Deion Branch

Well I was back on the track earlier today as the marathon training got me up to the 13 mile mark. Now 13 miles is a break-point for many people because first of all it’s about 2 hours of running which obviously needs some major endurance but it’s also the first time when your body wants to give up. I’m not talking about the way the body wants to give up after running 3 miles but more exhaustion than that. This is the point where the body has run out of sugar and you have to start burning fat but if your heart rate is too high (85% of max for example) you are not burning any fat and thus after two hours you are out of fuel.


This was me this morning… not only was it a half-marathon with no fans cheering you on but it was a half-marathon at 6AM with a downpour and unrelenting humidity. For the first 9 miles, I ran pretty well but in hindsight a much faster pace than I should have which means I was burning ONLY sugar.. The sad/funny thing about this is that after your sugars are done, there is nowhere to get more energy from. The fat is sitting there but you need some sugar to start burning fat. It would be like going to your fireplace and seeing a bunch of wood sitting there but no match to turn it on.

So the last 4 miles were really painful and with the rain coming down I’m sure I was getting weighed down by an extra 5 pounds as my clothes, shoes, socks and hat were all soaked. This is when I thought to myself.. it can’t get worse than this.

Of course I was wrong, see I had started the run by taping my nipples so that I wouldn’t have any bloody nips, I had rubbed lotion on my thighs so I wouldn’t have nasty thigh-chafing and even had rubbed it into my feet so that I wouldn’t have the dry cracking blisters later on.. This is where not being with it 100% starts to affect you, see I’m running in a park I run at least twice per week and many times four or five times, on the same track, around the same bends, over the same obstacles I always do. Well at mile 12 of my run when I was exhausted and somewhat delirious I darted around a tree, jumped over a puddle which seemed to be leaking from a porta-potty, put my head down as I was about to climb a little hill

What I didn’t notice was a branch about eye-level which I used for a full on clothes-line. There I went, exhausted, tired and wet and all of a sudden I get smacked right in the face by a big wet hard branch. I stumble backwards and as I do, I step right into a big wet puddle right by the porta-johns. I regroup but I know the puddle I just stepped in is probably half piss and poop,.

I just kinda put my red-marked head down and ran the last two miles with a shoe full of homeless guy’s piss squashing the whole way back.

The Great Coffee Challenge

I think I have adequately documented my addiction to caffeine which has completely controlled my life in so many ways I can hardly keep up. When a friend was in the hospital recently and could not have coffee while there, I felt her pain. I remember once going without coffee and almost crashing my car because of the headache which started as a dull pain and it turning into a nuclear war between my skull, my sinuses and my brain.

The other issue with this is that the caffeine runs right through me and it reminds me of some wacky Japanese game show I saw once where a bunch of dorky Japanese guys stood on a stage in just their jockeys while they were given cup after cup of coffee. The poor Japanese guys had to drink a cup of coffee every 5 minutes of something and the one who didn’t soil his underwear was the winner.   Those funny bastards just didn't want to lose and just about every one of them pissed themselves on national TV.

Well that got me to thinking about something which has changed my life and although I’ve mentioned it before on TOR, it bears repeating.

When you go to the gym I’ve noticed that the old-timers will often tuck their undershirts directly into their underwear. It always confused me but after doing some research at www.forums.footballguys.com I found out that this is done to avoid your button-down shirt from flaring out which always makes you look like a parachute jumper. So I’ve been tucking my undershirt into my underwear whenever I wear a button down shirt and it’s done wonders for my look, I look much more put-together and neat.. I HIGHLY recommend you make sure all the men in your life are told about this little secret, as it will change their lives in ways that not even Jesus could.

So that got me to thinking for a NEW coffee challenge..

Take a bunch of 70 year old dudes whose prostates work as well as my old Nissan Pulsar did and put them throught that Japanese challenge.

They will be staining their undershirts in places other than their armpits.

Top of the List

I don't have an off-list of people I want dead because I am afraid that I would make it on more lists of other people and making my own may only tempt my fate.

But if I did have those kinds of fantasies then there would be only one person on it.

Cue Wonder Years Music

1986 the fifth grade

There I sat the little weird foreign kid from Holland having immigrated about a year ago with the suspenders and clogs on just desperately hoping to not be noticed. Although I had made huge strides I still had a hard time with the language speaking with some little accent. In a year in at Fort Lee's school #4 I had managed to make exactly one friend who happened to be the one kid who to this day may still not have been laid.
Things were pretty bad in the fifth grade because I was miserable and had no-one to turn to but I had finally started to hit my stride which in my terms meant that I could go a few days without being noticed and made fun of. I was the one kid who wasn't allowed to play dodge ball because some fat bully wouldn't let me play. I had lunch alone most days which consisted of brown bread cheese sandwiches while the other kids had snack-packs and pizza. My parents couldn't afford a car so we walked to school in the rain or snow, I tried out for little league and was sent to Pee Wee's as a 10 year old because I had never thrown a ball. I usually struggled through most classes as I sat in my little desk waiting for the ESL teacher to come take me out of my misery when the rest of our class would get Language Arts.

Well one day, sitting in class my fifth grade teacher my teacher Mrs Moser stops in the middle on some lesson on The Civil War or arithmetic and exclaims in front of the whole class

"David, is that the same pen mark you had on your face yesterday? Do you not shower or something".

My face turned bright red as I sunk into my chair.

She continued badgering me "I don't know what you people do but in this country we take pride in cleanliness"

I tried desperately to come up with something finally saying that I did but did not use soap on my face as it would be bad for the skin but this c*nt was relentless and sends me out of the class humiliated to go wash my face in the sink in the bathroom

I went from the weird foreign kid to the dirty outcast and my life went from unknown to tortured by my class mates, the fifth and sixth grades only got worse as I was constantly teased for two straight years

What bothers me to this day was that she didn't take me aside privately, didn't make it funny and didn't try to help me through it. She cast me out to sea and then took pleasure in seeing me drown.. I was already the 10 years old outcast when this vengeance bitch unleashed to humiliate and scar me.

Well I'm over it now but if there is a bus somewhere driving down a street who doesn't notice this witch crossing, I can only hope he mistakenly hits the gas instead of the brakes.
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Taking Flight

The 6AM flights out of LaGuardia bring together an interesting mix of people. Old and Young, rich and poor, short and fat but in all my years of flying I have come up with the fool proof method of telling how unpleasant a flight will be by the people on it. What is the mix of business travelers to tourists.

Business Travelers have a routine: get to the airport, get right through the security line, grab the paper and a coffee and board onto the flight. Tourists dilly-dally, have no sense of urgency, are usually the ones who take all their crap out of their carry-on's at the security but mostly disrupt the rest of their passengers while on board.

Have more than 25% tourists on board and your flight will leave late because they cannot find their seats. These are always the people who sit in the wrong seat or don't understand any flight protocol like don't start playing a game of Jenga before the seats between you and the window are occupied.

Have more than 25% tourists on it and the chances of some overhead storage is nill.
Business travelers are bad too but it's the tourist whose mismatched bags will never fit into the rectangular shape. They are the ones that will also put one bag in the middle of the bin and then close the flap.

Have more than 25% tourists and realize that you will get no rest.

See if I get up at 4:30 to take the early flight out, I intend to sleep while on board but when some snot-nosed kid decides to scream in my ear for 2 hours that consolation prize is taken from me.
If you cannot control your kid from screaming they (and you) should not be allowed to fly at 6AM. Airlines should have specific flights dedicated to bratty kids and their over indulgent parents so that the hard working professional has a chance at a much needed 45 minutes of shut-eye.

Have more than 95% tourist and you wonder if you mistakenly boarded a flight to Orlando.
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God I hate driving.

So I haven’t had a car in about 10 years but recently came back to the role of automobile ownership and although it’s been a blessing in certain cases, it’s been a nightmare in others.

First of all. What the hell happened to the price of gas? I felt like Back to the Future 2 when I saw some of these prices. Did somebody hit me across the head and I fell into 10 years of a coma because the last I remember I would be able to troll onto Route 46 and compare-shop myself down to about $0.89/gallon. All of a sudden I pull up to one of these NYC gas-stations and pay $3.10/gallon and there isn't even somebody pumping my gas for me. Is this new 2009 gas made from gold or something?

Secondly, I would think that when I got to the future it would be more civilized but with all this honking, beeping and screaming, how does anybody expect you to have a cell phone conversation while driving? When did it become OK for every idiot driver to honk at any given time? People honk when they are trying to pass you, when they want you to move at a light, when there are people cross the street, when they get close to you in their car, when they stand outside of an apartment building.
Is this the new method of communication in this crazy 2009 world?

And finally, what the hell happened to the flying car.. I was told that by now we would be zipping Jetson style all over the place but instead I go from one ridiculous traffic jam to the other.
I figure that NYC was expecting the flying car to have been here already which is the only reason I can think of why they haven’t fixed any of the same pot-holes I used to hit in the Jeep back in 1998 or haven’t figured out how to properly funnel people over the Brooklyn bridge.

Somehow in 10 years of not owning a car, there have been no improvements what so ever

Hot Dog

I had a hard night sleep last night and it wasn't because I was drunk or hung-over or particularly hot but I couldn't get myself into that REM phase because every half hour I'd feel my dinner coming back up.

I have a question.. how is it that a processed piece of food like a hot-dog is so difficult for me to process?  I had a couple of dogs yesterday at a BBQ and then spent most of the night burping up and regurgitating half eaten dogs.  Now it's not like I had one with three pounds of cheese, six jalapeños and a pickle squeezed into the bun with it, just a straight all-beef dog in a bun and for some reason my body just rejected the entire concept.   If you think about the concept of a hot-dog you would think that like baby-food it should be easily digestible but whenever you have one, it's like a ticking time-bomb in your stomach waiting to conquer the waves of stomach acid.
 I obviously realize these things are just lip-and-assholes jammed together under a thin skin but it's amazing how difficult it is for me to digest these things properly.  Why is it that turkey breast which is the same concept of processed meet never gives me indigestion while a Hebrew National makes me feel like i'm about to have a heart-attack?

It's like having a Blue Moon except the beer version doesn't come up but instead comes down..

I would say that the person/company who can come up with the dog which won't give the customer stomach acid reflux could be the invention we should be striving at as a people, this is what could really help people.

Hungover

Before I get crucified, please realize that I am a tough critic on movies. I do not call a movie a classic unless it's on par with True Romance, The Big Lebowski, Casablanca or Rudy and most movies that people love I just think are OK.

Went to see the Hangover and was amused but I don't think it's a great sign when you feel like a movie which was only an hour and a half but felt longer than that.

For those who haven't seen it, it's kinda like Swingers without skinny Vince Vaughn and sort of skinny John Favreau but with Andy Bernard and a Tiger.

The issues I had were as follows

First of all, if you pay Heather Graham and she is willing to show you her t!ts than give me a little something. I saw a lot of male junk and just 3 seconds of Roller-nipple, something wrong with that formula.

Number B
The characters just seemed like they were thrown together, there was no reason that these four dudes would be friends.. One guy was too cool, the other too lame and the fat guy too weird which makes no sense relative to their best man.

Problem #C
The problem was that the best character (Zack the fat jesus looking dude) changed personality types throughout the movie. HE starts out as sort of a weird mentally unstable dude, turns kinda awkward and strange, turns kind of cool and mysterious, goes into kind of a gay phase and then ends up kinda lonely and pathetic. They all worked on their own I guess and it wasn't as if the script was complex enough to have him have multiple personalities; it is seems they used him for whatever position they needed at the time. It"s actually kind of like Acevas on the Yankees. It left me wondering why they would mess with the character so often.

Problem #D
I hated that they saw the bride before hand, mostly because I'm a traditionalist and don't think groom and bride should see each other but for the movie sake it would have been cool to see her walk down the aisle not knowing if she was pissed or relived.

Plus I think cameos are terrible and the Mike Tyson thing proved that again

And I hear the are making a sequel already, they should go and watch American Pie 2 to see how that turns out.
I left the movie feeling like I was hungover

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A beautiful morning with dew on the trees and an open path around prospect park.

I can’t tell you how happy it makes me when I’m about 25 minutes into an early morning run. I love the thought of being out there before most people are awake, seeing the sun-rise, hearing the birds chirp and seeing the occasional wildlife creature. I will also say that being up at 5:45 to run is also somewhat humbling because although most people are sleeping there are still quite a few people out and doing stuff including one guy who I’ve been watching for ever.

This dude has been running Prospect Park every morning for as long as I can remember, I recognize him because he runs the park clockwise while almost all other joggers run it counter-clockwise. Now this isn’t what makes this dude nuts. What makes him nuts is that I’m 99% certain he is homeless.  First of all he talks to himself while he runs, he wears a dirty white undershirt which was white but is now yellow from sweat stains, long white tube socks and these little black Reebok sneakers the kind which would snap my ankle if I would run in them for 1/4 of a mile.
He has terrible form, runs like he’s pulling a refrigerator on his back and looks completely uncomfortable doing it. But he is out there every single morning and he isn’t running only one lap because if I’m doing a few laps I’ll pass him 3 or 4 times.   I have convinced myself he's probably a recovering crystal-meth addict and this is a way for him to get his high but of course what do I know.   He's only out there in the mornings and it doesn't matter if it's rain or shine cause I'll always see him running

I’m gonna have to bring my BB with me and take a picture of him and hope he doesn’t notice because I’m not sure I can outrun him.

Long Haired Freaky people need not apply

I notice weird things but...


I have been doing an informal survey and have noticed that most white dudes over the age of 30 with long hair are also usually about 30bs overweight.    I can't figure out why there is this correlation but the two seem to go hand-in-hand, it's as if they are trying desperately to reconnect with an era which is gone by looking like they crawled out of their dungeon apartment where they were kept captive by Everquest and Cheese Doodles.


Now i'm not talking about the total obese dude, but rather the guy who carries that extra 25 or 30 pounds with the " I don't give a crap what i look like" attitude   I'm convinced that somewhere somebody is giving chubby white-guys some bad-advice and telling them to grow their hair cause this is what girls want.   See if they paid any attention they would notice that the 240 pound dude with shoulder length hair always leaves the bar alone.  


It's as if this guy is wearing a sandwich sign around his head which screams  'I give up, I'll never get laid' because the third feature that the chubby, long-haired white dude has is he always dresses like he doesn't care what other people think.  But not in a good way, it's almost always in that really bad way, the entire look says 'i'm living in my parent's basement and I run Linux for fun'


The 32 year old dude with the long hair isn't taking you back to the beauty of 1992, he's taking you back to living in the basement of your parents house.  Mind you this comes from a guy who had hair down to the middle of his back in 1998 and whose had wall to wall Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain posters and who was easily 40lbs overweight at one point (although never with the long hair).


Now this is a different look than the much older white dude with long hair who wears it is in a pony tail and rocks the whole "I banged a lot of hippies in 1969" look.   This look is usually relegated to a guy over 50 who matches his pony tail with a bad goatee and circle lens glasses.  See this look sucks too but at least this guy isn't fat and if nothing else he stands for something.

So please fat white guy, you are already so predictable and white-washed, can't you at least entertain us with a clean cut?



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Backack Pain

Not exactly sure what I did to deserve this but that nasty back-pain I had about six months ago is back. My lower back feels like Bam Bam Bigelow did the jig on it. So not only do I feel like I’m suffering from a disability without the benefit of one of those disabled parking passes but lower back pain seems to effect everything you do, I can't walk, sit, work or play pocket-pool without it feeling like somebody is stabbing me with a dull kitchen knife.  . I would expect it to hurt if I were to pick up a sack of bowling balls but for it to hurt when I’m sitting down is another thing.

I’ve done everything I can think of

1) Took my wallet out of my back pocket when I sit down

2) Stopped carrying around the 55 pound statue of Adonis

3) Been trying to sleep on my back as opposed to my side, although I’m reading that sleeping on your back is actually not good

But nothing has helped.

The funny thing is that when I go running it actually feels a lot better, like it loosens up although I can’t really imagine that the pounding on your bones and muscles can really do anything but misalign my back. It then doesn’t hurt much for the rest of the day, so the pain is higher early in the day. I do know one thing, when I was in college they did one of those scoliosis tests where they have you stand up and they adjust all these little ropes to show how your back looks. Well my skeletal frame looked like Gumby.

The chiropractor told me that they can realign my back but I was in college and didn’t have a pot to piss in, let alone a few hundred bucks to give this quack. The irony is that my back is aligned like a gumby but it feels like the opposite of a gumby because I can hardly move.

So I’m desperate and asking for help, does anybody in the TOR army (an army of one I guess it might be) know anything about how to cure back pain…especially with the marathon training just beginning.

Take on the Bump

I know I’m venturing into other people’s territory here but I’ll review a couple of shows I’ve been watching. For a MUCH better review of everything that is television check out http://www.bumplovestv.blogspot.com/  There probably has never been a better URL name to describe a person and a hobby than this for my buddy The Bump. This would be the equivalent of TOR being named http://www.righettilovespornandbeer.com/ which now that I think about it might be a good new name.
I have been thinking of gettting a non blogspot.com URL for TOR and thought it might be a good time to consider a new name, one that is more main-stream and might be easier to find.


Onto the task at hand.. reviewing terrible TV Shows




Hung

Kind of a show which is a mix between Loverboy meets Dirk Diggler but looks like Tin Cup. The show is pretty terrible, not a lot of laughs and the only thing you wonder is if he pulls his Marky Mark out to reveal it at the end. The red-head is pretty hot, the pimp chick is pretty not and it’s kind of sad that the channel that gave you Dream On and First & Ten now gives you this. I’ll keep watching though, if for no other reason because I like Dennis Quaid.



The TO Show

It’s ironic how incredibly boring TO is, for such a loud-mouth he really has nothing to say at all. This would be the equivalent of the Dennis Rodman show since the Worm isn’t interesting either he just plays an interesting character on TV.

Onto more pressing issues the ex-fiancé is a total piece of ass and I’m sure he’ll be tagging her within two episodes, the Asian real-estate chick he bangs had a face made for kicking but an ass made for sticking and some of the slutty chicks at the club look….slutty.

It’s kind of cool to see that he seems to have one real buddy (the Big Pun looking guy) but what was 10x more annoying than anything TO did were Venus and Serena who do not shut up the entire time. I don’t know what TO sees in these two broads but if I was giving him advice my first thing would be to get rid of these two leeches.

Curb your damn horse

I love dogs and have always loved them although I am much more a fan of my own dogs than I am of some other slobbering beast.

What I am NOT a fan of is people who don’t curb their dogs which I feel are sometimes a bigger issue in a big city than it ever was in a small town. It’s not uncommon for me to walk out of my house and find a big heaping pile of dog-crap sitting next to my NY Times (which luckily is wrapped in that blue bag). This attitude of ‘other people should do it’ seems more common when you don’t yourself have a private sidewalk or yard. 


This was a huge problem in NYC where I my then girlfriend/now wife used to live where every morning it would be like an obstacle course dodging dog-crap. Luckily in Brooklyn it’s less of an issue although I do notice that early in the morning when people don’t think other’s are around that they are less likely to bend down.

This is bitter irony of it

You decide to buy a damn dog, you get to play with him, take him for runs and throw th ball around but you don’t feel like you should pick up its shit, I am just a guy who doesn’t have a dog and thus don’t get any of the pleasures of having it’s companionship but still have to pick up dog-shit.

There are other issues too

1) Just because you pick up the largest pieces should not mean you can leave the racing stripes on the sidewalk. How about dog-owners bring a spray bottle to at least attempt to get some of the left-over gunk off the sidewalk

2) I can’t tell you how rude I find it that people let their mutts piss on garbage bags. Some garbage man has to pick these bags up, it’s not like the dog is pissing on a pile of garbage but he’s pissing on the bag which is meant to contain the filth. If your dog can’t get this done, strap a condom on him which you can throw out into a garbage bag when he’s filled it.

3) Why do horses get away with being able to take gigantic horse dumps on the street, I was in central park the other day and I felt like I was in trying to avoid land-mines. These horse-and-carriage drivers should get off their high-horses and bend down with a shovel to pick this crap up. Police horses get away with the same

So it's time

There are many ways for somebody to know they have to go on a diet but nothing is more apparent than a 33 year old dude who is having a hard time beating back father time, or better yet father donut. I have been on this yearly yo-yo thing where during marathon training season I can get down to 182 pounds when I approach 40 miles per week but when the running season ends and I cut down to 20 miles per week, the pounds creep back up and this winter I almost hit two bills.

The issue with the extra 15 is that my knees hurt when running at 190+ pounds which really is a nasty case of chicken-or-the-egg:. See my knees hurt when running cause i am a fat slob but the only way for me to lose weight is by running. The extra 15 pounds do allow me to wear my ugly cargo shorts without a belt but that is not the kind of compensation prize I want.

Well there is another familiar issue which is rearing it's ugly head..

Last night I had a hard time walking through the humid city (so much for those 4 days of nice weather).as my run earlier in the day in the humidity had my fat thighs) rubbing together for ten miles and all of a sudden I find a bunch of chafing bumps on my inner-thigh and every step I take results in yet more irritation. Now this has been so bad in previous years that I rubbed myself down with the oil and vinegar dressing from an Italian Restaurant but my only reprieve yesterday was to walk around like a cowboy. Big strides that first go east-west as they go north-south.

I do a online search and the way to avoid this is by putting lube all over my inner thighs. First they recommend running in those bike shorts and you know how I feel about that entire sport and secondly they recommend liberally spreading vaseline or lube to your thighs.

Problem is that I start many of my runs from the gym and If i want to avoid situations like these from escalating, I am probably better off not pulling out a big bottle of lube into the NYSC locker rooms

Bad Life
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Tour de Bike Race

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I'm too sexy for this shirt

No comment necessary

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Dogmatic = Fantastic

Have you ever contemplated how you can improve on a hot-dog? I know, I know it sounds impossible but after YEARS of searching and thousands of dogs and extra buns later, I have finally found the perfect hot-dog.


There is some little place on 17th street just west of Union Square called Dogmatic and these guys have perfected the dog. The concept is basically a certain sausage type (beef, chicken, pork, turkey, lamb or asparagus) which it delivered in a holed-out artisan bread.

Think the old subway sandwich where they would cut the wedge out but instead this bread is corked out like a Sammy Sosa bat and stuffed with a sausage.   They then add all sorts of sauces (jalapeno cheddar, sundried tomato-feta, truffle gruyere etc.) into the cocoon and hand it to you steaming hot and absolutely delicious and most importantly totally self-contained.  It's like a sausage filled hot-pocket except actually good.

I believe that Dogmatic was once just a standard street-hot-dog stand but upgraded to the fancy-schmancy Union Square digs which probably accounts for the ridiculously price of $4.50 per dog but with a little initiative they could so easily sell these things at CitiField and sell them for $6.95.   It would really be the perfect baseball stadium food since everything is stuffed into the bun, so you don't have to worry about some slob sneezing on your dog as they hand it down the aisle.  

By the way the ginger soda is horrible but the lemon-lime one is delicious.

Now I know how poor Larry Craig felt

So I’m getting out of the shower at the gym earlier today and walk to my locker to get dressed and back to work. Like usual I make no eye-contact, avoid talking to anybody and just get to getting my business on. As I walk down the stairs from the treadmill, some tanned guy with some Eric Nies haircut comes in from the street, checks in and walks to the locker-room in front of me. When he gets into the locker-room he scopes out the place while I walk past him to the first available locker. I get to my locker and he chooses the locker directly next to mine. I get my wet clothes on but notice that the dude is getting completely undressed, he’s got some kind of bird tattoo on his left shoulder blade and he walks down to the showers. He must be 5 strides ahead of me and he turns around to go get something, the problem is not that he is hung like an icicle while I’m more like an ice-cube but that he keeps walking past me and kind of crazes my arm. I go to the shower wash up and get back to my locker and start getting dressed. Shoulder-Blade Tattoo guy comes out of the shower with no towel on and walks towards his locker. For the second time I notice that he grazes against me. He walks past me one more time and says “excuse me” as he touches his hand on my back. Now I have no issue with a couple of guys doing the vertical shuffle but I don’t specifically need to feel like I’m propositioned every time I take a shower. I’m also not that into people who come off the street in their work-clothes; go to the locker room to take a shower and then kind of hang around the locker-room.


The showers are meant to be used AFTER you work out, not as a place TO work out.

I have a bad life.

Bahumbug

Another week and another nauseating version of the Metropolitan Diary

Dear Diary:


The other day I was cleaning out my bookshelves a bit. I always place unwanted books near the curb but away from the garbage so that people can have an opportunity to take a free book.


My wife finds it difficult to throw things out, so when she came home from work, seeing the books, she brought one back into the house. It was a book from her college days. Inside the book, as a place marker, she discovered an unopened letter from a friend. The postage was an 8-cent airmail stamp. The postmark was from 1966.


I slit open the letter and read it to her. It was fairly ordinary stuff, but the last line read, “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.” That blind date was me, 43 years ago. I guess it worked out; we’ve been married 41 years.


Roy Alexander

Thanks for the extra information about you being such a generous person who leaves books on the curb. This is not something specific to you Roy; I do this all the time as do most people who live in the city. The fact that you are such a good samaritan has NOTHING to do with your story and is just added because you were given a platform to discuss it.   And honestly, you shoudl be recycling the books not throwing it in the trash anyway.

Seemed similar to the nugget from last week’s column which had this piece

Dear Diary:


In March 2007, I moved out of my apartment to make room for a total renovation. I gave my $139 television away, knowing that I could replace it later with one that fit the new décor. When I moved back to my “new” gorgeous home in August, I found that I wasn’t in a hurry to get a TV. In fact, I still don’t have a TV. However, I did watch a TV program in my home.


One day last September I was working in my study, turned on the radio and listened to the start of the ceremonies celebrating the former Yankees who played in what would soon be the former stadium. I looked up and noticed that my neighbor, about 25 feet away in another tower of my building, had his large flat-screen TV turned on to the program.


Pulling out my sofa and angling it a little, I got a good view of his screen through two sets of clean-enough windows. I sat back with a beverage and enjoyed the program almost as if the TV screen were in my living room. The sound was not in sync, but I easily adjusted.


There was one slight problem. When the ceremonies ended and the Yankees game began, I was still listening to the radio. However, a movie came on the TV. “Change the channel,” I wanted to yell over. I refrained.


Leigh Henderson

I’m so glad to hear that you are such a considerate person giving your TV away (as opposed to throwing it in the trash or putting it on the sidewalk like Roy Alexander would have).. No your boring story had to include the caveat that you gave yours away, can we assume it was to a very needy person?
I don't agree with throwing stuff in the trash especially stuff like TV's which will just contaminate landfills but do we have to hear about your genorosity..

Upgrade

So I finally get a new version of the Blackberry moving from the BB8830 to the new Blackberry Tour and so far my review is positive. Nice interface, slightly smaller design, the new BB operating software is easy, the 3.2MB camera is good (mainly because the 0.0MB camera that came with the BB830was nonexistent), they finally got rid of that terrible Blackberry browser and added one that feels like a normal computer browser, the keys seems to work and so far I’m getting all my emails.. It’s like a 10 for 10 in the world of Righetti.

Problem is the following.

For some reason they decided to nickel-and-dime you with some of the additional hardware which I am convinced that this is another one of these scams companies put together to force you to buy a bunch of new crap. . First they change the charger plug type so the ten different blackberry chargers I’ve accumulated at work, for the car, in my travel bag, at home etc are now completely useless. The old BB charger was a standard mini-USB one which works well mainly because it can double as a charger for other electronics I already have like the Garmin, the Kindle, my wife’s Blackberry curve and a bunch of other things you need to charge anyway but not my new BB. The other noticeable difference is that they changed the battery slightly, so the extra battery I bought doesn’t fit in anymore. Then they change the headset hole, it is now is a big-fat normal-headphone plug instead of the old slightly thinner plug.

It’s just another reason the BB people decided it was important to swindle another $29.99 out of their loyal users so they can get a new car-charger, $14.99 for another wall charger and $19.99 for another headset. And it will mean a bunch of old stuff going to the landfills around my area.

Absolute scam!!!

summer blues

For many people the summer time is the opportunity to get out and wash away the winter blues. The weather improves, the sun shines and all of a sudden people have energy again. In anticipation for the three months of heat, gyms get crowded as people start working out to lose inches off their waistlines in April, so as spring springs eternal, summer breeds optimism. Most baseball teams are still within striking distance in the early summer and with the long days most people seize the opportunity to extend their days and utilize the light-hours to get together with friends. But when you have a summer which starts with 26 days of rain in June you wonder what happened to the summers of yester-year. I am not a soap box guy but I do know for certain that the weather patterns we are getting now is not the same as the summer weather I remember getting as a kid. The fact that it rains everyday in NYC and did not rain in Seattle or Amsterdam for a month should tell you something.
Now I cannot tell you that I have any experience with greenhouse gasses (other than creating them through flatulance) but I do know that it rains every day and I hate the humidity that precedes it. Even yesterday which started beautiful was hampered by the evening shower, it is like I was transplanted to Florida against my will
I applaud Obama for finally showing US leadership in climate change initiatives even if the Krugman and Friedman elite claim the commitment to a 17% reduction is not adequate. It is amazing that there is even a movement that is now heard in Washington and this 17% commitment is only the first step.You can't reach for the skies when you can't even see it.

Under-represented

So the NY State assembly is back in business after a month of wasting our tax money on their stalemate.   This shows again that the members of society who care the least about the well-being of its people are the ones that represent them in government.  
Government bureaucracy has become such a joke that getting something reasonable passed through either local, state of federal government depends solely on the ability of the constituent to have properly greased the palms of everybody from the highest office to the fluffer girls down below.

But what it really does is bring a bigger issue to the forefront.  Is there any reason other than "because this is the way it is" that the entire state of New York is represented in Albany.  First of all,  there is no way that  such a corrupt group should be representing anybody let alone a state as complicated as New York but more importantly, all of New York being represented by one state government doesn't make any sense anymore.   This is not a state of farmers and manufacturing, the interests of the city people have nothing to do with the interest of the up-staters.  It has become obvious that in order to fix state government in a place like New York you would have to decouple the City from its upstate brother.   The mentality and outlook is completely different once you get north of Peekskill because not only does not nearly the amount of money we send to Albany come back down to NY City, we are also held hostage by corruption and politicians who stifle good concepts like Bloomberg's congestion pricing ideas.     This is where we have to take a stand and break up the state somewhere North of Westchester.
  For the city folks this would work because just like going to trial and you are suppose to get a jury of your peers, I think that you should be able to be represented by people who are your peers, not some hot-head from Buffalo.   I am sick of having my city dollars sent upstream and sent back short.   I am sick of having some clown from some rural part of the state decide how NYC should handle its congestion and pollution and I'm sick of having some fat-head like Tom Golisano and his billions of dollars be able to interrupt the state senate for a month at a time and I'm sick of paying for the plight of the upstater.   We have enough problems within this city to deal with that we don't need an entire welfare state pulling at our coffers.

Defender of the Needy

For years New Yorkers have had a reputation for being rude and aggressive something I have argued against and have continued to believe is a huge myth until recently.

I have noticed that when a pregnant woman gets onto a subway car that 99% of the time her fellow riders prove again that they are nothing more than lazy, inconsiderate and overweight as these slobs will immediately look away doing everything in their power to not make eye-contact. The attitude is the same as the people who won’t make eye contact when a car is trying to cut in front of them on the way to a toll but unlike that scenario where the driver is completely justified in the case of the pregnant woman it shows again how inconsiderate the average lazy ass New Yorker is.

The pregnant lady scenario is one of the main reasons I never even take a seat in the subway, knowing that I don’t want to take up a spot for somebody who may need my seat way more than me but having become more keenly aware of this problem I have decided to take a different stand. I will from this point forward always grab a seat, fighting other riders for the seat if I have to for the pure reason that when a pregnant woman, woman with a small child or somebody with a handicap comes in that I can give them my seat. This is not a Metropolitan Diary scenario, I will do it quietly and not make mention of it when doing it but from today on you will see Righetti as a seat-holder for people in need.

I find this completely justified because somebody has to look out for the little people and honestly forcing the completely able bodied slobs to stand up for a few minutes is probably good for their waist lines anyway.

Reply All

There has not been a part of the great inventions of the 21st century which has been as destructive as the "reply all" button on an email program.
I learned a long time ago that when sending out a mass email about something that happened or will happened that I better be very cautious when choosing the people on the To and CC lines because the damage any of these people are able to inflict can be crippling. I have a friend who when he knows the stakes are highest and the audience is broadest (read lots of people on an email with a comment he knows can shame) will never pass on the opportunity to hit 'reply all' and comment something to the effect of

"Your observations show that you are childish, know nothing about xxxxx and by the way you used 'their' instead of 'there' proving again you are an idiot,"


The other issue with the 'reply all' is that there are often conversations and bickerings between two people which now get broadcast to everybody within email distance. I have fallen victim to this but have also been a culprit which i usually justify by saying I am saving face which is a shitty justification anyway. But honestly when I get onto an email thread with two people going back-and-forth it is painful especially if you aren't monitoring it in real-time and get home to find 46 messages in your email box.

So my suggestion
The way I avoid the Reply All menace by keeping him off the original email or better yet post all your controversial thoughs on your blog.

Reply-all must be used very carefully when you are answering something. Step back and realize that your insanity is not interesting for anybody else especially if the appeal is to a very small portion of the email readers.


Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Those red LED lights

There cannot be a worse feeling than lying in a hotel room, staring at the red clock LED lights and seeing minutes disappear from precious sleep time.
I have come to the conclusion that the effects from overseas flights usually don't hit you until the 2nd night. My first day is one where I lose a night of sleep and muscle my way through the day working on adrenaline and then hit the sack and fall asleep from pure exhaustion.
Day 2 is usually a bit more consistent during the day but my body just doesn't want to shut down at midnight European time which is 6pm NY time. And this is where my story starts.

11:30am. Watch CNN as I lay down in bed,watching Larry King give a Michael Jackson memorial blow-by-blow

12:30am. TV off while I stare at the ceiling, catching glimpses of the clock.

1:30am. I turn on CNN back on to watch that weird British guy dissect spending sprees at high-end PAris hotels.. I wonder who this guy really is, maybe a MI6 spy or maybe just the British Al Roker.

2:30am. TV back off, thoughts race through my mind about work, my fantasy football draft, my mortgage, baby Righetti. My heart rate is at about 150 beats per second. I calculate that if I fall asleep right now I can still have 4 1/2 hours of sleep, I believe this is what US servicemen get by with during combat tours.

3:30am back to CNN, not surprisingly the Nikkei index opens down. Watch the same Larry King piece I saw 2 hours before but also see some study about people who fly often and their propensity to get some kind of clogged vein thing..

4:30am can't keep my mind off this clogged vein midair scenario and desperately I start to count sheep but realize that I can't remember what a sheered sheep looks like. With only 2:30 possible hours of shut-eye, I wonder when delusions would set in.

5:30am still tossing, eyes tired but now so concerned that I won't wake up in the morning that I get up to make sure my alarm is set.
I wonder if anybody else has noticed the irony in the fact the CNN logo uses the same exact shade of red as the LED lights in hotel alarm clocks.

7:00am. Alarm goes off

I have watched more CNN at 3am in a hotel room than all the other times in my life watching CNN combined.
I remember back in 1998 that I was awake at about 3am in Europe when Larry King stopped his show to announce that Mark McGwire had hit homerun 62. Another time I was awake to see the entire Bush-Kerry debate live and more hours then I care to think about have been spent watching the asian stock markets open, worldsport and those weird British guy expose's.

Regardless my life sucks
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Europeans

"Live and direct and you know I like doin' it
They called me Biggy Balls but now call me the Big U-IN-IT
I aint a Korean
I'm the dirty European,
My balls so big if you blow me you won't be seein' it"

we know these Euros are nasty since they wear the same clothes all the time. You can meet the same guy and he'll be wearing the shirt he wore yesterday, will wear tomorrow and maybe even Thursday. I gotta imagine they shower but if you will put on the same shirt then what the hell is the point???

They again the average US citizen uses 3 times the fossil fuels a dutchman uses so maybe what they save in coal they also save in washing soap??

But what gets me is that when you go to the WC (this is a fancy word for toilet which in turn is a fancy word for bathroom) they have a few things that make no sense to a person who does care about personal hygiene.

***now by no means are any of these observations even comparable to the hole-in-the-floor I have used in both the Middle East or in China****

- in a European Toilet there is this little shelf in the toilet instead of a straight drop into the water like a US toilet. I am sure they invented this to avoid the splash back but what it really does is just give you a way to get a good look at your own dump. It also forces it to smell like all hell. Why the Dutch want to have their poop left for them to inspect is completely beyond me.

- the European's will always have a hand washing sink but almost always this is located outside the actual shitter room. I figure it's so designed to make sure that people are really washing their hands which I do actually appreciate. BUT

- The European sink will only have a cold water faucet. First of all you cannot burn off bacteria when the water is 33 degrees especially when you can't possibly keep your hands underneath it for more than 5 straight seconds.

- the Europeans are NOT into softness of their toilet Paper. It's like wiping your ass with sand-paper. And you wonder why these guys all have zits on their asses.

- The size of a European WC is similar to the size of a broom closet. I can't imagine how many poor people have passed out from the CO2 gasses collected
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Airplane-Itch

For all the flying I have done over the last few years, nothing has made my life more pleasant than the 45 minutes I get to spend in the business lounge. Most of the time it isn't even an hour but somehow it is long enough to make you feel human again and regain your sanity.
The wonder of the Frequent Flier pass and status has gotten me bumped up on a number of Delta/NW/KLM/Continental flights recently due in part to the platinum elite status I gained from the travelling I did in the last few years primarilly the overseas trips in business-class I have made.

What is less pleasant is that today I take my last business-class trip as the company has cut all travel to coach status. Now I have a LOT of experience in coach, so this isn't like I am some average Iraqi who one day in 2003 goes from having a good job, nice home and savings to having my world turned on it's head but for a guy planning to travel to China in the next few months the thought of 14 hours squeezed between some American slob and some sezchuan smelling asian is not very appealing.

But for those who travel coach here are some small things that make travelling that way somewhat livable.

The extra 2" you get on a JetBlue flight vs that on an AirTran one makes it a coach seat you can actually sleep in.

Those airplane socks although stupid looking can make my feet look like NY Sausages ass opposed to Vienna Sausages

With the new regulations on the docket which limits carry-on bags, at least the future may actually allow for some overhead bin room.

The problem that neither business-class or coach can fix is the airplane-crotch you get from sitting in the same clothes for 24 hours with your fat thighs squeezed tightly together by some seat-belt. For all the dry-air in an airplane, it doesn't translate to the crotch area where here is just too much heat, dampness and lack of open air. At some point they have to start introducing some kind of airplane shower on normal flights or at least I gotta paint my sack with baby-powder because I'm about thisclose to letting the boys air out right on the plane.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

MJ

I argued with a buddy about Michael Jackson this weekend, me saying it was tragic despite all of the problems he had and him not being able to get past the molestation charges. Now I am not a fan at all of kiddie-touchers so this is by no means a defense of that but I do believe that MJ was not a 'normal' person. He had issues that were deep rooted, his maturity level not above that of a child and if he had not been blessed with musical ability he would have been institutionalized.
In a strange way eventhough he was free, he lived wirhout freedom, his own psyche shackling him to his celebrity, he was probably never happy, lived in fear and undoubtedly suffered. His talents were unmistaking but his genius was also his downfall.
I wonder why European and Japanese fans never vilified him for his transgressions but the fact he always had addiration probably allowed him to never truly feel the weight of his punishment for the crimes against young boys he had. What is most absurpt is that even in death he had to be a show, his celebrity not allowiung for a dignified funeral. Ithe one thing Joe Jackson could have done is burried his son in peace but like everything he's ever gotten his grubby hands on he's all about himself.
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Palin

I was as shocked as anyone when Sarah Palin resigned as Alaskan governor yesterday afternoon although the actions of any celebrity (political or not) should never surprise anybody. The rumors were flying rampant on the internet including such gems as 'was she really pregnant with Trig", is she prego again, was she actualluy the Latina mistress of Mark Sanford.

The Republican party has 5 makor issues today

- their family values messages keeps getting derailed by the governors who can't keep their pants on and ones playing footsy in men's rooms
- the concept of fisically conservative does not resonate when all you cannot commit yourself to not spending
- the southstrategy courting the evangelicals has turned the party of an inclusive one to one which non-evangelicals have a hard time connecting with.
- leadership. With Bush gone there is a vacuum for a person to step up as the head of the party which leads to point 5
- except for Palin all their potential candidates are dull and lack charisma

Palin represented the best and worst chances for the republican party in 2012. She is incredinly stupid and completely incompetent to be POTUS but she was the only Republican with charisma. As these republican governors and senators who have been considered early canidates for the rebulican ticket and they al have one thing in common (and I am not talking about cheating on their wives) that thing is that they are all increbibly dull. They do not connect with the American people, they have all become carbon copies of each other.


Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Refurbished life

When I showed up at the Verizon store last week desperate because my blackberry trackball had crapped out I was relieved that they were able to get my another BB8830 in my hands within minutes but as I walked out of the store an uneasiness came over me because I knew the abyss I had fallen into.

Yes they got me a different phone but what I knew in the back of my mind was that this was one of those refurbished jobs.   I have had a lot of experience with the refurbished cell-phone and much like a 70's porn-star it's gotten a lot of use and will never operate quite the same way it did when it came fresh out off the box.    Within 2 hours I noticed that the enter button didn't always take, by the end of the day I noticed that my text messages and BBM threads were getting erased periodically.  All of this was annoying but seemed manageable especially as I knew I'd only have to deal with the refurbished thing for only a few weeks as Verizon had just announced that they were releasing the Blackberry Tour in about two weeks.
Well of course this is where I jinxed myself as my phone went from spotty to all out terrible.   By Monday the enter button wouldn't work, on Tuesday emails were disappearing on me and on Wednesday the phone started turning off by itself.   It's like I had somehow gone from a normal business machines to one possessed by a ghost.   I would pick my phone up and it would be a white-screen with the little hour glass going and this would happened constantly, 10 to 15 times per day with increasing frequency.
   By the time I got to Thursday it was in a vicious cycle where it would freeze, reboot itself and then freeze.  As this viscous cycle was happening another vicious cycle restarted.   Me walking over to the Verizon Store complaining about my blackberry, them removing all the contacts and replacing it with a refurbished phone etc etc.   On my first real day off in months, I have to wake up at 8am to go to the Verizon store.
This is where I don't understand a company like Verizon who is so desperate to gain new and retain current customers.  Why in god's hell do you give people refurbished phones knowing they are only going to conk out on them.   I am completely convinced that some other schmo is walking around with the first one I returned last week today and wondering why the track-ball doesn't work and in a few days there will be another schmo who wonders why the phone he just got turns off all the time.    I know they don't do anything to these things in terms of real maintenance, yeah they probably blow some air into it and smack it on it's side like I use to do when the reception on our old black-and-white TV would go out but whatever routine tests they put it through are probably not more sophisticated than turning the phone on and off and seeing if BrickBreaker loads.
 
When you get a refurbished phone or any other electronic you are essentially agreeing to take on somebody else's problem.   You know that going into it that it can't possibly work that well if the thing works even 40% as well as a new one consider yourself lucky

Just as Steve Jobs comes back to lead Apple, the Jobs report comes out and we are at almost 10% unemployment. The way I see it, Steve Jobs is the guy who is going to get us out of this stupid recession because he’ll “invent” the I-Book I guess which will be similar to every-other net-book except it’s got a little Apple on the casing and all of a sudden American’s will be spending their way right out of this recession.

But seriously, an unemployment level of nearly 10% that is 1 in 10 people out of work, most people have 10 friends and that means that for every 10 times they go out to the dinner with somebody they feel some obligation to pick up the check. I don’t know exactly how many more jobs would have been lost if the Stimulus package hadn’t been passed but I doubt it’s that different as most of that stimulus money has just not been spent.

From everything you read since this recession hit we have lost 6.5 million total jobs but how many new jobs are offsetting that number and how many saved jobs are keeping that number down?

What has always bothered me about the original stimulus package is that they kept talking about either creating or saving 3 million jobs. Yeah you can create 3 million jobs but if you add 6.5 million people to the jobless rate than you really have 9.5 million people who lost their jobs at some point and 3 million who have gained a job. Are these the same people?  Anyway you cut this, it is a lot different than having saved 3 million jobs in which case 'only' 6.5 million lost their job.

The net difference is the same (people working) but how it actually plays out is a bit different in my mind. Say they can claim that they have created or saved 3 million jobs there are two ways to look at that. By saving jobs (and assuming those are at roughly the same pay and hours) you don’t have those people hitting the unemployment lines and drawing against the public funds.

Being unemployed adds to the angst of people, disrupts lives and from everything I hear from people I know the jobs that people are taking are at lower pay than before. People who are unemployed become desperate and may go without healthcare to save money. When they find a new job they may take one that is further away, at lower pay or with worse benefits than they had before. So although they may be employed again the net income is less.

The kinds of jobs created has also never been made clear. What happens if the stimulus package creates a job for high-end engineers making sonar fuel cells and the people available for that kind of job are all presently employed? Yes you have created a job but you are only shuffling people around since the job that becomes vacated probably can’t easily be filled with an employee from the unemployed workforce. All those infrastructure jobs which are around the corner are great if I wear timberlands to work but not so good if I wear a button down shirt.

So whereas saved jobs keeps the unemployment numbers lower creating jobs is what helps shrink the unemployment numbers once they buldge, so what we should be looking at in the beginning of a recession is saving jobs and at the end of one is creating new ones.

Shake Rattle and Roll

I have a confession to make and it’s a bit nasty so if you just had lunch maybe it’s better that you come back to TOR in about an hour or so. Actually it’s not that nasty it’s really just sad but I feel like I should come clean because there might be other people living in the shadows with this affliction

Well yesterday as I’m standing online at the airport waiting to get through the security line the fact I had already had 4 cups of coffee hit me (I was very afraid to repeat the Monday Caffeine fix fiasco). The major problem with over-caffeinating myself is that it also means my bladder goes from that of a 33 year old guy to that of an 83 year old guy. So I’m standing at the airport, jumping on one leg and practically begging that the family of 5 going to Orlando can somehow hurry through the line. Of course leisure travelers are one of the pet-peeves in airports because they never have any sense of urgency and never know that they have to take their shoes off or forget a bunch of change in their pockets. Give the leisure traveler a bunch of kids and you might as well start listing to ‘November Rain’ cause it will be an hour before you get to the front of the line. Even Blitzkrieg Bop seems like it is 4 hours long when you combine leisure travelers with kids along with three cups of java for me.

Well I finally get myself through the line and make a full fledged sprint to the john. I get there, pull my work pants down and let rip. This is when it goes bad at about 10 seconds into my stream I feel a big sense of relief and as I’m about 75% done I get this tingle of a chill up my spine,. It is something I’ve experienced 100’s of times and I know what’s about to happened. I go from a normal posture to a sudden violent jerk which shakes my entire body from the chill down my spine. This happens to me when I’ve held it too long, I just spasm in the middle of the stream. Well I blink and all of a sudden I got a puddle of piss all over my pants and work shoes. This obviously sucks but at least it’s my own piss on my clothing, the problem is that I look down and I sprayed Righetti-pee all over the tennis shoes of the guy standing next to me and this dude looks like he plays for the Miami Dolphins.

Now I am pretty sure he didn’t notice and I wasn’t going to take any chanced; I zip-up and burn out of the can quicker than I ran into it. Now I personally blame the airports for having me wait too long in the first place but also not putting full body length dividers between pissers.

See when I take a leak especially in a public place I get this Parkinson’s like shake that comes over me about 3/4rds of the way into a steady stream. It happens with the combination of coffee and public pissing. It doesn’t matter where but after a couple of cups of java, I inevitably have to get to restaurant, airport or ball-park as the black-shit runs through my system. I have chalked this up with some other weird afflictions I have which include sneezing two times every-time I see a bright light like the sun on a clear day and the fact my urine smells like rotten cabbage whenever I eat asparagus.

Maybe it’s the fact it’s sped my heart race up, maybe it’s because of the jumping jack thing I do while squeezing my fat thighs together hoping to quench my bladder or maybe it’s just my bad luck but anytime I get in one of these scenarios I get this shake which in cases like yesterday could really play out badly.