About

We review things. Why? Because of a boss and a straw hat¹. And, “sure, why not?”

Once upon a time, somebody in Nick’s office left a straw hat sitting around on a desk. As he does, he picked it up and put it on while talking to the owner of said desk. Right at that time, his boss came walking around and asked, “what’s with the hat?”

“Well, it was there, so I put it on.”

“So are you saying that if we just leave hats around, you’ll put them on?”

And the fateful reply … “sure, why not?”

Two days later, after an all-hands meeting in which his 40-person team was told to bring in all the crazy hats possible, a photo stream of crazy hat pictures made its way to Facebook.

What does this have to do with reviews? Well … Courtney has this habit of dancing, spontaneously, with very little provocation.

Importantly, she did this in front of Nick and Toby at dinner one night, which prompted a discussion of why in the world she was dancing, and whether it happened frequently. To which a downright indignant Courtney replied, “of course.” And it came to pass that a confident Courtney declared that she could easily generate more dance videos than Nick had posted hat photos.

“Call.”

This is the sort of dumb discussion and assertion that happens all over the place, all the time, that doesn’t ever amount to anything. Except, this time, it did. And Courtney’s Dance of the Day was thus born.

OK, seriously, that’s not this site, what the *#$% does this have to do with writing reviews?

At a subsequent dinner, Nick enthused about the upcoming excuse to visit Vancouver, because poutine could be obtained.

“But why not just get poutine in Seattle?”

“Because all the poutine in Seattle sucks.”

“Have you tried it all?”

“Well, no, I suppose not.”

And thus, plans were hatched to choose a day and try all the poutine in Seattle, under the theory that not being Canada, there couldn’t be more than a small handful. So they chose a day and planned to do their poutine tour.

As Courtney discovered, there are actually approximately 90 places in Seattle that purport to serve poutine. So that day became day 1 of a series, focused on Ballard.

Upon hearing of this plan, Nick’s team asked the fateful question, “you’re going to review all these places, right?” And the world came full circle in the way that it does.

¹Not to be confused with a boss straw hat².

²Though to be fair, it was a pretty cool hat.