Today was Mark's [1] birthday party and John, the paper millionaire of a dotcom, was hosting it for us. Unlike the last party [2] John threw, there were no strippers.
It was just Mark's very close friends and family (his father). We sat around, eating freshly grilled burgers, warmed macaroni salad and cold baked beans (their maid is from another country and doesn't quite have our cuisine down pat), soda and beer. All of it good. And one delicious chocolate cake that was to die for.
Later on, we marveled at John's 800 gallon salt water aquarium, home to a few dozen fish, a dozen snails, live coral, some shrimp and two suicidal fish that kept wanting to be sucked into the filtration system. Mark and John spent some time keeping the fish from suicide runs (or who knows, meybe they get a rush from doing that) until they seemed to stop it.L
Afterwards, we ended up watching a forgettable film (Milk Money [3]) and American Beauty [4] on a digital HBO broadcast on John's 72" HDTV. Wow. HDTV, if you've never seen it, is simply incredible—it's like being in a movie theater.
[1] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/
[3] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0110516