Lunch. (Not Great Northern Beans in the Shape of Hello Kitty)

Across the street from my workplace, there's a little hole-in-the-wall soul food restaurant called At The Bistro, where you can get the standard meat + 3 for about seven bucks and the selection rotates daily. I may be the only person at work who's ever bothered to stop in--they're moderately busy at lunch, but they really ought to be packed, as the food is excellent.

Today's lunch was a smothered pork chop, broccoli & rice casserole, greens, and mac & cheese:



Three things to note:
1. I don't even like macaroni and cheese, and yet I order it here.
2. The thing on the plate in the back, for you non-southerners, is hot water corn bread, cooked on a griddle. It's important, because it's poor manners to drink the potlikker from the greens straight out of the bowl after you're done, but it's okay to soak it up with cornbread. It's also known as a hoecake (from the days when they were actually cooked on the farm implements, not "because ho's gotta eat too") or a johnnycake (if you added sugar, which would make it unfit for anything but flushing down the john).
3. The broccoli and rice casserole had precious little broccoli in it--you'd have a hard time passing it off as a green vegetable, the way you can pretend broccoli and cheese sauce is a green vegetable.

It appeared that they had carrot cake for sale, but I was stuffed after everything else.

Sweet Georgia Belle is still awesome as a whipped cream flavoring.

I've been an admirer of the concept behind Prichard's Rum since I've been aware of its existence--good-quality rum (and other spirits) made in eastern Tennessee, so several years back I visited their website and found an intriguing link for "investors," which was "under construction" for quite a while. I visited again several months ago--to find the link leading to an email address, so on a whim I emailed the proprietor of the company to see what was involved in investing, thinking, foolishly, that if a couple thousand dollars came my way (as it might, come bonus time) it might be fun to invest in what will likely be a lucrative enterprise.

After some back and forth, today I received an official form that the SEC provides to non-publicly traded companies in order for investors to express official interest in buying company stock. Apparently, you must have a net worth of a million dollars, or make 200 grand a year three years in a row, or have a million dollars in the bank, or have a million dollars in the bank and make 200 grand a year, or already own stock in a company (so that the poor founders can make some dough with the VCs) in order to buy stock in a company. Guess that's one of the ways the government keeps the workin' man down.