Well, who would've thunk it. All Too Flat turned 1 year old this week! That's 3 years old in halibut years and around 80 in Internet years (note: I say 80 in internet years because (1) we are so far behind in our technology (i.e. no web services) and (2) how many web sites live this long on the internet with a business model as inane as ours? Oh, and I like the word octogenarian.)

We actually had a HUGE birthday celebration planned, but it happened to coincide with Dov calling us rock stars and commenting (in much more colorful language) that our site had become a meta-site. All new content was simply content about the site. Nothing was actually new. Therefore, we were feeling pretty bad about our birthday celebration that celebrated, well... ourselves. So we discussed that matter decided to do something about it.

We made a birthday resolution to add more content. This resolution comes but 2 weeks after we failed to keep our New Year's resolutions. (Interesting side note: in fact I broke 2 resolutions. The first one is obvious because there haven't been many '03 site updates. But the other one I generally don't like to share, but if you promise not to tell anyone, I'll let you in on the secret. See, I decided to go on a low-carb, psuedo-Atkins diet for the new year. Not 100% you know; I still wanted to eat fruits and veggies, but no more pasta, rice, bread, etc. It lasted until immediately after 12am on New Year's eve when I drank 3 beers and polished off a bag of Nacho Cheesiest Doritos. But hey, we'll start in the morning, right? Well, my second lasted around 12 hours. I went to the little corner shop where I buy groceries in NYC (NB: this is the same shop from the teeth myth). Just for shits and giggles, I decided just to walk down the chip isle to ogle my favorite flavor nacho chip (Garden of Eaten brand, Tamari and Ginger flavor). Well, I didn't see them. How distressing! I asked the dude who owns the store if they were out of stock. He said he can't move them- shipments come in and they just sit on the shelves. It wasn't worth his while to supply them anymore. So I asked "Okay, so how many bags do I have to buy to single-handedly make it worth your while?" He told me about 3 a week at regular price, more at sale prices. I agreed. So for the past 3 weeks I have eaten an entire bags of nacho chips every 2 days to try and keep them on the shelf at the corner shop. Kind of a valiant effort. Bummer about my resolution, but sometimes you have to take one for the team.)

Look, I don't have a kennyblog or a Switch blog where I can discuss such matters, alright? So you get it here.

So to get back to the adventure, we wanted to throw a BIRTHDAY PARTY for All Too Flat! And what better place to throw a party than in a fish market in Chinatown in NYC?!? (Answer: pretty much anywhere. Hindsight is always yadda yadda yadda...)

Our first mission was to buy/make/get a cake that said "HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALL TOO FLAT" on it in the shape of a halibut. As it turns out, round white cakes with nothing on them in NYC start at $45. And since we don't have quite enough members to fund such an endeavor we needed a cheaper route. So we decided to get a plain white cake and we'd Photoshop in the fish and the text later. So we went to a bakery in the East Village. CLOSED FOR SHABBOS! Well, it was Saturday and it was called Moishe's bakery. Who knew? So we went to another. CLOSED FOR NO APPARENT REASON! Well, ummm... no sarcastic comment here. It was just closed. I'll sum up. After FIVE unsuccessful bakeries, we decided we needed a new plan.

I should take this time to mention that it was 12 degrees F outside, but the "Feels Like" index was at -8F. Goddamn. No. Let me say that again. Goddamn. Really stinking cold. It was horribly cold. It was like when-its-cold-I-like-to-die cold. It was like punch-me-in-the-face cold. It was like spend-the-next-9-hours-staring-at-computer-code-so-when-kennyb-hits-tab-the-fish-goes-from-pranks-to-geeky-because-thats-really-fucking-important cold.

What was I going on about? Oh yeah, change of plans. We decided to forget the cake and just go to the fish market in Chinatown. But that wasn't going to be particularly funny.

Instead, we needed a funny goal: We decided we were going to find a halibut.

The fish market was like you might expect. There were a TON of fish, but not so many halibut, as seen in figure 1:

Kennyb went up to a nice fish market shop keeper and asked if they had any halibut. It went about as well as you can imagine. In case you weren't sure about this fact, halibut are HUGE. Like 300 pounds and 7 feet long huge. Check out these pictures on halibut.net if you don't believe me. I think that's why they were laughing so much when we asked. (Warning: Monty Python geek humor: You know what's funny? When the customer mentions he chose his pet halibut Eric "out of thousands," he is actually refering to something on the order of 300 tons of fish!)

We found a fair amount of octopus, which was actually pretty cheap. If you ever need raw (or possibly living) octopus, Mott Street is where it's at!

Did I mention it was cold? Here's a nice shot of kennyb near some fish. No halibut. Notice the scarf over his entire face. Damn it was cold. I shouldn't complain. The fish were probably colder...

Here's Ben in yet another fish shop. Notice the large jacket and the distinct lack of halibut.

Check it out! We found a flat fish! It's not a halibut because it's too little. Probably a flounder or something. Can you believe we found another flat fish while looking for a halibut? It's a total fluke!

But wait! The next store we went into had halibut! I asked at the dude outside and he said they had some! I went in excitedly to take a picture when the owner yelled something to me in Mandarin and kicked us out. What the hell? I was so confused. I tried to go back in when he pointed to a sign:

Can you believe it? The only store in chinatown with halibut and they have a huge sign posted that says "No Pictures." That's weird for so many reasons. I think the first is who posts a sign in a store that says no pictures? And such a humongous sign at that? I wonder what kind of problems they've had with people taking fish pictures in the past? And to make it even crazier, it's the only place we could find a friggin halibut!

This is the best we could do trying to snap a halibut picture from outside the store.

I could have tried harder and ran in to snap one, but it was pretty slippery in the store, what with all the fish guts everywhere. And you figure you don't want to piss off a guy who is happy to spend 16 hours a day in a bloody room full of giant fish heads. And my dedication to ATF isn't what it once was. Oh well.

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