Map Quest

Although I love the IPhone I do have some issues with it and they are not all related to the fact that out of the 100,000,000 apps available there are less than 1% which are even worth downloading if they'd be free.

I can't seem to get off of the fact that everytime I make a phone call the person on the other side spends half their time asking me to repeat myself and the other half of the time asking if there is still a person on the other side of the connection.   For a computer it's great, for a phone it's about as reliable as a the pull-out method.   Now in this age and time, talking on the phone just isn't all that important but having the ability to at least make a phone-call and not have the call drop 50% of the time would be nice.   I don't care how many blue colored maps they show you on those terrible commercials with the dude from wedding crashers because apparently if you zoom in enough you'll notice a giant vortex over any area that I frequent.  It's like I'm walking around with a rain-cloud over my head the entire time.  

 

The more I think of it, maybe I should have just gotten the IPod Touch

 

sweep this

Street Parking in NYC is the kind of challenge other cities know nothing about.    First there is the physical act of parking which is more bumper-cars than anything else as love-taps are not just accepted but completely expected when people parallel park on the streets.    Add to it that there are anywhere between 1 and 4 fire-hydrants per block whose 10 foot aura swallows up some of the most valuable pieces of real-estate this side of the Upper East Side.   Then the city has eliminated tons of street parking spots by adding those cursed muni-meters and allowed one giant highrise after another from coming into neighborhoods instantly boosting the total population –and in turn the amount of cars- exponentially.   But still the bigger issue for the drivers in NYC are the street-sweeping rules which can be so badly designed that even a Zen-Master would get eaten up by the frustration not to mention the Gregorian calendar necessary to figure out which dates opposite side of the street parking is suspended.      

In my neighborhood they sweep one side of the street every Thursday and the other side every Fridays. The issue here is obvious to anybody who has ever played musical chairs.   What it means is that people have all week to find a parking spot for Thursday Morning BUT the entire neighborhood is searching for a parking spot every Thursday Night in anticipation for the Friday Morning Street-Sweep.     I have literally spent hours of my life circling the block, my blood pressure rising with each turn around the block.   

If I could get Mayor Bloomberg ear, I'd give him the TOR law-changes for parking in NYC

-          Don't put oposite street-sweeping on consecutive days on any given street, spread them out so that the residents have a few days to find a parking spot.

-          Split up blocks in a neighborhood so that the side that the hydrants are on aren't all scheduled for street-sweeping on the same day.    

-     Blocks that are scheduled for more than one sweeping per week should get cut down to one sweeping per week.

-          Change the law to allow cars to park closer to the hydrant

 

 

Withdrawing the troops

Addiction is tough…breaking the addiction is tougher..

For as long as I remember I wake up and within the first 45 minutes of daylight I will fill my body full of caffeine and then I spend the rest of the day coming off the caffeine high slowly and then banging my body full of again while I slowly come down.

I have often thought that breaking my caffeine addiction would be much tougher than my alcohol addiction.   There are literally days where I feel like Tarzan swinging from one cup to another, constantly making sure my self-medication stays even-keeled.    The problem is that knowing the addiction is so powerful doesn't help when it comes to trying to stop it because the days of going cold-turkey will be so painful.  Non coffee drinkers don't realize the level of irritability that can lead to caffeine withdrawal, the pain starts with a deep dull headache, leads to pain behind the eyes, goes to an itch deep behind my eye balls and finally leads me to want to kick somebody in the groin. 

Now I'm trying to cut down on the intake and so far it's been somewhat successful as I've only had three cups today as I try to cut-back to two-cups with the pure reason that I have a powerful need to break things when I'm not fully caffeinated.

What the hell is that smell??

There is a time in every New Yorkers lives when they are waiting on a platform and a packed train approaches but miraculously the cart that stops in front of you is near empty. You always think you've hit the jackpot with a ton of open seats but don't realize your fate until the doors closed.. you are stuck holding your breath for the next 5 minutes as you realize you are sharing the subway car with the equivalent of a zoo animal and you hope to get out before this lunatic charges you with his winkie out.
I have made the point for many years that the issue of homelessness is not an issue of people not having a roof over their head but rather one of mental illness. NYC like all major metropolitan areas has a huge homeless population who mostly keep to themselves as they fight their inner neurosis. We have shelters but these are just band-aids and the most dangerous ones are never going to use them in good faith anyway. I know the safety nets in this country are very low but they do exist and any 'normal' person who is out of work still finds a way to get his assistance which obviously not ideal still offer some level of normalcy.
Any homeless person who is sleeping on a park bench or pissing on himself should not be walking the streets they are dangerous to themselves and to the rest of the city. This is the reason that chronic homelessness should be handled with mass institutionalization. .
The issue I have is when the animals start mixing with the visitors at the zoo. Not only do you have fears of them shoving you in front of a moving subway car but even if their actions aren't hostile they are often unsanitary and disgusting.
But the danger isn't what I'm most concerned about, it's the odor which is so distinct you could pick it out of a smell lineup. I'm not sure what it is but the combo is some mix of piss, sweat, subway grime and decaying flesh and it is beyond offensive, it is downright dangerous. They tell you that inhaling mold is dangerous and second-hand smoke has proven to be a carcinogen well the smell of a homeless person should be covered by the clean air act.
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Being Cheap aint easy

Being cheap isn't easy..

I'm not talking about being monumentally cheap like separating double-plied toilet paper or not flushing your toilet to save on water-costs.   What I'm talking about is the little things you need to do to basically not be taken advantage of.    See if you feel like you have been wronged on a $6 credit-card charge you have to go through and dispute the charge and spend hours fighting it or if you find out after you walk out of a store you were given incorrect change but the difference is less than a dollar you may just eat it knowing the rise in your bloodpressure isn't worth the $0.60.   

There is a break-point where you may think it is worth the dispute see the other day I bought two items in a big department store (we'll keep the name of the store out of this blog to protect the innocent).   I found a coupon for  15% off any single item so obviously I used it to take the discount off the more expensive one ($85 turned into $72.25). I was happy and left with a big stupid grin on my face realizing that without much effort I just got a free lunch.

 The issue is that after bringing it home I realize that the item I got the discount on isn't something I will be able to use and am planning on returning it and here comes my dillema (Anybody who has the cheap-bone will see the issue.)   The problem is that I'm sure they will only give me a credit for the amount I paid ($72.25) which means I will have spent full price on the other item insteady of shiftin the coupon to item#2 and giving me the 15% off on that one.   There is no way their CPU scanner is sophisticated enough to give me a discount on the $50 item ($8.50) and credit that to me.

So this is my dilemma; do I bring back both items.. return them both and then repurchase the $50 item using the 15% coupon OR do I just return the one item and basically 'lose" $8.50?   I know this math is complicated and I'm happy to explain it to you later.

Now if both items were still in the box then I'd probably do this but the $50 has already been installed in my house which means I'd have to un-install it and put it back in the box..return it..buy it back and reinstall it in my house?

As if this place didn't bend you over enough

I'm convinced Ikea is designed to break the mentality of the American man. First they throw their Communist colors and architecture in your face but that's not the issue. I'm also not talking about the directions which at first seem simple but after 3 hours of putzing around with an Allen Wrench you have some up with some dresser shaped like something out of Stalingrad. I'm also not talking about the obstacle course you have to run through in order to return a simple item with lines like you see in Siberia for a loaf of bread.. What I'm also not referring to are those god-awful meatballs made from bison or that hormone infected salmon. I am not even referring to the cest-pool they disguise as the ball-house thing for the kids designed to kill our kids.
What makes this place impossible is that once they walk you through their rat-maze with their little paper measuring tape and red-square pencils measuring crap in centimeters and liters like the footsoldiers they expect you to be they get you to the last spot where you pick-up your Made in China furniture and now you realize your screwed like your getting ambushed by the Viet-Cong. See there is nothing in the showrooms which indicate whether something in the warehouse is old out. So you spend 4 hours picking up crap made of plank-board but when you come to pick it up they don't have them in your color or your style. so after you spent the good part of a morning shopping you leave empty handed, aggravated and with a serious stomach ache.

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The face mute

Although it is great there is a MAJOR design flax in the Iphone. With the touch-screen as a keypad typos are inevitable, incorrect word choice is expected and most emails need to be left open for interpretation. The issue I have though is not typing related but rather facial related, see when you are talking on the IPhone the touch screen is your keypad and when you are cursed with a head that protrudes out then you constantly bang up against the 'keys'. What happens to me is that when I lean slightly against the phone, my face presses the mute key. Forget Fat-Fingering this is an issue of Fate Facing. How about Steve Jobs stops trying to invent a smaller IPod nano and focus instead on a face-guard
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Uncle Junior

Living in Brooklyn people will always ask you how close you are to the Brooklyn Bridge, if you ever eat at Nathan's or ride the cyclone or if you have ever been to Bed-Stuy or East New York.   I can see the reason for all those questions but what I can't figure out is why everybody always asks you if you ever eat at Junior's.  The food is terrible, unimaginative and pricey and that's only half of it.

The reason's I despise the tourist trap is many..

First of all although it is famous for its cheesecake it is not even close to the best cheesecake you'll ever have but that in itself isn't the problem.

See Juniors is also a restaurant serving your standard chain-restaurant fare including burgers, iceberg salads and chicken fingers and like any good tourist trap the prices are ridiculously overpriced.  Today the people who frequent Juniors are the same people that would eat at the Olive Garden but even this isn't the reason to hate the place since stupid people have to eat

When you actually eat something off the completely uninteresting menu you find that the food is some of the worst one the planet you realize that this place is living off a reputation from some tour-book because nobody would ever eat here twice.. but even that is something I can look past.  

What makes Juniors the closest place to hell-on-earth (next to IKEA) is its location.  Now I'm not talking about it being convenient as it's fairly centrally located about a mile east off the Manhattan Bridge on Flatbush Avenue but instead my hatred comes from something else.    See Juniors is not only a glorified tourist trap where people will pay $18 for a terrible burger, wash it down with a coke and then top off their meal with a 1000 calorie desert but the front of the restaurant is a goddamn parking lot because every imbecile who will actually frequent this place thinks it's their right to double and triple-park all over Flatbush avenue.    Driving down the roughly 1 mile of Flatbush Avenue from the Bridge to the crossing with Atlantic Avenue is already one of the least pleasant experiences on earth with potholes the size of basketball courts and homeless people the size of blimps but add to that the fact that four lanes turn into one during the evening-dinner rush and I think Bloomberg's got enough reason to dump this dump into the East River.. there is no self-respecting Brooklynite who will miss it.

Disney Owns Everything......everything in your blood

Just saw a front-page headline in the Daily News about the first ever murder in a Disney built town..   Residents are in shock as they have seen very little crime in this small family resort-type town where people leave their doors open.

I'm just surprised it took this long for somebody to go nuts in Walt Disney's World.    I've been there three times in my life and wanted to stab myself in the penis with a Mickey themed ice-pick the entire time.    You can't possibly expect people to live with a smile on their face 24-7, I can't even bare to smile 24 minutes out of seven day week.    See we don't live in Michael Moore's Canada where people can walk around with guns and others feel safe.   This is the USA where we seemingly shoot people for sport basically because they are happy and we are not.

Now I wonder if you are allowed to carry a gun in to theme park how much more fun it could be.  Magic Mountain while dodging bullets from an uzi's, Epcot center with grenades hurled at you while you canoe through those miserable countries and Donald Duck standing at the end with a nine-millimeter pointing at your head.

See Disney makes people crazy, just look at the grown adults who trek down to Florida sporting some T-shirt with Mikey Mouse on it.  This about those psychopaths and imagine who is willing to live there.   Forget the mouse-ears, all these people should get straightjackets as soon as they sign a lease to rent a house in one of these neighborhoods

born on date

My father in law is one of the smartest people I know, he has a knack of keeping this simple and always seems to be able to find the right thing to say without saying too much. Well one of the best things he ever told me is his concept of born on dating when storing shit. See his theory is that when you put something into storage while in the vast majority of times you should have instead thrown the crap out. The issue though is that we all love our crap, they hold memories, were often costly and always seems like something you may need at some point....or at least that's what you tell yourself.
Well my father in law has a great concept and it's simple but perfect. When you put a box down in storage write the date on the outside. If you come back down there in one year and that box hasn't been opened then pick it up and bring it immediately to the dump. Don't open it up because if you do there will be some reason to hold onto it because you'll see a book you think you might read or an ugly sweater you might wear. See if you wait one full year then you have gone through four seasons and you lived fine without it. This avoids throwing out your skis or your bathing suit but keeps you from accumulating shit.


Now he's also got a garage full of shit from 1972 so obviously it's not that easy a concept to work in practice
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The last peaceful place

I am connected 24-7 between the calls and text messages on the IPHone, the emails and BBM on the Blackberry, 3 email addresses, a (dormant) Facebook account and a daily blog not to mention the instant messaging, text messages, MMS's and pigeon I keep in a cage just in case.
The one place though I don't want to be reaches is sitting on the bowl. I cannot comprehend people answering their phones while taking a crap since the toilet might be the last place of solace left but just today a dude had a full conversation mid-strain. I understand the need to multitask but I also had a buddy who separated his retina while dropping a deuce so really I don't like to take chances in case the conversation got heated.

Well the thing that really got me to thinking was that the dude wiped up and flushed in the middle of the conversation so there was no shame taking the call while planted on porcelain.

Plus how do you properly wash your hands unless your on one of those bluetooth thingys.
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Gridlock Righetti

TOR usually doesn't focus on local issues expect ones that directly affect –and annoy- the author.    We try to stay out of local political races, staying away from town ordinances and school and PTA issues but one thing we cannot turn a blind eye to are traffic issues.    After nearly six years of living in Brooklyn, I believe I have come up with the reason for most of our frustration as a borough.   The endless traffic we have to deal with from the four major bridges and one tunnel is completely miserable especially for those of us who live nearby the entrances of them.   I have often wondered aloud why there aren't more police-officers on the streets directing traffic and less of them sitting in their cars talking on their cell-phones.     One of the most maddening examples is the police car which is stationed daily at the entrance of the outbound side of the Brooklyn Bridge.    This car has been stationed parked in the right lane of the bridge since 9/11 and I'm sure the reason is to prevent somebody from detonating a bomb over the bridge but the only practical purpose seems to have is to slow-down traffic on an already exhaustingly overcrowded crossing.    See the cop-car is located on the span, not in front of it so god-forbid there was an attack the would be bomber would already be on the span.    I can't say I know the ins-and-outs of counter-terrorism but it doesn't make sense to set up a TSA metal-detector inside the airplane which becomes operational only after the plane is airborne already.

Spawning like Rabbits

Five Years ago the rabbit wine bottle opener was the gift of the season it was a great contraption which allowed anybody open up a bottle of wine like an expert. The problem was they got too cheap and stayed inoffensive so I honestly got one for Christmas, two for a housewarming and another for my birthday. The gift was great and very useful but nobody needs three of them. Each year there is something and usually it was too expensive the year before but has come to a price point under $100 so it becomes a perfect non-offensive gift
Last year the gift was the cheap digital frame and I must have seen 10 of them exchanged. There was the DVD player a few years ago, the digital camera, the martini glasses... It's like every year the world decides what is the perfect gift and then everybody gets 10 of them.
This year the official gift is going to be the seltzer machine. It's a great little machine which makes bubble water and allows you to add flavors to make your own gingerale or pop and somebody convinced the manufacturer that they just needed to lower the price a little bit and it would be the equivalent of a tickle me Elmo. People will love it but like all these things they won't need 6 of them.

Oh by the way I already own.
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Schlepers

At 34 with a 1 year old kid and full time jobs for both me and the mrs, I have decided that enough is enough. I am never going to schlep my own shit from move to move again. I work too hard, party to little and sleep even less to think about dragging my armoire up and down the steps. I can't bear to ask my friends all of who have families, jobs and responsibilities to break their backs lugging couches up and down the steps and honestly if asking your friends and family to break their backs for your crap isn't enough reason then realize the math doesn't add up:

So for $560 I get 3 dudes and a van to move my crap down 3 flight of stairs and back up another 3. So if I were to do this with the aid of 8 of my buddies it would run me

$100 for a UHaul
$40 for renting those padded blankets
$25 for the insurance
$20.for gas
$20 for waters
$30 for egg and cheeses
$20 for coffee
$60 for beer
$150 for lunch for everybody
$100 to replace the shit they'll break
-------
$565

Not to mention the favors I will now have to return at some point, the bitching I'll have to endure and the sloppiness of the entire event.

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blackfriday

Black Friday in my mind really should be a day to reflect on the gluttony of the day before not a day to shop till you drop but there will inevitably be some 250 pound woman who'll get trampled under the weight of hordes of Christmas shopping and honestly good riddance. See shopping on this day is like deciding to drive through Times Square on your way out of the city, you might get your stated goal accomplished but the level of frustration can't possibly be worth it. The problem is we are a country of sheep and just like the all-you-can eat buffet we will always find ways to gorge ourselves with cheap food, plastic toys or hallmark holidays.
But what kind of total sociopath gets to a Walmart in Ohio at midnight to be first in line to get their christmas shopping started. I have a hard time finding a reason to go shopping the day before Christmas let alone the day after Thanksgiving when I know the crowds will be insane, the deals underwhelming and the smell unbearable. People dumb enough to shop today deserve the stampedes, at least as a survival of the fittest population control
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Boxing

So after you take it up the five-hole from the attorneys, brokers, banks and taxes when selling your house the real fun begins. See somehow you have to move the crap you collected over six years into 25 boxes and hope that nobody drops the one with the stemware in it. See this is the difference between moving in your 20's and moving in your 30's. By the time you have started to accumulate matching plates, a collection of vases and framed pictures and photographs. What this means is that you can't just randomly dump it into a bunch of boxes you found on the stoop and hope to not get back a box of glass-soup.
So you walk over to the UHaul to buy packaging materials and all of a sudden you are confronted with the impossible question of how many boxes you actually need. This is where the box companies could be somewhat helpful because there has to be some formula based on square footage considering the junk in an apartment is mostly predictable (towels, clothes, shoes, plates, TV, pictures etc

They could easily put together some web-based program which spits out how many small, medium and large boxes you need based on the stuff you input. Even if the technology makes it too complicated they could offer a handout with some guidelines . Shoot I'm not asking them reinvent the wheel but at the minimum offer a rough rule of thumb like 5 boxes for every 100square feet of space in your apartment and then you may have a chance but instead you ask and they respond with 'whatever you think'. I realize the guy at the counter probably makes barely over minimum wage and we live in a country where nobody takes pride in what they do but if you are UHaul or Staples wouldn't you want your customers to feel like their needs were satisfied?
Great thanks man this is like walking into an real-estate brokers office asking them for advice about selling your apartment and then telling you to price it however you think.
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closing time..

Nothing makes you feel more like a used up prostitute than when you close on a house.    Now maybe 5 years ago when people were selling their houses for twice what they paid a few years ago things were different but all I know is that now  the net profit can hardly buy you lunch.   The closing goes something like this.

You sit down in a conference room across from the buyers, both parties have a stack of papers high enough to reach the 2^nd floor of your duplex, you proceed to give yourself the worst carpal tunnel syndrome ever with all the bullshit signing.    I honestly feel like Reggie Jackson at a baseball-card signing.

Say you have a sales price of $200,000 after buying your place for $182,000 and you think you will walk away with $18,000 which would be about 10% of your cost price and you are jumping for joy but then you realize there are closing costs and they are the equivalent of an ass-rape.

First they bang you with a 5% broker's fee   

Then they bang you with a 1% flip-tax for your building 

Then they ream you with a 1% city tax   

They they slam you with a 0.4% state tax 

Then there are a couple of random fees  (filing fee, UC fee, title transfer fee, Bank fee, Lien search fee).


Then the lawyers get a hold of you and mind you there are about 10 of them.. Your attorney, the bank attorney, the building attorney, their attorney, the attorney's attorney.

Then they charge you for the UPS charge, the photocopying, the cup of coffee you had while waiting for everybody to show up and there goes your profit.. just like that it has all disappeared into thin air.

it goes something like this

Gross Profit	$18,000
Broker Fee  5%	$10,000
Flip Tax  1%	$2,000
City Tax  1%	$2,000
State Tax  0.4%	$800
UC Filing Fee	$100
Bank filing Fee	$100
Lien Search Fee	$100
Attorney	$1,500
Bank Attorney	$500
Building Attorney	$500
Some chick to drop off a check	$300
Random crap	$98
	$17,998
Net Profit	$2

So when they give you a check you look down and realize the subway cost $2.25 and you think you might have been better off staying home

that song sucked 20 years ago too

As regular TOR readers know, this blog does not have the highest regards for today's music especially the music we are all exposed to from the world of pop-music.   I'm sure that there will be some donkey who will come out and tell me that I know nothing about music and that there is a ton of good modern day stuff out there but whenever I'm in a place which has a pop radio-station on, I'm shocked with how bad the music is.

Just this weekend I heard my 7 year old niece singing along with some terrible Kate Perry about 'going all the way tonight' and I really wonder if they are trying to not just dumb down the next generation but send subconscious messages about becoming some hootch when they get older.

 

Well that in itself can be a TOR blog but honestly it gets worse.   Today I heard some Jay-Z song which uses the background music from Forever Young some miserable techno-pop bunch of diarrhea which came out about 20 years ago.   Never has one song been able to suck so badly that two completely different generations of music-listeners can be corrupted by it's British awfulness.

I guess the genius of Jay-Z is also what I don't understand about it.   He takes some aberration show-tune like the song from Annie and throws some lame lyrics over it about him being the ultimate Yankee fan and the country eats it up like they are at a Waffle House.    The music sucks, the lyrics are worse and the fact that I have to relive 1986 is worse.

 

 

 

 

 

The Rate Me Form

There are a ton of customer-service jobs out there who depend on a customer service survey to help their compensation.    The problem with these surveys are that when you get them in the mail you generally throw them in the trash as it's part of the collection of junk-mail and spam which has totally taken control of our lives.     Now I'm the kind of person who probably would only fill one out if the service was exceptional or if it was terrible but for the average experience I probably couldn't be bothered.        A few weeks ago I brought the car in for an oil-change, tire rotation and inspection and when the service-rep called me to tell me the car was ready he explained that I would be getting a customer-service survey in the mail and that it would mean a lot to him personally if I could fill all 10 some-odd lines out as 'excellent'. 

 Now I wasn't getting open-heart surgery or having an 8 course meal so really 'excellent' would never be a way I would express myself as I tend to reserve this kind of praise for something exceptional.   Quite honestly for an oil-change I really would not ever think of giving a review but the service-rep insisted it was very important and implied that the next time he'd give me a free oil-change. 

What the hell are these things good for if the survey results are bartered on the free market?   There has to be some wonk at the Ford Company somewhere who is getting all these reports back with 'excellent' on every category and has to scratch his head.  To start off with hardly anybody in their right mind would actually fill one of these out and when every category comes back with 'excellent' without fail it's the equivalent of 10,000 votes that pop out in a Chicago election with the return-address being that of the local cemetery.

But my biggest issue is the fact that the rep has called me back three times already to follow up and remind me of the survey.   You wonder why all these car-companies need bail-outs, their service reps are spending their entire day stuffing ballots

Garage Sale

What is more awkward than the few minutes after somebody gives you something you have no interest in.. You try to act like you are even remotely interested and give a couple of lame ooh's and ah's but really you want to stab an icepick into the throat of the giver. See people all think that the thought of the gift is nice what they don't realize it's the thoughtfulness of a gift which is what is nice. If you get somebody a DVD of their favorite movie that is thoughtful, get them a huge DVD rack because you don't want it anymore and you are being a jerk. I have bought countless necklaces, scarves, trinkets, hats, gloves and other crap trying to find the perfect gift and it almost always ends up in some closet
So although I will break my own rule because of some expectation i don't give gift in birthday's because inevitably I will stress out to find the perfect thing. I prefer to get you something when I see something you'd like regardless of an occasion otherwise I'm only strapping you with a garage worth of junk.
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