AverageAhole.com

A few years ago I came up with a business model. It was a business model based on criticizing other business models. Basically I designed a professional outlet to bitch and complain and tell people what I think. It was going to be called AverageAsshole.com


The thought-stream behind it was that I am just that: an average asshole and sometimes you don't need complex market research to tell you an idea is a bad one. Basically the "average asshole" would have told you that your idea was flawed and had you asked him, you would have saved millions.

First of all you don’t get more average than me: I got average grades, I am completely average looking, I have never won the D-Cup in our fantasy football league, I went to a state college and I have an average blog

But the real reason I should run this place is because I have great vision when analyzing average situations.

For example, a few years ago there was a fairly big consumer website called Pets.com. It was a one-stop website for all your pet needs, from food, to pet toys and those annoying little jackets they make dogs wear. I remember distinctly thinking “This will never work, I have had dogs my entire life and you get new dog-food when you turn the box and realize it’s empty. People will never plan far enough in advance to go get a box of cat food three weeks before it is finished."

Plus the above-obvious fact that there are a ton of other places where you can get pet food while getting a ton of other stuff like toilet-paper and dish soap likes target.com, amazon.com and freshdirect.com. What they thought might be their ideal audience is an audience that wouldn’t go to a place to only get pet-food and their selection of other items didn’t compare to what other companies offered.

Long story short.. Pets.com fails miserably and there I am standing there thinking: why didn’t they just ask a few Average Joe’s to see if there this was something they would have an interest in and whether they would even use it. Take a Friday night, invite 20 buddies for free pizza and beer and kick the idea around, it would have been the best $200 they ever spent.

Of course there are a ton of other businesses bound to fail, like the bagel shop in my hometown which I commented would fair cause there was no place to park in front of the joint. Bagels and coffee are an in-and-out place where you want to throw the car in park and be back in 20 seconds on your way to work. This place closed down in about a week, again ask me before hand and this is the most obvious fault in your business plan.

So I’m opening the doors for AverageAsshole.com again and invite you to submit your terrible business propositions to me at TakeOnRighetti.blogspot.com and I will tell you why they suck!!!!!

(then again the Average Asshole may very well tell investors in AverageAsshole.com that this is not a money making enterprise, which will only cast the tortured businessmen into the sea)

Rules of Engagment (part 3)

If you are going to post two parts of a Maxim article that didn't get published back in 2002, you may as well post the final one too.
Part 1 and Part 2 can be found here


Part 3 is here

Hanging with a handful of college girls the other night seemed fairly interesting especially because their motto during this Spring Break trip was “what happens in New York, Stays in New York”. Well what doesn’t happened in New York should not have been made to sound like something that might not be repeatable outside of New York. First of all the nastiness of trying to find a bar which doesn’t card and gives these chicks a somewhat decent time is one thing but then when they expect me to do all the entertaining it becomes painfully obvious why these chicks are spending their Tuesday morning recovering from their Hangovers while sitting in History Class while I’m spending my Tuesday Morning recovering from my hangover sitting at work. Actually that is a horrible example but what are you gonna do? The fact is that world experience does have some more value than originally meets the eye, I’ve been blessed that I’ve seen a few places and met some interesting people throughout my life but these girls found the joys of smoking up and going pumpkin picking a great pastime. One was telling me about this great book she just picked up called “Walden”. Then I spent the rest of the night hearing about her boyfriend and how he was going to get a covershot for Snowboarder magazine. Though I ride, I’m proud to say I’ve never picked up a single issue of Snowboarder magazine. The problem is a college girl is like snowboarding, fun to ride but not a whole lot of interesting articles in between the pictures.



I know one thing about me which is that I never go into a meeting with a new person without at least having 3 or 4 sure-fire stories in my back pocket, something that you can whip out at moments notice just to give you an opportunity to keep the conversation light and interesting, would it be wrong to ask some of these chicks to have something prepared also?






The point to this whole thing is that I know I’m not all that bright but that’s cool, I have done worse and I’ll do better, but whenever you’re having Italian-American food while playing conversational ping-pong with a 19 year old you know you’re in for a good time. I got a set of blue balls, a corkscrew and a headache to prove it.

THE GWB Bridge, from President Washington to President Bush

In what could be his last act as president, President George W. Bush’s handlers are trying to rename the famed George Washington Bridge which spans the Hudson River connecting Northern New Jersey to New York City. The George Washington Bridge has often been referred to as the “GWB” and Mr. Bush is said to have made an inquiry to have the Bridge’s name changed to the “GWB for Freedom Bridge” an obvious play on Mr. Bush’s initials.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino on Tuesday when asked about the push to change said “In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, we believe renaming the bridge for the men and women who risked their lives to rush up the World Trade Center seems like a fitting tribute, since this is the most visible arm of the New York Port Authority, we find a tribute to the freedom the Port Authority officers fought for when they went up into those towers.” Local politicians on both the heavily Democratic New Jersey’s Bergen County and New York County are up in arms saying that the bridge represents local culture and has its name from then General George Washington who spent months fighting the British armies from outposts on the Palisades.

Tonya Townson of Englewood Cliffs New Jersey speaking with local CBS news channel 2 said that changing the name of the bridge “was an insult to everything that President Washington stood for…by changing the name of the bridge from a great president to the initials of this incompetent fool”.
Not everybody had the same take on the possible renaming; Manhattan Resident Anthony Lasorto said that “Just like President Washington, President Bush is a general who fought for freedom against threats, imperial and terror based. I think it’s a fitting tribute to two leaders of this country.”

A name change like this would not be unprecedented by the Port Authority, in 2002 the PA officially renamed Newark International Airport to Newark Liberty Airport as a tribute to the fallen heroes of the 9/11 tragedies. Naming rights for the Bridge are held exclusively with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Repeated calls to the Port Authority have not been returned.

Rules of Engagment (part 2)

After the success the recent TOR post which looked back at a Maxim article piece I wrote 6 or 7 years ago which was basically left to die, I decided to publish part 2 today.

Thios was written about 8 years ago.. all names have been changed to protect the innocent

Whenever you date one of the most important decisions is deciding where to go for food. My go-to option has always been Sushi. Its not overly filling, its usually kind of quaint and Saki bombs are fun in almost any setting. Well let me tell you something, when a chick response to your Sushi suggestion with “I’ve never had that, you’ll have to order for me” it tells you something.

This happened to me once, and after that reaction I suggested Thai and even thought about going for sea-food but by the look of it, I wasn’t sure that she even realized that there was a country Thailand. Never date a chick whose only foreign experience is that kid Sweeny Patel she knew in Elementary school. She tells me she usually sticks to stuff she knows and usually chows on Italian, American or Italian-American. God can you stick a fork in my penis next time I decide to go this route.

On the same subject, I once met this girl in North Carolina who tells me about this fledging modeling career she’s been working on, First of all my thought is that models below the mason-dixon can be fairly average looking broads cause this girl was about as close to being a Calvin Klein Model as I am.

The thing that got me with this one is that she has never been on a plane, not because she’s afraid but because she’s a hick, not once, not to Disney World, not to Mexico, not to Daytona Beach. Actually the kicker wasn’t that she’d never been on a plane and that she worked at the Airport Holiday Inn but that she had never been further North than West Virginia and that she went to Washington DC once but didn’t have the guts to actually venture outside of Northern Virginia. God that’s like going to see Nightmare on Elm Street wearing earplugs and Raybands

Rules of Engagment (part 1)

Was going through a piece I wrote about 6 years ago which I submitted to Maxim magazine but was denied (or at least never heard from them again).   kind of an interesting piece I wrote before I started to date Mrs. Righetti..

all names and places have been changed to protect the innocent

It was a three piece article entitled "rules of engagement" about being a single dude in NYC.

this is part 1

Let me tell you something, I went out with this other chick a few weeks back and listening to our conversation was like Craig Killborn interviewing Darva Konger. You’re not really sure Darva Konger has anything of value to say and you’re not real comfortable having Craig Killborn dictating the conversation. We hang out for a couple of hours and it was like a game of table tennis without the Chinese guy slapping down a “riser” or a “slurve” to mix up the fun. Back and forth, forth and back, it was exhausting, we kind of got into this rhythm where I would tell a funny anecdote about my dog and she would respond with “oh my dog did this and that…..blah blah”. Then it was my turn “oh that’s funny because my buddy once took a shit in the bathtub” and she would come back with “my brother peed in the bathtub when we were young” and I would say that “I once held my piss in for 8 straight hours and then it hurt for 2 weeks every time I urinated” to which she told me about her urinary tract infection which she thought was just bad Jalepenos.

I’m not saying what I had to say had any value but this ping-pong conversation is awful to read about and worse to have been a part of. Its like we signed up for a Haiku class, you can’t ever say anything more than three lines and it has to have perfect iambic pentameter. It was understood that neither party could at any time take control of the conversation, just because we were trying to feel each other out. We had made an unconscious decision to piece-meal this conversation together without either one taking more than 50% of the conversation, its like playing Risk with yourself, you’ll never really win, you’ll never really lose but you’ll spend a whole lot time wondering if you could be doing something better at that time.