BEACON HILL DOG WALKER SEES POKÉMON EVERYWHERE

Right after taking this picture of a portion of sidewalk with Beacon Avenue South on one side and Stevens Place, a small park dominated by one big tree, on the other, a portly man walking toward us with a big smile and two pretty little dogs asked if we had found a Pokémon. How could we tell him the truth? How could we ruin his bliss? The sun was out, the leaves were so happy, it was Sunday afternoon. He walked past the words on the sidewalk without noticing them.

POKÉMON GO-ER WITH INTERNATIONAL AMBITIONS

On a hot Thursday afternoon, you walked into the T-Mobile store on Broadway on Capitol Hill in search of just one answer. "I'm headed to Amsterdam," you proclaimed as you strode up to the counter, "and I just want to make sure I can still play Pokémon GO without any crazy charges." Every employee and customer in the place laughed knowingly. Sure, the clerk told you, he could help.

ADULT MALE ATTEMPTS TO CONNECT, MENTIONS POKÉMON

You only got half of a grilled cheese sandwich, which you seemed to know was an injustice as you wolfed it down and watched your brother (or friend?) eat the other half as he sat next to you at the long table in the center of Volunteer Park Cafe on a Sunday morning. An adult, maybe your dad or uncle, walked over and pestered you. "What are you guys talking about?" he asked. "Star Wars? Pokémon?" "Nothing," you answered sharply, no doubt tired of adults always asking inane bullshit like this. He walked away and, as soon as he was no longer looking, you picked up your empty grilled cheese plate and licked it.

LINCOLN PARK VISITOR ALMOST CATCHES PIKACHU

An elusive Pikachu was spotted in West Seattle by a Lincoln Park visitor on a hazy Saturday afternoon, but, much to her chagrin, the little fucker got away.

REPUBLICAN WOMEN, AMIRITE?

We were chatting with friends at Chuck's Hop Shop on Sunday night, and the discussion turned to Republican women, a concept that seems as ludicrous to us as Jewish Nazis. This spurred our buddy, a fortysomething liberal music fanatic, to recount an anecdote about a conservative-leaning female friend who eventually ended up working for the CIA (he was one of her references when she applied for the position). "The funny thing about her was, she would blast Too $hort in her car tape deck." We're still laughing and shaking our damn head over the image of a staunch Republican nodding her head to a notoriously misogynist rapper whose main lyrical tropes include drug dealing, demeaning sexual situations, and "pimpin' hos."

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER

In the frattiest possible voice, you said, "Duh, what the fuck?!" during Regal Meridian 16's showing of Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster in theater 9 last Sunday night. Your criticism directly followed the closing scene—*SPOILER ALERT (SORT OF)*—when the film cuts to blackout after Colin Farrell holds a steak knife up to his eye and lets it hover there. In case you're slow, what Lanthimos had just done was cleverly invert the world so that we ended up rooting for people to commit horrible acts of violence against each other and on themselves just because it would fulfill our ingrained need to see a boy-meets-girl narrative play out to its conclusion. Meanwhile, the beauty of the natural world provided one of the few respites from the deadpan gray world of blahness and weird pain that the characters inhabited, which is kind of funny since nature is so often depicted as an indifferent witness to human suffering. There's about a million OTHER things to be said about The Lobster (even if one of those things is "it's a touch too long"), but you chose to barf up a hot cup of nothing. Next time you feel the need to declare your confusion in a public way that adds no value to life and serves only to ruin the silence following a powerful and challenging scene, trust that your idea of reality is remarkably different from the reality of others.

SUMMER VACATION, VALLEY FORGE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK EDITION

We watched you, a skinny white tour guide, inform tourists in suburban Philadelphia's Valley Forge National Historical Park that George Washington and his troops really did stay here, in these fields, in the winter of 1777 during the Revolutionary War. The park has re-created Washington's luxe quarters, as well as the crude cabins where thousands of his troops died in the punishing Pennsylvania winter. The park even has a trolley to take tourists around hills that tour guides say are significant remnants of the former encampment. This represents America and freedom. A plaque near the mini-museum entrance assures visitors that General George Washington didn't even take a salary for his efforts. Unfortunately, it's only in the small print of another plaque—located on the top of three flights of spindly steps up to the home's attic—that casually mentions that Washington, America's first president, kept slaves here.