take on Times Square 3G

Times Square is often called the intersection of the world which they probably never meant to mean that there is a ton of grid-lock.   Now we're not talking about the cars which Bloomberg has basically made obsolete in favor of a huge pedestrian walk-way or even the gridlock caused by the idiots standing in front of Good Morning America, the main gridlock has to do with normal 3g service.   

I made the mistake of walking through this hell-hole this morning and tried to check a basic website and was instantly brought back to my parent's old IBM PC trying to download porn using their terrible AOL connection.     It's 2012 in NYC and there are black-holes everywhere where you cannot possibly use your cell-phone because of the lack of bandwith, there are about 50 different 'free wifi' offers my Iphone picks up but they seem about as legit as that email I got from the dude with the inheritance from Nigeria

take on the Boingo Cancellation policy

There is nothing more frustrating than finding out how incredibly easy it is to set up but when it comes to cancelling it, they make it incredibly difficult.   A few months ago when I was travelling a lot, I signed up for one of those BOINGO accounts which for about $10 gives you unlimited WIFI service..  It costs about $10 a month which when you are sitting in airports for hours on end is a small price to pay to get to WWTDD.com on your laptop.  

Well when I got my third bill of the year today, I realized I'd hardly used it and thought that maybe it was time to cancel it.   I scroll over to the boingo website, logon to my account and then spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out how to cancel this thing.    Of course there is no easy 'cancel subscription' button and the only thing I find is

Accounts and Billing

How do I cancel my Boingo subscription?

Simply visit My Account and select "Cancel Subscription". If this option is unavailable, please call Customer Care, available 24/7, to cancel your Boingo account. You may also request more information by email at support@boingo.com.

 

You'll never guess but there is NO cancel subscription option on the homepage so I'm forced to call customer care and after nearly 8 minutes on hold I finally speak to a live person.. another 3 minutes to cancel my account and reject his offers to keep the account open at a discount later and finally I've gotten from underneath there $10 vulcan grip.

Take on bagpipes

We've often ripped on these ethnic, religious or nationalistic
holidays as completely ludicrous. For one day everybody is Irish,
Mexican or Puerto Rican and then the rest of us are forced to clean up
the parade mess. But past the fact that the bars are crowded, kids
are peeing on the sidewalk and some idiot decided it was cool to
scream obscenities out of his window, the thing I hate most about
Patty's day are the bagpipes. There is nothing musical about blowing
continuously into a thing that looks like my sack while making it
sound like you are torturing a bag full of cats.
I'm sure when done really well it can be sort of nice sounding but
every amateur fireman thinks that because he's got an O in his name
that he can play these things
I walked down the street today and honestly felt like if these weren't
50 year old white men but instead a bunch of city kids, they would
have been charged with disturbing the peace

Take on The New IPad effect

When I heard the new IPad was coming out, my first thought was anger
because I had just clunked down $800 for the all-thrills IPad2 but it
took until this week for it to finally set in how much this new IPad
was going to affect me. I'm not annoyed anymore because of the retina
display or the better camera, why I am annoyed now is that everyone of
my apps on my IPhone ad IPad have released upgrades. Generally I
don't mind upgrades when they improve the app but on this case the
only thing was drain the memory. I went from having 5.9gigs available
on my IPhone to having 5.1giga available without getting any advantage
because all these apps are designed once and all hardware whether or
not they are fully utilizing them have to take the same memory
draining version

taking on the glass bathroom sink

I'm not a person who gets any pleasure out of DYI projects, I have a house full of empty walls because I can't even get around to jamming a nail into a wall to hang up a few frames..  it's not that I don't like having things nice...it's that I hate having things 'sort of nice'    A buddy showed me some pictures of a place he's thinking about buying and preempted it with 'it needs a lot of work'.  the pictures looked nicer than he warned me about although obviously even the worst realtor will find a way to show the best features of any house or apartment.  

I scrolled through about 15 pictures and the only one that really caught my eye as completely atrocious was the bathroom.. The floor looks like it's got mold growing on top of the mold, the shower 'tub' looks like it's make out of PVC and for some reason they decided that they need a paper-towel rack above the sink...   it also looked like they tried to go with some kind of art-deco toilet stainless steel toilet seat cover and the bathroom features a home-made vanity table out of plastic tubs.  

but what really got me is that somebody decided that the way to spruce up this disaster is by adding one of those idiotic glass sinks..   Maybe this was a safety issue so you can see the creatures crawling underneath the sink at all times but it's an example of somebody throwing $300 at a problem and hoping that it will blind a buyer from the fact the floor is crooked, the pain is pealing and there is a homeless guy pissing in the shower.. 

 

here is my advice to guys selling houses.. save the $300 and knock it off the price of the house because unless I'm walking in wearing RayBan's it's not going to work

taking on the Kardashian photo-shop

Reading the tabloids today, I saw an article about the newest part of the Kardashian Empire, their Kardashian Lingerie Kollection .  The three main sisters (I think there are other ones but I guess they aren't allowed outside) are selling lingerie and just released their first ad showing the three sisters in some seductive poses in bras and panties.

Now the entire world is up-in-arms because the photo is obviously photo-shopped and the interwebs are a buzz saying that there is no way that Kim's waist can possibly be that tiny although nobody is denying that he chest is that big.  Other people had comments about Kourtney's figure but if there is any photoshopping that happened in that thing it was on Khloe's face because the chick in this ad looks NOTHING like her dad OJ. 

But I don't really get why people are up-in-arms about this stuff..It's not like these are real people.. nobody who is bitching about Kim's ass being photoshop will ever have a chance to shop her ass themselves.  I like hot chicks and if I'm going to see them in a magazine, why do I need to see the warts.. show me hot, show me big and show me lots of it.

Take on that new union radio ad

Anybody who listens to NY radio has heard this new ad by the
Correctional Officers Benevolent Association (COBA ) where some dude
speaks over an Eminem track denouncing Cuomo's plan for restructuring
their pension plans (link to ad at http://www.cobanyc.org/)

"The city and the state legislators in Albany want to eliminate our
pensions - pensions that we have negotiated, worked for and deserved.
They're trying to force us to accept a 401(k) plan that failed on Wall
Street not more than 2 years ago."

I believe the words and voice are that of Norman Seabrook who is the
COBA president and although it is meant to show solidarity within the
ranks for action they see as unjust, to my ears it just comes across
as defiant for the sake of it, he never makes a coherent point but
mostly our gripe is with the fact he sounds like he's imitating Ray
Lewis. Problem is that this kind of works on a football field but
when you are trying to psyche up a bunch of average Joe's who have
their own problems to support your crappy cause through a public ad,
it makes your entire organization come across as rinky dink.

This dude isn't even passionate about it which is probably why he
needs the Eminem to give it some oomph. If you listen to what he's
saying it's like an elevator repair man or plumber trying to get
excited for Mitt Romney. He's completely robotic and it's obvious he
is just reading a script, one that sounds like it was written by a
high school sophomore mind you.
If I'm a member of COBA and this is how I am presented to the average
schmo driving to some crappy job who just wants to listen to Boomer
and Cartoon, I'd be furious.

Take on time change

I don't get Daylight Saving Time, I know this was designed a hundred years ago to help out farmers but if there is one industry where it should it matter it would have been a family run business a hundred years ago.   It's all psychological anyway, if you want more day just get up early and stop forcing us all to live with interrupted sleep schedules

Actually it's not daylight saving which I have an issue with, it's standard time.   Last week it got light at 6am and dark at 6pm which seems pretty good as it was light the same amount of hours before and after 12noon.  Now yesterday it got light at 7 and wil get dark at 7pm, what exactly does that do for me??

We are about to get into spring and eventually into summer so we will have plenty of light at night, why do we have to add an extra hour to that??

Sent from my iPhone

Take on the hotlinks

When you have a mobile application, I really see no point in all those
hot-links throughout the article. First of all, I do not think that
I have ever consciously clicked on on of them as there really is never
a time when I think 'I need to know more about sailboats' while I am
reading an article about a new port in South Carolina
But mostly I detest these links because I inevitably will hit them
when I'm scrolling through an article and all of a sudden my browser
pops up. I lose my spot in the article and my train of thought, so
these addition which I think are designed to make me better informed
instead pull me away from the article

Take on the photostream

One of the beauties of having a couple of Apple products is the
syncing, I download an app on my iphone and it magically appears on my
iPad. Calendars and email options are even better a they can be
synced over all computers (not just iOS ones) and the photostream
seemed to be the next great thing in that string of having everything
in one spot. That was until iOS5 came out and everybody realized
that you could 't delete pictures off photostream. If you took a
fuzzy picture it got stored in the Cloud and although not terrible it
is frustrating that in today's world you are stuck with some shitty
out of focus picture for eternity
But that is not the worst of it, say a buddy sent you a picture of
Crazy Amy, well normally you'd download it and then either hide it in
some obscure folder or otherwise delete it. Well with photostream
every picture stayed in the stream unless you deleted the entire thing
I have to imagine the amount of bitching was endless and I'm happy to
find out that iOS5.1 finally fixed this. There are marriages at stake

Take on the big headphone

I see people on the subway or walking the streets wearing these ridiculously big headphones.  It's as if they either believe that they are Swiss Beatz or otherwise are trying to listen to secret messages from aliens or right wing conspiracy theorists 

First of all wearing these things is actually pretty dangerous because you can't hear the crazy homeless person sneaking up on you before they shove you into an on-coming train

Plus these things cannot be comfortable to have to lug around and honestly is Cold Play or Kelly Clarkson any better with these stupid things on?? Wear the same stupid white iPhone headphones the rest of these do

Sent from my iPhone

take on the group text MMS

I am one who sends a lot of pictures to large groups of people so this may seem like a ridiculous bitch but is there anything more badly designed than the group-text option on the IPhone.     There are tons of times when somebody sends me a picture of their kid, some funny picture or some mutt and before I even have a chance to open it, I have already received 10 responses from various people most of whom I don't know.

A few weeks ago somebody who will remain nameless sends out a picture of some snot-nosed kid and I get a bunch of responses like 'so cute'..  this is fine but these were obviously not meant for me.. actually it's not fine.. I don't want to hear some second aunt commenting on some coworkers snot-nosed kid

But the real issue is that you just know that people are getting into trouble with this, unless you have IOS5, you don't realize that this is a mass text and your response will go to the entire list.   I can see it now.. some dude sends a picture of a bunch of hot chicks to 10 guys and one of them comments saying the one to the right is a dog.. what he doesn't realize is that another dude on the list might have tagged that chick or worse yet is related to her.. now this dude who is just trying to be funny gets his ass kicked because his idiot buddy added him to some blind list.

Take on the triple double

IceCube made it so every white kid felt like he could screw around and
get one while looking at the Goodyear blimp, Jason Kidd and Rondo seem
like they could do it any night of the week, the Big O averaged one
for an entire NBA season and even my buddy Big nose O has scored a
plethera of triple-doubles in his day if you count a finger in his
five hole that is
But what has always bothered us about this stat in basketball is that
We'e felt the points are too easy to come by. 10 points, 10 dimes
and 10 boards gets you to this coveted achievement but I think
everybody would agree that the points are much easier to get to
because it only involves making 4 or 5 field goals
To truly make this a meaningful stat, we recommend 10 field goals as
the minimum or at least 10 shots (including foul shots). You can
call it the TORiple Double

Take on the diner

No this isn't about some Paul Reiser flick but rather about the
greatest single concept in culinary history. Although NYC has the
best restaurants in the world with the most variety there is one place
they can never compete Coming from the suburbs, I have long
appreciated the griddle pancakes, bottomless coffee and gyros and
having lived in the city for the last decade, the beauty of the diner
just seems lost upon city-folk.
It's not that there aren't any city diners, it's just that they have a
different feel to them. The food might be similar but between the
health-inspectors and the undocumented workers, there is just
something that is lost. A real diner is manned by an old Greek guy
with a flock of middle aged waitresses, a real diner serves eggs 24
hours per day, a real diner has an old awning, a long counter and a
fridge full of cakes. A real diner has a certain smell, a certain
level of filth and a certain charm, something the city ones often lack

take on gregg williams

With all the talk about bounty-hunting in the NFL, I thought it was time for TOR to offer our take.   Obviously the NFL is a violent game and I don't think anybody with any sensibility was truly surprised this takes place in locker-rooms although we were all a bit surprised to see it done in such a systematic way.    Maybe it's still better than soccer where guys fake injuries as often as chicks fake orgasms but playing a game where your goal is to knock out your opponent before they can throw a touchdown against you is barbaric.   

Now I don't see any place in the NFL for players deliberately causing injuries although I doubt this is a novel thought but really what I detest more than a guy like Gregg Williams' bravado in the face of normal humanity, what really bothers me about Gregg Williams is that he walks around with man-boobs.    Come on man!!!!  There is no place for tits on a dude.. you work for a professional football team, you have world-class trainers, you have a hundred treadmills, you have nutritionists, you have a requirement to wear fitted shirts..get off your lazy ass and burn off those mammaries.

take on the slow expedia

book a lot of flights online and my defacto website has always been Expedia..  the problem with using a third person vendor when you book stuff online is that when shit hits the fan and you need to change your flight last minute, everybody passes the buck.     I've had a thousand situations where Delta or United told me to go back to the ticketing agent (Expedia) to change something, Expedia than tells me to go back to the airline and before I know it, I'm stuck in a virtual limbo just begging for somebody to revive the party line.    What I've started to do is use expedia not for booking things but instead to compare prices along website….well I think that BigBrother has been watching me because lately everytime I surf over to Expedia it's as if somebody switches my connection back to an old AOL one.    I can't get moving on that site anymore, everything slows the hell down, not exactly what a site basically selling airline tickets wants to be known for

Take on self inflicted bulimia

I know that bulimia is a major issue for many people but I have to say
it sounds really appealing sometimes. I go for lunch today and for
some reason don't stop at 'a burger please'. Instead I go for the
fat-cat of burgers with onion-rings on the bun and then order fries
anyway. When the waitress asks if I need a side, I go for some
pickle sampler and a coleslaw. If that isn't enough, when my wife
decides she doesn't like her veggie burger I swallow that to plus a
few handfuls of her sweet potato fries.
I walk out of the restaurant an I honestly consider shoving my finger
into my throat and puking on the sidewalk like a drunk college kid. I
know there could be some long term medical issues with bulimia but
there have to be just as many with eating 3000 calories in a single
sitting

Taking on dating

Forget match.com, eharmony,justlunch, goingdutch or jdate because
apparently the newest way to find your perfect match is by calling
some number off a flyer hanging in the subway. The banner screams
'one nite stands only' which couldn't be more to the point but then
says 'females only' and i wonder if that is what they are advertising
or who they are advertising to. It's not fancy and seems earily like
the kind of thing that will end up being the last call a girl will
ever make literally or the last one a guy makes before he makes his
one-call later that night. Then again maybe this is the new trend as
i've been seeing these 'ads' spring up all over the R-Train
Now it's not pretty and unlike it's fancier competitors it doesn't
claim to offer any guarantees of happiness but it does offer something
cheap and direct because really that is what you are looking for when
you are lonely and horny.

I can only imagine the lineup of drunk bay-ridge bound slobs are lined
up to get some free sex

take on the cold-sink

Taking on the hand-wash

After our Tuesday blog, a friend of ours and loyal TOR reader came back with the following comment

Gindian:  Temperature of water doesn't make a difference in hygiene. The soap factor does.

TOR:  you try washing your hands in freezing cold water and tell me if you are properly scrubbing for 45 seconds.. 

Gindian:  What the hell are you touching that you need that much time to scrub your hands???

TOR: my ass…why else would you need to wash your hands, it's not like I'm pissing on my hands

We realize that the temperature of luke-warm water isn't high enough to kill any germs but it will ensure that you can spend enough time actually washing your hands.   Dutch houses are notoriously cold, so when you are sitting on the cold porcelain with your bare-ass, nobody can fault you for trying to warm up a bit.   So when you are then confronted with ice-cold water from the sink, there is no doubt that most dutch-people pass up the opportunity to properly scrub and instead let the water run just long enough to give the illusion that they actually washed properly to any toilet eavesdroppers

If I've said it once, I've said it a 100 times; don't shake hands with a Dutchman.

Take on the seat warmer

There really nothing more annoying than sitting down in a public seat
an it feel like there's a seat heater underneath it. Nothing is as
gross as this happening on a subway which already reeks of decaying
homeless flesh. Cause as soon as my ass hits the seat, I cannot stop
thinking is that what kind of lard has been ripping ass for the last
half hour and now I'm soaking it up in my ultra-thin work pants.