter is, unless you feel like washing your car, pumping gas, or playing darts at Mojo's, there ain't shit to do in Kiln. So c'mon back, Brett. I understand.

SATURDAY, JULY 5th - Calling Baton Rouge!

When you travel as many places as I plan to over the next two weeks, it's inevitable that somewhere along the way I'll meet some random person who knows a random friend of mine, or whose grandfather taught me Strategic Marketing in college, or whose son was beaten up by one of my relatives at Mardi Gras. You know, random "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" type stuff. Well, it only took one day. At the Chimes in Baton Rouge, I was telling my waitress (the lovely and talented Cricket, pictured going dual rods below) about my trip and my New York-area destination when the couple at the next table overheard our conversation. Rather than publicly lambaste them for eavesdropping on my top secret "sweet nothings" with Cricket, I decided to engage them in conversation. Come to find out the husband coached my cousin Mike's son in soccer in upstate New York. Why do you care about this? I don't know. To be honest, after re-reading the story, I'm starting to care less and less about it as well. Damn, sorry about the lead in for this post. You'll never get the last 90 seconds of your life back ... my bad.

Anyway, I did go to the Chimes, which came highly recommended by many LSU alum listeners to the "Sean and John Show". Truth be told, I've been to the Chimes a handful of times before with the mother of my children back in a simpler time and place, back when deciding between gumbo and stuffed mushrooms represented "tough decisions". Feeling nostalgic for said time and place, I decided to jump on the stuffed mushrooms Saturday morning before hitting the road for Mississippi. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I came away disappointed. The mushrooms themselves and the crab meat stuffing were fine, but the cheese on top was problematic, to say the least. When a dish is described as having "melted cheese", I expect the cheese to have a gooey consistency to it. The cheese on the stuffed mushrooms can't even be described as "melted". It was more like a cheesy shell, kind of like the chocolate shell that Dairy Queen puts on a soft serve cone. Like the chef said "screw it" and poured the queso version of the chocolate shell on my stuffed mushrooms. It was like a cheese helmet.

Now, I have certain rules in life and one of them is that if the melted cheese on a dish crunches like a mouthful of Doritos, the grade for said dish cannot be above a C. Of course, back in the aforementioned simpler time and place (around 1994), the stuffed mushrooms were an A- at worst. Perhaps that's a metaphor for something. Or perhaps the chef at the Chimes on Saturday mornings is violently hungover and could give a damn. Whatever.

At least Cricket is not averse to flashing the double rods. You go, girl!!!

THE CHIMES - BATON ROUGE, LA
FOOD: STUFFED MUSHROOMS
GRADE: C-

54 days until college football season....

.....just sayin'.

FRIDAY, JULY 4 - Lake Charles, LA

So I decided to take a little vacation ... and here's how it works. Over the next couple weeks, I am driving from Houston up to New England and back. Along the way, my kids will meet up with me, presumably flying into an airport in one of the cities I am visiting, but I wouldn't put it past the three of them to lift an SUV and try to race me to Connecticut. I mean, 10 year olds are really advanced nowadays. Just look at the video games they play. When I was 10, Space Invaders (in all of it's block graphic, horizontal-only movement glory) was the height of video game sophistication; today, my 10 and 9 year old sons earhole me from long distance with a sniper rifle in Call of Duty.

At any rate, my plan is to stop in as many college towns as possible between Houston and New York City, and along the way sample recommended cuisine (thank you again to all of my listeners who emailed in suggestions) and buy a piece of gear from the local university. I'm a little over 24 hours into the trip and already I'm wondering why it took me so long to do a trip like this. There's kind of a cool vibe to hitting the open road with only some semblance of a plan as to where and when you'll be stopping. It's kind of like I'm Dr. David Banner from "The Incredible Hulk" randomly bouncing from town to town. Except that I don't have to hitchhike, since I have a car. And also, I'm not presumed dead like he was, so I don't have to change my name to some variation of "Pendergast" at every stop. (Remember how he would introduce himself each episode to his new pal du jour with some new last name that was close to "Banner" but not quite "Banner"? Like "Bannon" or "Barrett"? That D-Banner was slick, especially for a dude with that much gamma radiation tugging away at his body chemistry.)

Ok, I just totally lost any of you who are below the age of 35, so enough Hulk talk ... I made my first stop of the trip on Friday night (July 4th!!) in Lake Charles, LA. After enduring literally two hours of standstill traffic in Vidor, TX caused by road construction, I was hungry. So taking the recommendation of several listeners, I stopped at a bar called Darrell's which is right down the street from the majestic L'Auberge casino. My goal was simple -- to get up on the shrimp scampi po-boy. Now, if you've attended one of our listener events you know that if there's one area in which 1560 listeners are experts, it's cuisine. So I wasn't really concerned about Darrell's. That said, I knew that this recommendation was a stellar one when I called my brother in law in Baton Rouge (he's a Lake Charles native) to let him know I was gonna be staying with him Friday night and I'd be late because I was stopping at Darrell's, and he responded by hyperventilating the following plea: "Get me a Darrell's Special po-boy with jalapeno mayonnaise to go!!". He had this giddy bounce in his voice that I haven't heard since his bachelor party when he found out that we could bring our own beer into the strip club we went to. Needless to say, I knew the grub was gonna be good.

I pulled into the parking lot, and like most good places in Louisiana, Darrell's doesn't look like much on the outside. But if you've ever eaten in south Louisiana, you're aware of the Dive Corollary which clearly states that the quality of food at any given establishment is inversely proportional to the aesthetic beauty of the domicile in which it is housed. (For the record, the Boiling Point in New Iberia, which may or may not be on wheels, is the benchmark for the Dive Corollary.) So I was optimistic.

Upon entering, the first thing you notice is that whoever owns the place has a real hard-on for the deer species. I mean like badly. We're talking like at some point as a kid, the owner had to have been molested by a deer and is now trying to get back at all deer by gunning them down like Tony Soprano rolling over Uncle Junior's crew in the first season of "The Sopranos". That's all I can figure. There were no fewer than ten dear heads on the walls.

After thanking God that I'm not a deer, I went ahead and ordered the shrimp scampi po-boy. In short, it was awesome. Not your typical shrimp po-boy in that the shrimp was actually sauteed, not fried. So the shrimp was laden in butter ... and not so ironically, butter laden shrimp was by far the healthiest thing about this po-boy, which included three kinds of cheese, mayonnaise (regular, not jalapeno flavored), and was housed by Darrell's homemade po-boy bread which they make in house. The bread clinched the five-star status for this delightful creation.

To top it all off, I was served by the lovely and talented Lindley who was kind enough to give a double rods shout out to the 1560 Secret Society.

So in conclusion, if you're ever in Lake Charles losing money at one of the casinos, be sure to set aside $8.99 for a foot long shrimp po-boy at Darrell's.

And if you're winning money, be sure to buy a foot long shrimp po-boy at Darrell's for everyone in your crew. It's what good friends do.


DARRELL'S - LAKE CHARLES, LA
FOOD: SHRIMP PO-BOY
GRADE: A

GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY...

....THAT'S THE SPORTS KOLACHE'S THEME MUSIC!!!

After a prolonged absence, I'm getting the blog cranked back up again. I figure since I went on hiatus, the price of gasoline has gone up about another 50 cents a gallon, so maybe if I start blogging again, the oil barons will stop raping all of us. I realize on the surface the two things (my blog and oil prices) would seem to be unrelated, but at $4.29 a gallon for premium, I'll try anything at this point.

As a gift to try and buy my way back into your hearts, I give you this video -- nearly ten minutes of deliciously hilarious interaction between Chrissy Moltisanti and Paulie Walnuts. You don't even need to be a "Sopranos" fan to enjoy this one:



I am two days into my two week cross country vacation, stopping in college towns throughout our great country to sample food, purchase gear, and ogle the local talent. I'll be sharing pictures and thoughts throughout the next couple weeks.

So welcome back. Make yourself at home. Just put the toilet seat down when you're done, that's all I ask.