I got Juliana this book [link] as part of her housewarming present, and Amazon shows you can get them for NY and Chicago too.

Hey! I asked a legitimate question! Have you ever been off the bean since I've known you?

A year in Maine and other shorter periods of time. (For the record, 2 days is a period of time-- it counts!)

Plei, my sistah!

My friend K and I used to go to this great dive bar - oddly enough, it was across from Bloomingdales - it was always empty and so cheap! You could drink all night and not need to take out a personal loan to pay the tab.

As opposed to, say, the bar at the St. Regis. I will always be profoundly grateful to the unnamed millionaire (and the bartender who conned him into picking up our tab) because he enabled me to still eat that month.

Thanks Msbelle.

I think Kristen and Plei should come visit me and the dive bars.

Twice even.

I like dive bars because they are unpretentious and usually not full of stupid people. I am just as fond of the neighborhood bar.

What's the difference between a dive bar and a neighborhood bar? I feel like they're both kind of dirty and cheap and like the kind of thing that I like. Until they get overrun with hipsters, and then I'm pissed.

There are too many corner Irish pubs around here for the dive bar to make many inroads. Mashed potatoes, polished wood, and game nights somehow don't say "dive" to me (despite their being, functionally, neighborhood bars). Downtown Crossing is infested with divey bars, and I've seen some in the ring towns -- Quincy, Braintree, Everett -- but the hipster ones are obnoxious and the not-hipster ones are depressing.

I bet if you took a hipster into a not-hipster dive bar, she'd run away.

What's the difference between a dive bar and a neighborhood bar?

"Dive" to me means cheap and a little skeevy. "Neighborhood" doesn't imply anything to me but locality.

"Neighborhood" doesn't imply anything to me but locality.

Good call. OK, then I question Sue's liking of neighborhood bars as a category, until she qualifies the type of neighborhood.

My bank put a fraud hold on my debit card. I paid $274.00 on a cable bill by phone this morning, but instead they charged me $2,740.00

Yikes. I'm assuming the cable company has already corrected their error?

When I was young and went to bars for the sake of drinking, it was always dive bars. I could drink alone, and no one would bug me, unless it was friends also seeking the cheap comforts of home away from our own liquor cabinets.

I'm weird among friends in that I don't care to go to bars. I just don't see the point in paying extra money for booze I can easily drink at home with the added aggravation of noise, cigarette smoke and obnoxious drunks that don't have friendship-earned leeway. I'd rather have a laidback party at home and share a few drinks with my friends that way.

Though given a choice I'd rather go to a dive bar than a hoidy-toidy one or a *shudder* sports bar.