Phuh????

So, wife's outta town and I ended up going with JLowe, Lady Lowe, and Mr. 12 (also sans female) to a place called Pho Oregon. Now, despite what they taught you in school about "open O's at the end of a word are pronounced 'OH'," that's not the case at a Pho restaurant. Here, according to 12 (who knows these things because of his upbringing in lovely Rockwood), an open O at the end of a word equals "UH."

So, when it was time to go to dinner with good ol' XII, I knew that we would be engaging in voodoo language even before I got there.

Phuh, as 12 likes to state every hour on the hour, is the word for Vietnamese beef noodle soup. XII developed his fuh fetish long ago, and now inflicts his particular brand of hungriness on anyone that will oblige him. And, tonight my friends, I was feeling obligatory.

The night started a little late, because the day just wouldn't end. As anyone who's trying to be grown up and buy a house is aware, in order to buy a house you have to possess credit that's, at least, not so bad as to make your mortgage lender openly laugh at you. Up until a month ago, I had just such credit. I won't bore you with all of the details, but suffice it to say many years of college and law school pizza and beer have come back to haunt me IN SPADES. That, and some guy with my name (or at least pretending to have my name) keeps buying cars and leaving them on the roadside in Washington.

Now, here's a scam. I'm a tow-truck driver, and I see an abandoned car on a roadside. "Hmm," I say to myself through my booshy truck driver mustache and mullet bangs, "looks like business is good." I pull over and scoop up the poor vehicle before anyone has a chance to say anything. Now, I have this vehicle that isn't mine, without the consent of the owner, and without any real obligation to tell the owner I have the car, and during this whole time I get to charge the owner storage fees. Really, this is brilliant. Because, once the owner hasn't picked up the car he may or may not know that I have after a few weeks, it's now my car. I can scrap it, I can sell it at auction, I can turn it into a swing set....and whatever I decide to do, the owner still owes me for the storage fees. So, anyway, some Jack-O (not to be confused with the Jacko, who has his own problems) bought a car using my name, ditched it on the roadside, and some tow truck companies scooped 'em and sold 'em. And decided I was on the hook. Twice. UGH! My loan officer saw this and, suppressing the sick that rose up in her throat, dialed the number of the first place. After a few minutes of talking to them, lo and behold she talked them into clearing their collection action off my account. AMAZING! I had no idea things worked so nicely. So, we dialed the second place and I expected everything would be cleared up in moments. But, no, no, no, life just can't work out that way. As JLowe often says, I just couldn't win. According to the second collection agency, since they had established that someone with my name had once owned this car that had been scooped from the roadside, it was up to me to prove them wrong. Ugh.

So for a month I've been gathering proof. I've found that there is, indeed, someone else with my name in Washington (with a different DOB and SSN, even, so they might even be a real person...) Is that enough? NO! I have to prove that I never lived at that person's address (proving a negative has always been soooooo easy...)

Anyway, today I finally got all the ducks in a row, and that made my day go long.

So, having spent all this time getting my life in order, I looked at my watch and realized the time was over-ripe (almost bruised) for the sweet, sweet phuh, food of the gods. I picked up my very, very patient peeps over at Chez 12, and whisked them eastward to 62nd and Sandy to engage in the eating of Vietnamese beef noodle soup.

We sat down and I was instantly wowed by the selection on the menu. Not only was there fuh, but there was Vietnamese chicken noodle soup, Vietnamese tripe noodle soup, Vietnamese tendon noodle soup, and (for the truly adventuorous) Vietnamaese beef, tripe, and tendon noodle soup.

Or, you could have the pizzle soup. Lady Lowe looked up. "What is pizzle?" I didn't know. She asked Mr. 12. He claimed ignorance. The waitress came up and 12 asked her. "That's what the Vietnamese people eat. They like it." She looked Vietnamese, but I wasn't sure. Don't wanna make assumptions. I think she sensed my confusion. "I'm too scared to try it."

I suspected that JLowe would bite at the challenge, but at the end we all (well, all the guys) had the Thai Nam, or phuh with nearly-cooked, very fatty Veitnamese beef strips in it. Now, believe it or not, it was pretty good.

XII dropped the line of the night, by the way (when we weren't making pizzle jokes). "When I can, I'm gonna open a phuh restaurant." And he seemed perfectly serious to me, to this point. Then, the proverbial other shoe. "I'm gonna call it Pho King."

Someday, maybe, I'll have a shot at a line like that. Until then, I'll just have to keep going to Pho Oregon with 12 so he can make more funnies...

Anyway, here's a few funny sites for ya:

I'm a clear choice...

What ever happened to Mr. Pink, anyway?

Alright. Gotta go. Turns out a childhood friend was on KGW's "GIMME THE MIKE" tonight, and I have to go see how bad it was...

Catch ya later...