The Piss test

One of the big positives of being a dude is not having to sit down to pee, one of the negatives is getting back-splash off the porcelain. Now it's one thing if it was just your own piss splashing back at you, but when you are in a public pisser you got to realize half of the backsplash is another dude's backwash especially if you are wearing shorts and flip-flops
They invented spit guards at the buffet lines, why can't they invent something to avoid my pant legs looking like I walked through a misting station. So you have to make a decision, piss against the porcelain which will mean some long-rebounds or piss into the reservoir which means that if your under the basket you'll have an opportunity for a lot of easy tip-ins. So you have only two options, become a sharp-shooting 2-guard able to stroke it from long range or go in down-low wearing waders.
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the name game

Naming your kid is a big responsibility, we all realize this is not easy and I have a friend who is asking her for help on Facebook for naming her 2 day old daughter who has gone with as Jane Doe for 48+ hours already.       I for one don't think there should be such a rush for naming your child; they will be stuck with the name for the rest of their lives unless they pull an Ochocinco or something else similarly bizarre.   Now we all know how cruel kids can be on a playground, do you really need to set your kid up for failure by naming them something as idiotic as Apple (but really what can you expect from the dude from Colplay, he's as creative as a Mop commercial )

I don't think the government should interfere in most aspects of your life but I do think they need to step up if your parent's have gone David and Courtney Cox-Arquette on their newborn. 

There really are a lot of ways to screw up a kid's name but the three I detest the most are: 

Going Hippy

If your nickname is Sunflower because you smoked a lot of pot and had a lot of unprotected sex it's one thing, if your name is Sunflower because your parents did than it might be time to get your own tubes-tied.   Hippy names are cruel and should be punishable by death

 

Naming your kid after a consumer item

 I've heard kids damned with names like Cristal and Lexus and whenever I come across them I can't imagine how incredibly stupid you have to be to name your kid something as idiotic as a luxury item.   It's as if people have wish lists of luxury goods they want but may not be able to afford so I guess the next best thing would be to curse your kid by naming him that.

 

Giving your kid a name when you had a different intention

As asinine as it is to name your kid after a bad bottle of champagne it fails in comparison to giving your kid a name of a word you don't understand correctly.   I know of one poor girl with the injustice of having been named Envious.   Now I have to imagine that there was a complete lack-of-education or at least lack of word-comprehension when this girl was named as I'd guess her mom and dad were going with the whole concept of naming your kid something that is desirable like (Joy or Happy which are incredibly stupid also) and were thinking they were trying to come up with Envied.   What they probably didn't realize until the birth-certificate was printed was that they didn't get a desirable name but instead got one of the seven deadly sins.

Intentional Misspelling

Now I get that people may confuse big words like envious and envied and I have even heard of a girl whose parents used script when writing her name of the paperwork for her birth-certificate and she became known as Deffie instead of Debbie but even this you can overlook as it wasn't intentional.  What I really can't stand is intentional misspelled names for example I met a woman named Jennafer the other day.   

There is a website dedicated to helping parents with these 'creative' names with an entire section dedicated to intentional misspellings.    Now this is troublesome on two levels, the first being that the idea of naming your daughter Jessyca instead of Jessica is incredibly stupid but the issue will be that people will never know if the misspelling was intentional or not.   So either she comes across as having stupid parents who thought being creative was sound parenting or they come across as having stupid parents who can't spell…

 The good news though is that TOR will have a regular feature whenever we come across an idiotic name

The Calendar

Granted I've been out of this game for a long time but that doesn't stop me from commenting on the subject of dating etiquette. As I have noted in previous TOR posts, there are many different steps to the speed of dating which seem to vary greatly between races, religions, age groups and gay and straight dating cycles.
Some people put out more quickly other's are prudes. Some introduce their new partners to their parents almost immediately while other people refuse to ever acknowledge being in a relationship.
One thing is for sure though, regardless of who you are, you should hold to the following hard rule. Never make plans with a new chick which is planned further-out than the amount of time you guys have dated.

Basically you need to have gone through at least two continues seasons like winter and spring if you want to make plans in the fall. Relationships are hard and most fail so unless you are prepared to go to the Alicia Keys show alone, you have to be realistic.

Let me explain. If you are dating a girl for 3 weeks don't make plans for a vacation in St Lucia six months from now or you're likely to have two tickets, a heart shaped hot-tub and a bottle of bubbly for you to drown your sorrows into.

No camping trip plans for late spring can be made in February if your first kiss was under a mistletoe.

You can't make Christmas plans during an Indian Summer when you started knocking-boots after the Fourth of July

No discussion of turkey stuffing in July if you started to stuff your turkey after baseball season started.

Now after a year all bets are off!! But before that you need to think with your start thinking with your head not your heart.
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Swipe again at this terminal

I am convinced that there is somebody up there laughing at us all. I'm not talking about the omnipresent Holy Father but instead talking about some version of Big Brother.
See I am completely convinced that when you most need to get through the turnstile to catch the next train, the more likely your card won't be read.
It's as if the vibration of an arriving train malfunctions the MetroCard readers while somebody at MTA headquarters giggles as I keep getting that "swipe again at this turnstile" message. There isn't a more frustrating message around especially when you are in a rush
Now there is probably something to swiping quickly when you are in a rush vs swiping more slowly when there is no train arriving but how the hell are there EZ-pass systems which can record my car doing 55mph but an MTA card-reader can't distinguish a card slid through it at a 10th the speed?
Maybe those crazy old guys are right that it's all a big conspiracy theory where the MTA keeps having you swipe and keeps deducting $2.25. With the crazy dollar amounts on the cards, nobody would know
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Riding that Train, High on Cocaine

The NY Times reported today that in 2009 almost 96% of all commuter trains arrived on time coming into NYC which I have to think came as a big surprise to the working-schleps from NJ, Westchester and Long Island  who take the Metro-North, NJ Transit and LIRR options every morning.    To be fair to the NYT they did note that during their analysis they did notice that during rush-hour that 96% number didn't come close to holding true.  Then again you probably don't need a doctorate in mathematics to figure out when you look at the vast amounts of people waiting for trains in Penn Station and Grand Central..  

That's the thing with these stats somehow they never seem to reflect what is really going on in real life.   Who gives a crap if a bunch of trains arrive 15 minutes early at 4AM except for the fact the way that the LIRR counts the stats they take an average arrival time over all the trains to come up with the number.    So all the LIRR has to do is throw a couple of bogus train-rides out in the middle of the night to bump up their averages.   

You see this all the time with airlines when they brag about 'on time arrivals.'     Look at the average flight from NYC to Amsterdam for example.   Your ticket will give say you are scheduled to depart at 6pm and land at 8AM the next morning (8 hours) while anybody who has ever taken that flight know it takes 'only' 6 ½ hours of fly-time.    So getting there 'on time' really only means that they made the window so god-damn big that a herd of geese could fly through it.

Even if statistically true, in a city whose 8 million resident and millions more commuting in from the suburbs are forced to pay increasing prices for services which are regularly put to the chopping block, these 96% numbers are a weak consolation prize.

See I guess I don't understand how trains can be so late, they run on the same schedules every day, encounter the same predictable delays, pick up the same New York Newsday reading passengers and come into the same transit stations.    Obviously if you have a guy jump onto a track there should be some delays but it can't be that hard to try to be on time when you don't have to worry about traffic and you have a designated parking spot.

 It was also noted by TOR that they left the Subway on-time arrival information out of the article as the R train alone could skew the on-time arrival numbers so drastically it could make July 2010 look like a relatively cool month.   The subway's are so off-schedule that the MTA doesn't post schedules in stations or in cars.   The only place you can even find them is buried deep in their webpage and honestly I've tried to use those in real-time and it's impossible since the trains have no markings to identify them.  So if you are at Pacific Street and a train shows up at 7:15AM train you don't know if it's the one scheduled to be there at that time or if the train you are getting on at was really supposed to be there at 15 minutes ago.

 

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“and from now on, stop playing with yourself”

I have ranted about this in the past but it completely freaks me out when I'm minding my business standing in line and all of a sudden a guy starts discussing the weather.   I turn around and all of a sudden I realize this guy is talking to himself as if he channeling God like Kent did in Real Genius but actually he's having some benign conversation with somebody half-way across the world through his ear-piece.

 If the end of the earth is coming soon, I honestly hope the first ones struck down by lighting are the ones who walk around with a Bluetooth device tethered to their head.   I'm all for technology but what I can't grasp is what it would take for me to decide to clip a piece to my ear so I won't be bothered by having to lift my arm 10 inches.  

Now  let me be clear, I find that using a Bluetooth is completely acceptable when driving a car or operating heavy machinery but it comes across as  pompous and creepy when sitting at a desk or standing on a line at a bank.  See the beauty of the Bluetooth is that you can act like you are speaking to somebody standing next to you at the same tone and intonation but in practice it sounds like you are talking to a piece of cantaloupe. The perpetrator is almost always a guy who speaks way too loudly, seems self-righteous, is often foreign or a banker-type of both and has conversations which should be kept in private but most important always seem like the guy who couldn't throw a spiral more than 10 yards with his weak can't lift my arm above my shoulder biceps..

Recycling Rules

I am an environmentally conscious person and one who is college educated but despite my desire to do it right I cannot figure out what I am supposed to be recycling and what should end up in the trash. Paper can be recycled although I'm not sure about paper-towels, soda cans should be recycled but how about aluminum take-out containers, glass bottles should be recycled but how about a broken wine-glass? How about non-rechargable batteries, used bulbs and wood?
But with all that said the one that causes the most headache is plastic. The recycling people think they have made it easy by putting some little number on the bottom the issue is that nobody knows what any of those symbols mean or more importantly which you can and which you cannot recycle. I hear you can recycle a water bottle but not a yogurt cup, you can recycle certain food containers but not the plastic utensils, plastic shopping bags can be brought back to the grocery store but the blue bags my NY Times gets delivered in makes it to the dump. How about bubble-wrap, packaging material and plastic toys?
Why can't this be slightly easy or clear?



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Talking to an acquaintance whose serving on a jury for some felony trial it is completely obvious ho inefficient our courts are. You are asking 12 men and women (plus two alternates) to give up weeks of their lives to sit in judgment of a potential criminal taking away time from their jobs, families and lives.
This guy was telling me that there are literally days when they come in, sit in a room and then get dismissed after lunch having heard no testimony, seen no evidence all the while been forbidden to discuss the trial amongst the other jurors.
Now I totally believe that a jury trial is fair and have no problem asking our citizens to serve but I just hate how inefficient thing are.

With all the court delays, defense stalling, judges prior commitments and sicknesses these jurors spend days sitting around twiddling their thumbs as their workplaces scramble to pick up their slack.

But even if that doesn't come to fruition asking people to waste days of their lives while trials are delayed seems idiotic, the way I see it, once you have the jurors there, use them.

If you are going to have a three day delay for the star witness to get flown in from Columbia then why not put those jurors to good use and have them decide a drunk-driving case or a domestic dispute. Maybe those are a little heavy so how about a personal injury or even something with no pressure like small claims - court

If I'm gonna be out of work, at least have me feel somewhat productive while I'm away especially if I can't use the time to sit on a beach sipping frozen margaritas..

Or better yet with a country suffering from 10% unemployment, how about bumping those guys to the front of the line?
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Dudes should NEVER share an umbrella

I don't believe in sharing-umbrellas, 

Now it's not like Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny or Adam and Eve as obviously I know that sharing an umbrella actually exists but I find that this sharing umbrella thing is about as close to denying the existence of Jesus as it gets.  I'm not homophobic but I can't think of a single situation I would voluntarily share an umbrella with some dude, it's like going to the movies and not taking the buffer-seat.  

I know that some of you are worried about your hair or your button-downs but there has to be a better way than having two drenched dudes pressing against each other under a thin piece of plastic.  Now if you are that concerned about getting your hair messed up maybe you should see how incredibly ghay it looks when you two are pressed together like you are tuna and toast.   Now if there was a tornado I might think differently but when it gets to a point when two dudes share an umbrella when the rain is coming down at the rate of a geriatric man's piss I  worry.  Forget education, our total inability to handle a little rain-water is why we are falling behind the rest of the world, people don't ask their buddy into the shower with them because they fear they may get wet or hug them when they jump into a pool.   

First of all no self respecting man should be carrying an umbrella when it's drizzling to walk a block.

Number B: do you realize that logistically it doesn't even work;  as no normal size umbrella can hold two normal size dudes.    So for the awkwardness of sharing your personal space you get the pleasure of having only one wet shoulder.   I'm all about ying-and-yang, if one side is wet let the other side be just as wet.

I don't care if the world is coming to an end two dudes sharing an umbrella is like crossing streams.

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Lumpy Bumpy

So I woke up a few months ago with this nasty growth on my back.. I wasn't sure what the hell it was as it was bigger than a zit but looked like it was coming out of my back like a Gremlin.   Now I'm not sure what the hell causes the formation but it's completely unsightly and when you are already dealing with ugly bumps on your inner thighs, unruly chest-hair, a lazy eye and a terrible hair-cut you really can't afford any more unslightly body parts.   

 
SO I make it over to the dermatologist who tells me it's probably a non-cancerous cyst which basically means it's a chunk of dead-skin with a bunch of goo inside of it.   Now I'm not all that vain so I don't honestly care what it looks like but I don't want to be carrying around any extra weight but  I'm also not so keen on going under the knife so I do what any red-blooded American would..stall.  I basically wait 12 months before I'm told by somebody that I should go and get it checked out again.

 Now I can't tell if it's gotten worse looking or if it's growing like that oil-spill down in the gulf but I'm sure that it hasn't gotten any smaller.    I remember hearing my college roommate asking his girlfriend to pop one he had one his head and him telling me it oozed for like an hour, so using a stucco knife in a dorm-room won't be the way I'm gonna approach this one.

So I searched YouTube of cyst removal and let me tell you it is completely repulsive, it's like somebody barfs from their back and the scar looks like somebody used a machete to cut open a peach.

NYPD Blues

My brother-in-law mentioned the fact that you never see a cop talking to a young kid to try to connect with the community while guys in the fire-department are much more likely to participate in community building.  Now I understand that the FD and PD are not interchangeable and the cops can't be too buddy-buddy as they need to have authority but I think they would go a much longer way if they showed respect for the laws they are expected to enforce.

I am not one who seeks out ways to defy authority and I do appreciate the work that the men and women in blue do but I am sick of the amount of cops who go through the motions, break laws and defy common decency while never seeing a pay-cut or criticism unless the act is so gruesome the media picks up on it.    Now I'm sure the majority of cops are fine and even sending a slight criticism is akin to supporting the Taliban by the police brethren but it's still a job and you should still be expected to do what you are paid to do.  It's time to run it like a business not a welfare state.

 How often do you see a cop turn on his lights in order to run a light just to turn them off again when they get across the street or cut into the opposite side of the street to get around a slow moving car.  Cops don't ever believe they are expected to obey anything.   They speed, park in front of hydrants, cut people off at turns and use their badge to intimidate.

 Forget the blatant disrespect of law and decency, how about the inefficiency.  What other job do you see people on their cell-phones for hours at a time?  These are employees of the city yet there isn't a single person making sure they are doing what they are paid to do.   How efficient is a cop who is staring at his IPhone going to be?   The police-department hangs up signs to report suspicious packages or situations but you can't expect your citizens to be the only ones vigilant.

When they are on the subway platforms they often stand huddled with 5 of them on one side.  Obviously their duty that day wasn't to congregate with their buddies but rather it was meant to patrol.

Why doesn't Ray Kelly focus on getting their cops to start patrolling, walking the beat, keeping their eyes on the street not on a screen.   I am sure these are novel ideas and I'm not an expert but...you are paying them to work, so expecting them perform the duties they are paid to do shouldn't be too difficult to sell to the public.  If you are incompetent or defiant than you get fired, now that's a novel idea!!   See  the average tax-payer who struggles to get to work, feed a family, deal with the grind of commuting all while having taken pay-cuts, hour-cuts or job losses understands sacrifice, cops don't have to worry about their jobs, benefits or pay because their supporters and the FOP and PBA are like the NRA.

 

But you can't fire any of them or ask them to take a penny less per year how about we start with this:

 

- We ask citizens to police the police, if we can be expected to report suspicious activity we should also be expected to report corruption, disrespect of common decency and inefficiency. we set up a 311 so citizens can report the badge numbers of cops blatantly breaking laws.

- hit them in the wallet: every cop caught running a red or swerving to the opposite lane to get past a slow car takes a 5% pay-cut for ever infraction.  If I get fined for breaking the law, they should too.

-We  (GASP) take away their cell-phones while at work.   They have walkie-talkies and we can give them NYPD issued phones that can make only official calls, kind of like the ones you give a 6 year old, shaped liked a frog with four calling buttons.

 

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my odds of winning are better in AC than them fixing this AC

so somehow all my bitching about the heat-wave of 2010 has found some ears because all the bitching an moaning has gotten us somewhere.. sort of.      For two days I've walked into the office to find that the AC is busted.   So not only is it 95 degrees and humid outside, add to that some extra stuffiness from being inside.    How the hell are you expected to work when you dripping sweat from your eyeballs.   

 

This is what I hate about working for anybody but myself.   See if it were my company, I'd be bithing and moaing to the Super and demanding a decrease in rent for the days that there was no AC.    The issue is that when you aren't paying the bill, you also aren't getting the discount.     So I'm drenched to my boxers and the owners of the building are clinging Coronas at some beach with hot chicks in bikins.    This is the same issue I have with all the construction that goes on in-and-around NYC.    The average ahole going to work is the one inconvenienced while the city reaps the rewards.  Nobody every looks out for the little guy who doesn't get the tax-breaks, the welfare checks, the free insurance or the discounted metro-card.  No we are expected to bust our ass every-day to make sure that we pay our taxes so that the rest of the world functions even as they cut our subway-service or find a reasons to ticket you for the most minor infraction.

 

If i wanted to sweat liked this I would have gone to the Turkish Bath House

BB sucks

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.   I hate the subway, I hate the heat, I hate the fact that people don't wait on the platform while other people are getting off the train, I hate the homeless people I get shoved into, I hate traffic, I hate opposite side of the street parking, I hate street sweeping, I hate hating everybody, I hate not sleeping enough, I hate ferberizing.

But what I hate worse than anything is the fact that I can't surf the net on my blackberry.   The 3G service Verizon offers combined with the traffic on the network and the fact the BB browser is AOL slow makes me want to throw this piece of crap out of the window.   In a world where everybody has an IPhone, IPad, Droid or Pre, I'm stuck as the one a-hole in the world driving 40MPM on the Autobahn.

So I challenge BlackBerry, you have to either catch up or you are losing me.   I've long been your biggest advocate especially since you've moved away from the straight business-machine to offer cameras and a few little gadgets but it's time to show up with a hot-blond to the ball because your act is tired, your hairline is receding and you aren't nearly as rich as you used to be.    See Apple comes out with a new IPhone seemingly once per year and even if it has some kinks they are small kinks in armor which is stronger than a diamond-plated protective-cup.   You bring the Storm which is the equivalent of telling people you will be taking them to the Hamptons and instead wind up sitting at Field 4 at Jones Beach.  For years you had BBM as your crown-jewel but with unlimited texting and programs which string texts together like G-Chat even that has gotten worthless. It's time to step up cause my friends all have great cameras, super-fast internet, tons of great apps and they get their email just as easily as I do.

So I'm throwing the gauntlet down, I'm eligible for a new phone at Verizon but I'm ready to bail on the whole thing if you don't come up with something and soon.

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The TRY-athalon

So I got swindled into a participating in a triathlon as part of a three man relay-team as the run portion.
Not only did I cost me $100 to run 6 miles but never have I felt like a bigger douch-bag then when I went to the number pick-up. See the triathlon relay is part of the normal triathlon, out of 4000 participants there are about 100 people doing it as a team. You are surrounded by great endurance athletes who will have really accomplished something and there you are standing around still hung over and looking fatter than you have in years. The average person in the relay is not doing it as a race but more as an experience. They are old, fat or both and after it's all set and done one dude puked.
From the rest of the athletes this is a feat, for the guy doing the uni-athalon this is about as masculating as shouting out during it's raining men.

So for $300 one guy gets to swim in the sewage that is the Hudson River, one guy gets to run 6 miles in the 95 degree humidity and one dude gets to lose sensation in his sack.
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Tequila

I'm convinced Tequila is being brought into the States by a Mexican cartel trying to bring down the US way of life. How else can something so good make you feel like such crap the next day, the way I see it the tequila is the poison but the frozen margarita is the trojan horse. between the sugar in the mix, the cheap tequila as the kicker and the salt rim, there is no way anybody could feel good the next day. Then you add to it a hot day and all of a sudden you are hydrating yourself with 32 ouncers.
So I'm giving up tequila.......again because the jack-hammer in my head which feels like it's trying to jam through my eye-socket has only gotten louder as I've gotten older.
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The Humidity is just brutal

Forget global warming, global cooling, global wearing or global deep-fying, I know that there is something going on.  I remember hot-days during the summer when I was a kid, but I don't remember the humidity.   People would say that it was humid in places like Houston, New Orleans or the Florida Panhandle but not in New York.

 Somehow in the last 20 years we have gotten these tropical summers, where you can't leave your house wearing a light blue button-down or you'll be showing the whole world your entire gut.  This might have to do with the amount of black soot we constantly pump into the sky, the change in wind-patters or maybe some-kind of long-reaching lake effect but it's already harder to live and work in New York than any place else between the high-costs, the demand for perfection, the feverish pace, the hellish commutes, the crumbling infrastructure and the perpetual rat-race (both literally at work and figuratively on the tracks of the subway) we shouldn't also have to put up with the worst weather in the country.

 

Something's gotta be done about this, i suggest we add a large cooling tent over the entire island on Manhattan

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The Scam

Now let me preface with the fact I am a capitalist and appreciate the fact that every market needs to find it's equilibrium but when there is a gross exaggeration of price it is our duty at TOR to point it out.
I don't think there is a bigger scam alive than iced coffee? When you pay for iced-coffee you are paying $2.50 for a cup of crappy coffee served over ice, nothing less nothing more.

Somehow we have all been scammed into paying a 100% premium for somebody to give you less coffee. If I go to a restaurant and order a ginger-ale, I usually ask for no ice so I can at least get a full glass of soda not one diluted by frozen water. Well somehow the coffee people have not only avoided this concept but they have turned it around on their customers. Today at my regular egg-and-cheese joint I noticed a sign for $2.50 for a $1.25 cup of coffee with a couple of ice-cubes floating into it and there were hordes of people shoving fists full of dollars to get them.

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Earth younger than previously thought, say scientists

 

So I read yesterday that scientists now feel the Earth is 70 million years younger than they originally calculated which means that it's 4.46 billion years as opposed to 4.53 billion years old.  But when you are taling 4 billion years plus what really is another 70 million years.    The funny thing is that this piece of science will lead to something very diferent.

You just know this will give fuel to the lunatics who take the Bible literally and will tell you the age of the earth is 6000 years old.    There is no better way to separate the crazies from the sane than the simple question of how old the earth is. 

A sensible person will tell you roughly 5 billion years old, somebody who should probably be committed will say roughly 6000 years.   By the way if you believe this than you also must acknowledge that man and dinosaur roamed the earth together which would mean that my great-great-great grandfather slid down the back of a brontosaurus when he got out of work at 5pm every-day.

 

The Bible is a great book I'm sure but the best point I have ever heard is

Mother Goose (or most any other popular collection of children's stories) is a collection of fictional stories each of which teaches the reader some lesson about morality.

The Bible is a collection of fictional stories each of which teaches the reader some lesson about morality.

Other than that one has talking animals and the other has Supercarpenters,

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I need a bus

I love going out to eat, love spending time with friends and family and love throwing 'em back over gossip. What I don't like are automatic gratuities, over-priced meals and less than stellar service but I don't think I'm alone in my complaints there.

But I have another TOR rant and that has to do with busboys. I eat faster than anybody at the table and I don't miss a beat between bites. I don't disparage slow-eaters but it does lead to one difficulty for me.
See when I am done eating, I want somebody to take my empty plate. There is nothing I hate more than sitting in front of a bowl of three spaghetti strings and a bunch of tomato sauce juice. I speak with my hands and am notoriously clumsy so it's a matter of when not if I put my elbow into the bowl. I also hate staring out at an empty plate as it just makes me more hungry. So I know some people see it as bad etiquette to bus plates but I see sitting in front of an empty plate as unsophisticated.

But really I see it as protection from an unneeded dry-cleaning bill.
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Spies like us

With the LeBron fiasco behind us, the Worldcup now in the rear-view mirror and no NFL for a few months the sports calendar has now left us with four months of baseball.    Although I love baseball, it's about as exciting a thing to blog about as watching grass grow so we'll have to turn our attention to something else.   They have apparently put a tighter seal on that gushing oil-well, the heat in NYC has finally left and with that it took some of the smell but the excitement never stops

You know we live in a lame time when even a major spy exchange doesn't get people's blood boiling.   The US and Russia exchanged 10 soviet spies who had been living in Greenwich Connecticut and South Orange New Jersey for the last decade as they reported back to their homeland in invisible paint a bunch of 'secrets' which was a bunch of information you could have easily gotten off of cnn.com.

I for one believe that this is just a set-up, there is no way that Putin who probably has KGB tattooed on his left-ass cheek is going to put the entire Russian spy business in jeopardy to have a bunch of house-wives sit at Little League games.   There has to be more to this, either they've been playing a game of cat-and-mouse with our CIA who have spent two decades spending tons of time, energy and money chasing around a bunch of empty leads or this is just the tip-of-the-iceberg

Honestly this is like the Reagan arm-war all over again.   The way I see it, the Russians paid a couple of families from Peru or Venezuela to send bullshit telegrams over-seas, put them up in a couple of houses and gave them some spending cash which probably didn't cost them more than a few hundred thousand dollars but the US government was probably spending 5 million covering their every-move.    I'm seeing the end of Goodfellas here with helicopters, double-agents, people infiltrating the local PTA all to find out that some lady was sending messages to Moscow with information like "looks like Senator Obama will announce his intentions to run for President"

So if I were the CIA and Eric Holder I wouldn't think that this is the end and I think it's time that they start checking out some of the chicks working over at FD's, maybe they need volunteers

Forget Golden Showers.

I have a guy I know who I play touch-football with once per year he's a friend of a friend and a good dude. After the first year of playing he was dubbed Golden-Arm Lou because unlike the rest of us he could throw a spiral for 25 yards and he is a lefty. His arm is 5, his decision making is a 3 and his mobility is a 2. See the misconceptions was that Lou always played QB because of the golden-arm but really he has no touch what-so-ever and his arm has been overrated for years. He's not nearly the QB we made him out to be and if you ask him to defend anything other than the deep-fryer it will mean your team stands to lose 7-0.
The issue is that it took a few years but everybody realizes that Golden Arm Lou actually is a terrible QB. This issue is how do you not have the guy with the nick-name Golden Arm be the QB especially if he can't help out on any other offensive position. So instead of crossing this bridge we took the tunnel and we just we don't ask him to play anymore. He usually shows up when the game is on the way and we always come up with some excuse but it's probably obvious to him since now everybody calls him Golden Shower Lou and somehow it fits him. But we digress
The point is that Lou is a terrible QB and that Bud Lite is a terrible Lite beer. But Lou can deep fry anything and he's a really nice guy so there is enough reason to invite him to watch the superbowl every-year we just don't ask him to play in our stupor-bowl.

Like the redeeming qualities in Lou, Budweiser came out with Bud Lite Honey Wheat. This beer is absolutely delicious and it blows some other wheat-beers out of the water all on 110 calories. Honestly it's shocking that an American mega-brewery could pull this off because up until this I would have said that Budweiser should stick to what they know- the red white and blue can, a couple of Clydesdales and a few good Superbowl commercials and leave the specialty beers to somebody else. I mean Bud Lime tastes like piss flavored seltzer, Bud Ice tastes like mold flavored seltzer and even Bud Lite tastes like seltzer flavored seltzer.

But I would have made a terrible Bud market planner because they shocked me when all of a sudden they came up with the Golden Wheat. Maybe it's the Inbev connection or the fact that they lost some market share after the last Bud Bowl but they finally got one right.

It's a refreshing beer, done totally right with no short-cuts, no water-down taste and no seltzer PLUS you can get a six-pack for $6.99.

So the next time you are deep-frying something realize that Lou has probably deep-fried anything from a turkey to a pig but he also doesn't wash his hands after he takes a leak so crack open a Golden Wheat and hope it can burn away the bacteria.

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Hello Mr Toe

Some people are blessed with great skin, others with great hair while some of have a great smile. Then there are a few of us who have fat thighs, a shitty haircut and pimples on our asses but at least we can hang our hats on the fact we have nice feet...
Well that isn't true either. Ugly feet isn't the greatest curse but it does become problematic when you wear flip-flops all summer long. I am not talking homeless-feet but it's pretty close cause when you stare down it t looks like a rabid-squirrel has been gnawing on my toes. Between the bunions, ingrown nails, dried skin, yellow nails, red bumps and general stench it is not just a bit embarrassing in public.
So a few years ago I tried to do something about it and was convinced to go get a pedicure to at least beautify them. Well when the pedicure-ist looked down, I am convinced she threw up and swallowed it. This is somebody who handles feet for a living and the look on her face was as if she had seen a war-victim and she dumped a bottle of industrial bleach over 'em before she dared work them

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the Bachelor

The Decision

Yesterday I knew what it felt like to be a chick.  I'm not one for reality TV although I will watch the occasional episode of So You Think You Can Dance but I've luckily never been pulled in by the romance shows like the Bachelorette, Rock of Love of the one with Flava Flav..that is until yesterday. 

Yesterday I became a woman, I sat through 1 hour of the biggest hype job this side of the Mushroom Cloud over Detroit as a handsome, rich, athletic, 25 year old entrepreneur  decided who he would spend the rest of his days with.  I watched as hearts were broken, songs were sung and mementos burned in effigy, I watched as thousands of people sat with baited breath hung on every word of a man who was born a year after Madonna humped the floor doing Like a Virgin for the MTV Video Music Awards.

For 2 years the Bachelor has been talking not-so-secretly about leaving his ex to bring it to a chick from a bigger city with a chick with bigger tits.   Everybody who has seen this marriage knew it would't last especially when you consider he was only 18 when they tied the knot.   Everybody knew that his ex couldn't give him what he wanted and that he would eventually leave we just hoped he wouldn't.    His ex could offer him comfort but no bright lights and she kept begging him for a ring which he had promised but never gotten her.   She would have been OK to hold out for it, as long as he would just stick around and hold her through the lonely winter nights.   But he had checked out mentally a long time ago and it was obvious that her little city was no match for the bright-lights of New York City, South Beach or Los Angeles

 Well for two years everybody has been courting him from afar, throwing bouquets at him, winking at him in public and showering him with admiration.  This was all sort of innocent flirting but when the show officially started on July 1^st the thirty some-odd contestants were paired down to six and the flirting turned into heavy-petting, the heavy petting turned into blatant groping and before soon it escalated in a six way orgy with the Bachelor along with his two buddies getting fellatio on a national stage by six suitors.

Well yesterday was the culmination of all the hand-jobs, blow-jobs and rim-jobs during a one-hour special where the Bachelor revealed which of the six suitors would get the red-rose.      The sad thing is that the group waiting for the rose were all highly successful in their own right and all individuals who have never had to grovel for anything before so this was all new for them.  But hey this is reality TV and everybody wants 15 minutes even if it means you could wind up standing there like some down-on-your-luck loser. 

Well I sat there (along with some 50 million other people) and watched as the Bachelor turn down five of the six suitors and hand his rose to slick-haired tanned older looking snake from Miami which   made the him easily the most hated person in his home town. He was so hated he surpassed another formerly married man took everything out of his house in the middle of the night and moved to Baltimore where he found love with a convicted criminal.

 Now it was a rating-bonanza for everybody involved in the broadcast which started hours before the actual show and went well into the night with the producers bringing in a group of experts in relationships. The issue was that there was no journalistic integrity as half the experts performed their own Jenna Jameson impression on the Bachelor while the other half of the experts killed him for his self-Indulgence.

Is there anybody willing to give me back this hour of my life???

I've been thinking about watching a re-run of Dancing with the Starts tonight at 9PM EST

So we have some must-watch TV tonight at 9pm when LeBron James finally graces the world with his decision which has been in the making for about 2 years.  

Regardless of what happens the following is abundantly clear

-          The NBA hasn't had this much press since Jordan retired.   Every ESPN show leads off with something about LeBron whether it's PTI, SportCenter or Mike and Mike.  It's the only thing they talk about.    ESPN Radio has a nightly show called the 'LeBron watch', the NY tabloids have had LeBron's face on the back-cover every day for a month.

-          This special tonight will certainly get a higher rating that just about any NBA game ever gets, higher than anything the NHL has ever done and probably better than anything the Knicks have ever seen including the runs to the finals

-          The Knicks even if they don't' get him have supposedly sold out their season-tickets already.   Now this is not confirmed by any stretch but my buddy Norm Zang heard this from a guy who heard it on the radio

-          Whichever team LeBron picks we know it will leave 4 other teams i shambles as their entire plan has been foiled (we're not taking the Clippers seriously).    The funny thing is that if he stays in Cleveland it'll be the best thing for the NBA as it's free-agency thing is a total sham but will also make everybody look like a bunch of aholes since that just means he's been pulling everybody's chain for the last six weeks.  

 

We do have one question.   LeBron decided to make the announcement at a Greenwich CT Boys and Girls club which immediately led everybody to think that he's choosing the Knicks since it's around the corner from their training facility.   Regardless if this is the case we at TOR have another question.  If there is a place anywhere where a Boys and Girls Club doesn't need the publicity it would be the one in Greenwich.    If Lebron had any heart he would have done this in the inner-city YMCA somewhere, not the one Boys and Girls club in the entire country which has red-carpeting, extra large parking spaces for Escalades and golden toilet bowls.

 

Anyway, I got this email from a buddy and it puts it better than I could ever.  The writer is not a TOR reader (as far as we know)

no matter who he picks, lebron is a classless, gutless, self-centered, egotistical, sickening child who needs to get slapped down.  i would like him to be MY gutless classless child, but still.  this is all entirely weak.  this is not what sports is supposed to be about.  this is exactly why i've said that, at times, i want nothing to do with him.  basketball blows because it has ceased to be about teams, jerseys.  it's about writing checks to collect individuals.  baseball and football have systemic free agency problems as well, but not like this.  those sports still require teams.  even the yankees.

 

anyway, here's my breakdown:  his best talent choice is chicago (young stud PG, great big men), followed by miami (no supporting cast), then NJ (Brook Lopez, Devin Harris, their rookie, and cap space). 

 

if he wants to make the risky choice and chase true greatness...legendary status, he picks NY.  not an ideal roster, but not awful, and some space to make another move or two.  he'd get to live it up in NYC.  if he brought a title, it would probably go down as the most amazing run of all time, in any sport.  and if he's truly competitive at all he makes this choice.  and if he's truly competitive at all, he sees bosh and wade as a challenge and decides to take amare as his wingman and go to battle and slay all the other dragons.

 

he's not going to cleveland.  there's people speculating that an hour-long special to stab cleveland is inconceivable.  and that's somewhat true.  but here's why i think he's not going back home.  he's spent 2 years at least idly daydreaming here and there about where he could go.  he's spent 2 years answering questions about free agency.  after all that, nobody goes back.  think about your own experiences.  once you send some resumes out and think about where you might go, you're done.  you've mentally checked out  eventually, you're dying to leave your current job.  you don't spend time thinking about possibilities to then decide you're going to stick with the status quo.  he was psychologically done with cleveland midway through last season and his performance in the playoffs proved it.  add in delonte west banging your mom and that's a wrap.  and moreover, you don't need an hour-long show to say you love cleveland/akron.  held in CT no less.  you need an hour-long show to declare where you're going, then explain to your loyal fanbase why you're going and why it was so difficult to choose.

 

the wildcard:  he could sign a short deal in miami -- maybe one, two or three years -- to collect some rings just to do it.  just because it would be historic and fun.  then he could fly the coop and try to do it himself.  i don't see him signing a full deal in miami because that's just a cheap, uncompetitive thing to do.  it's not what a "king" would do.  i just can't see lebron riding shotgun for any extended amount of time.  and if the plan all along was to play with his buddies on a dream team, wouldn't the announcement be a joint three-way announcement, just as it was conceived?  but who knows who we're dealing with anymore

 

 

 

 

condition this

As the mercury level hit triple digits yesterday I think we all took a step back and erased any thought of a pleasant summer.     I love the fall and spring weather but this summer stuff is for the dogs.   What makes the NYC summers so unpleasant is the fact that you have nothing but stagnant air which when combined with rotting garbage, sweaty people and the general stench of the homeless makes the entire experience almost completely repugnant.    Add to all of this the fact that with the service cuts on the MTA you are standing on the platform for longer periods of time and the commute home goes from hell to hotter-than-hell.

The only thing I read this morning was that Con-Ed was experiencing peak energy usage which was greater than they have ever have had to before so I think everybody is expecting a serious brown-out here at some point

What I do wonder though is how much of this heat is man-made.. now I'm not talking about green-house gasses per-se but rather how much of the heat is pumped into the streets from air-conditioners.   Have you ever stood outside of an air conditioner; it's like standing in front of a heat-lamp.   Now imagine 10 million people all blasting their AC's out into the streets and I wonder how much hotter the city actually gets by this man created heat

The World Cup

Soccer

I have to admit that I have really gotten into the world-cup again.   I've watched about half the games in the first rounds and almost every game since and it's become abundantly clear that the US will need to address the following few things if they hope to be competitive in 2014

They need to get rid of that coach for the following reasons.

-          although I know he motivated the team but when you have your kid playing on the team it feels like Little League baseball and the world-cup is the major leagues

-          Against Ghana after running up and down the field for 120 minutes he never used his last substitutions to get some fresh legs in there.  Even I know that at some point you're getting diminishing returns when your players are completely exhausted.  Don't talk to me about penalty kicks because you need to get there first.

  

-          You can't fall behind and hope to catch up every single round especially in a long tournament with world-class competition.   At some point you have to be aggressive early and play from ahead for a while..which leads to

-          The US team needs to find, import build, buy, grow or steal some forwards.  It is blatantly obvious that our front line cannot compete with the world class talent on these European and South American teams.   They don't have anybody who is fast or strong.  Their strikers are horrible.   You know when your best scorer is a midfielder that you have to rethink your strategy.  Whatever happened to Freddy Adu?

-          Somebody go down to Arizona and reverse those immigration laws immediately and get some Mexican and Guatemalan kids into futball uniforms with a big USA flag plastered to the front of it.   At the same time maybe it's time to shut the Canadian border as we have plenty of hockey players…I think.

We all know that Soccer will never be anything more than the fourth sport in this country and people will point to this as to why we cannot win a World-Cup.   This is total trash fourth or fifth place still means you can get a ton of viewers.   Playing soccer is immensly popular amongst kids so it's not like they aren't being exposed to it.    If Soccer is the fourth of fifth best sport than track and Field has to be the 10^th  and downhill bobsled has to be #1000 and the US Olympic team does quite well in that.      Of course it will never be as popular as the NFL or MLB but there are 300,000,000 people in the USA while a lot of the countries who do well in the World Cup have less than 10% of that population.    The way I see it you only need one-in-ten kids to be interested to have the same amount of kids to pull from as other countries.   USA soccer should be investing in youth programs with the internet, satellite TV etc it's about time we start getting some good futball in this country on TV because you know our kids know how to watch TV which is the first step to getting interested and eventually good.    I'm convinced that if the World Cup was every 2 years the US would be more competitive because this country does get into it for big events.  It's just hard to follow a sport when you are watching the equivalent of the Santa Fe River Dogs vs. the Bakersfield Blaze.   I would like to watch good futball it's just hard to find and hard to find a team to root for.

But most importantly they need a coach who can teach our players to act because it's very obvious that if you can't grab your leg in pain when a guy slides 10 feet away from you, you'll never compete on the big stage.

I need instructions for these instructions

Consumer items which are need some assembly should come clearly labeled with levels of difficulty. I am envisioning a color coded system with green being your run-of-the-mill IKEA bedframe, yellow being a home-entertainment set and red being NASA level space-ship building. I tried to put together a running stroller which when you buy from Amazon you would assume could be put together fairly easily as there is nothing in the instructions which mentions anything about needing a degree in mechanical engineering.

No I'm a 34 year old college educated guy who has put together a ton of things (granted most of them of the IKEA variety) but when you start looking over directions and realize you need a second set to decipher the first set, it's going to be a long day. These directions may as well asked you to build the item from scratch because this humongous box had more pieces than a LEGO set and a 10 page instruction manuel
As if the loose pieces and the War and Peace instruction manual isn't intimidating enough, every square inch of free space in the manuel is plastered with warnings saying things like "failure to properly adjust the quick release mechanism cam result in serious injury or death".
Nothing makes you feel less comfortable than knowing the health of your child is dependent on you decipher the code in an instruction manuel which could double as a may to find the Holy Grail.

Examples on page 5

-Move the quick release cam lever so it curves away from the wheel (fig 9.2).
-Insert the wheel between the fork blades so that the axle seats firmly at the top of the tips of the fork dropouts.
-Holding the quick release cam level in the open position with your right hand as shown in figure 11.1 tighten the tension adjusting nut with you left hand until it is finger tight against the fork dropout.

lit's as if I picked up the directions for building a space-ship not a consumer item but it gets better. Long gone are the instructions like push the part clearly labeled A into the slot clearly labeled B now you have to know the difference between a stump axle and a cam shaft.

But it gets better

- while pushing the wheel firmly to the top of the slots in the fork dropout, and at the same time centering the wheel rim in the fork, move the quick release cam level upwards and swing into the FULLY CLOSED position (fig 9 & 12). The lever should now be parallel to the fork blade and curved horizontally towards the wheel.

At the this point I am ready to take a hammer to the entire thing but then you get the real kicker

-to apply enough clamping force, you should wrap your fingers around the fork blade for leverage, and the quick release cam lever should leave a clear imprint in the palm of your hand

WHAT???? You want me to press so hard that I have 'Ironman Stroller permanently tattooed onto my palm? In all this technical mumbo-jumbo and warnings of child death the entire thing comes down to whether you can clearly see an imprint??

There is a reason people don't assemble their own cars, because if there is this much fear of bodily harm nobody would be driving anywhere above 10mph.

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Just TOO reachable

In a world of technology it has become impossible to go incognito anymore. Although I have long ago lost the ability to judge cell-phone usage, I am one who has seen what being connected 24-7 is all about and how much it can ruin your day. Some of technology is good while the rest of it sucks. Just yesterday I had 4 voice-mails... Why in God's name somebody would leave you a message when a text message will more than suffice is beyond me.
My dilemma with voice mail is how quickly I have to respond. When I see a call coming in which I send to voice-mail I feel like a ticking alarm goes off. Everybody knows that you saw the call come in, the missed call message and the voice-mail icon so the excuse of 'I didn't see it' doesn't ring true. It's as if the blinking red-light on the BB is designed just to mock me into having a conversation I don't want to have. The problem is that some people feel like the missed call isn't enough and will follow it up with a voicemail and then others will even send you a follow up text and just to be sure also send you an email, knowing full well that each of these are received on the same device.

Three forms of communication with the same exact message as you know the voice-mail will inevitably be of the 'call me back variety' which is a complete waste of band-with, air-time and real-time and if it's not of that mundane variety it is bound to be a request for a favor of some sort. I have done so many favors in my life that it must be time that I can abstain from them for a while. You know when somebody needs a pain-in-the-ass favor they feel bad about doing it over text or email, feeling it is something they should ask personally which to me makes the favor that much bigger pain in the ass. Not only do I have to move an armoire but I also have to have a whole bullshit conversation as you find the internal fortitude to ask me.
So the next time you want a favor, text me so I can hit you back with "sorry gotta do something with the baby" and not feel guilty about it.
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The office of

as part of the expose on the pedophile priests by the media, the heat has been coming down on Pope Benedict and TOR has no sympathy for him or anybody involved directly in abuse or indirectly in its disgusting cover-up.

But we aren't blogging about pervert priests today but rather about the position Pope Benedict held when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger. As the head of the office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he had the official edict to investigate and punish the priests who committed the most heinous crimes: soliciting sex during confessions, homosexuality, pedophilia and bestiality. Are you kidding me??? You know your entire moral system is f'd up when you equate bestiality with homosexuality so the entire office cannot ever be taken seriously as a moral compass.

But what it does do is again link pedophilia with homosexuality which is what in the long run will bring down the Church. The anti-gay thing resonates about as well with the masses as serving brussel sprouts for dessert and the Church would be good to leave this behind as quickly as possible if they want any chance to not become obsolete in the next century.
I am so sick of these anti-gay crusaders who always seem to be preaching from deep-within the closet yet somehow get away with it under the banner of organized religion. This is the issue when they blame pedophilia on homosexuality when the two have nothing to do with one another. Pedophiles prey on pre- pubescent children left in their care, homosexuality harms nobody.
How a religion which claims it is based on teaching tolerance get away with such blatant hatred, discrimination and violations of dignity is beyond me. There aren't enough levels of hell for those who commit these acts or for those who protect them from the wrath of the law and as they rot there I hope some old man in power comes to diddle their winkies against their will..


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