So your mother's a whore

There has been a major uproar in the sports-world when Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland (no relation to Kathy) asked Dez Bryant a potential draft-pick if his mother is now or as ever been a member of the prostitute party. I've listened to 3 days of sports-talk and although 90% of sports-fans find the question despicable (and if you included non-sport fans that number may rise to 95%) there are those who defend it. This is not far from sitting at a job interview in corporate america and the HR guy asking if your dad beat your mom. It might be interesting information but probably not relevant to your job description and definitely not appropriate.

One of the reason's how they defend is by mentioning that the player will hear much worse on the football field or that the GM was trying to entice the player to see if he would have a short temper. Now I get that a team will invest heavily into a first round player both financially (tens of millions) but also in terms of the direction of his team and I also understand that this isn't a typical job-interview and wouldn't be your standard job. But I do see one greater difficulty for teams after the en Roethlisberger , PacMan Jones, Michael Vick, Donte Stallworth and the whizinator incidents. See Roger Goodell is the judge and jury when it comes to personal conduct rule and he takes less crap than Vlad Putin, so if you are an NFL team you better make sure that your players aren't going to give you issues. I don't blame Goodell but his strict mentality when it comes to his players behaving leads to GM's delving deeper than they have ever before.

But I ask one thing, this question only seems insulting if Bryant's mom was actually turning tricks. I gotta imagine that there will be some reporters sniffing out Bryan's hometown to find anybody who will cop to having paid for a BJ from Mrs Bryant. Talk about something that may be hard to prove though, you gotta think anybody who will admit they paid for sex has to probably not be the most well regarded member of his community. Most of the time these guys are trying to cover up not expose their late night behavior.

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On Tuesday Lloyd Blankfein and a bunch of other Goldman $achs higher-ups were called in front on a Senate hearing committee do discuss their role in the financial meltdown on 2008. Of course TOR was watching as our beloved Senators tried to outdo one another for a little bit of prime-time glory.

At one point during an exchange with some senators I couldn't avoid thinking Blankfein would channel Vizzini and start screaming out "inconceivable"
Now nobody should feel that bad for "doing God's work" Blankfein who collected $9 million in compensation last year as the crisis which he helped create, drove the national unemployment rate to 10% and destroyed 401k's, retirement values and ostensibly housing values. Yeah I understand that in capitalism you have to be one step ahead of your competition but when you are selling jive to your own customers as Abacus was, you can't be sleeping well at night. This is the equivalent of trying to shark some 90 year old grandma out of her fixed income check by lying, cheating and scare tactics.. I understand that everybody should be doing research before they invest but isn't this exactly why you hire Goldman Sachs? who the hell could know that they are setting up financial IED's? Aren't they the ones that are supposed to be working for you, not setting up complex derivative cocktails intended to explode in your face.

Every radio-ad you hear about any investment tool concludes it ad with 'prior outcomes don't guarantee future results' but GS's ads should have said that the only certainty there was is that somebody will be pissed off and it won't be Goldman.

Years ago it was a popular notion that what was "good for GM was good for the country", you may argue against it but it's surely more true than GS being good for this country (or the EU with Greece for that matter).

I know one thing, when push came to shove it during war-time Detroit outfitted their plants to aid the war effort while 70 years later Goldman Sachs along with their fellow banking buddies stalled the economy to near Depression levels. They couldn't turn their machinery over to help the country because they don't make anything, this is where the US economy will continue to be fragile and vulnerable. When everything you "make" is smoke and mirrors and when all your gains are only gains on paper you are not only not adding anything of value but actually diluting the little value of actually creating something. . We already have a Fed who prints money and the FBI trying to stop counterfeiting and but somehow our banks are essentially printing and counterfeiting billions by the day.

So I implore everybody who says that regulation of the financial sector will crush innovation in the sector to answer one question.
What kind of innovation are you creating when it's all built on quick-sand anyway?
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We can invent a telescope to view the surface of the sun yet my ass is still a mop

How exactly am I supposed to feel better when all I got between my ass cheeks and a piss covered public restroom seat is this flimsy piece of recycled paper. I know these are supposed to be hygenic solutions but how about an engineered one, shoot it won't take an engineer to realize that sitting on one layer of toilet paper means that you are sopping up the piss with your ass. I know this is a pretty common issue for us at TOR but I travel a lot and we use a lot of public rest-rooms and I don't have the quad muscle strength to squat and I am not about to carry a plastic toilet cover seat

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Somebody explain this to me

I have asked before but as I have never gotten a reasonable answer I will ask again.

Why are you forbidden from using a cell-phone after the doors on an airplane have closed in preparation for departure BUT you are allowed to turn it back on the second you land.

There isn't anything drastically different in taxiing for takeoff and taxiing after landing, the doors are shut both times, the interference with other planes cannot be considered higher and the inconvenience to other passengers is not increased. What it is though is yet another way to keep people in line.
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the drop

The Drop


There is nothing you can do where you are more vulnerable than when you are standing at a public pisser and all of a sudden you hear the creak? I’m not talking about your knees or the creak in your crank but the creak of the toilet seat coming down. We can put a man on the moon but we still haven’t been able to design a toilet seat which can stay up all on its own.

This is one of those life-or-death dilemmas which test your will-power, intestinal fortitude, dexterity, reaction time and level of care for other people.

The dropping toilet seat has many repercussions.

- Avoiding pissing on the seat: As somebody who takes pride to never piss all over a toilet seat, as I know that sometime in the future I’ll be forced to plant my ass on said-seat.

- Avoiding pissing on my pant leg

- Avoiding touching anything with my hands what so-ever



One of the only ways you can avoid getting piss all over the place is by stopping mid-stream but with a falling seat this is like trying to hit Randy Moss in stride when you have Jason Taylor breathing down your neck

The other thing you can try to do is try to pin the seat back with your foot while keeping balance and continuing a steady stream which means you will likely be lying in a puddle of piss within ten minutes

Or lastly you can just let her rip and let fate take control. Maybe you’ll get some back-splash, maybe you’ll get decapitated but at that point you are likely to get piss on your shoe at minimum and if you are in a place –like work—you may be forced to bring out a mop too.

This is why it’s so important that every public bathroom starts investing in one of those foot-levers which lifts the toilet-seat, it’s sanitary, easy to use and will most likely ensure that I’m not covered in piss

Help

Coffee addiction is nasty, not just because of the withdrawal headaches. Coffee addiction leads to many difficulties because you because you become dependent on the caffeine to get yourself through the day. When it's bad it feels like a relay race where you race from one cup to another but unlike a relay race there really isn't a finish line. The problem is trying to find the fine balance between the needed caffeine boost and the line where you are bouncing off the walls with caffeine overload.

This is my ONLY issue with brunch, they keep serving coffee and I am so easily distracted that it's not uncommon for me to have 5 cups in an hour and a half which means I'm gonna be pissing like a racehorse for the next five hours and because I'm over caffeinated I'll probably spray the walls and the entire pisser will look like it's a Starbucks bathroom.
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what ever happened to RollerBlading?

I clearly remember a few years ago having to dodge the hordes of people zipping down Park Drive on their inline skates.   Basically with the conversion of four wheels in a box format to four wheels in a row turned the dying act of roller-skating and made it the biggest fad since velcro sneakers.  Well a fad is really all it was, I noticed today that although biking and running seem to fall in and out of fashion, they are both incredibly popular methods of exercising.    Maybe it is the fact that you needed to have every stupid accessory including the shin-guards, the wrist-guards, the helmet and the face mask to feel somewhat safe doing it but rollerblading had a shelf-life of about 2 years.    Any sport where you have to dress like you are going for painball really doesn't have much of a chance, people just don't want to look that stupid

A decade ago it was so popular it seemed like they needed their own lanes in the parks for it and people would roller-blade to work in a full suit, now you only see a couple of chicks in their late 40's still using it

Rollerskate had a small revival with the disco-dance thing but rollerblading seems like it's died a very quiet death.

license to print money

Traffic was a total mess in NYC yesterday and it wasn’t only because Obama was speaking in the Great Hall at Cooper Union. When I left work 6th avenue was blocked off since an even bigger event was being held at Radio City.


So as President Obama spent the morning chiding the banking industry for trying ruining the US financial markets while at the same time the NFL doing what they do best.. basically printing US Currency.

The NFL took their annual rookie draft and broadcast it in prime-time which basically meant every red-blooded American male (and some females too) said no to date-night and spent four hours glued to their televisions sets. The NFL draft was once held in some conference room at an airport Holiday-Inn to an all-out must-watch event broadcast live on two channels each dedicating 100’s of hours to its full coverage and analysis. After all the mock-drafts, the speculation, the combine, Gruden’s QB school and putting my daughter to bed it’s finally time..

I’m not a big enough nerd to give you an analysis on every pick and trade that happened but I can give you some of the blow-by-blow from watching the boob-tube.

TOR blogging the draft on ESPN

7:30 pm the draft starts as I crack open a cold seltzer water with my omelet.. It’s going to be a crazy night and I need to stay hydrated

7:40 pm. The Rams draft Mathew Stafford….. or maybe it was Sam Bradford, everybody yawns.. If you scramble their letters you can almost come up with “hard strap-on”

7:50 pm After Suh goes to the Lions, Gerald McCoy gets picked by the Bucs and nearly tackles commissioner Roger Goodell on the stage.

8:00pm Righetti takes a long leak

8:10pm how many players out of the state of Oklahoma will get taken in the first two hours???

8:20 PM first view of Jimmy Clausen’s war-room.. it looks like he needs to take a shit but at least he’s got Erin Andrews to clean up the mess.

8:30 PM some LB from Alabama named McClain gets picked by the Raiders, my buddy who is a Giant fan just had a coronary. I did notice that when they cut to his war-room out in Alabama somewhere that he was surrounded by hot young white-chicks. I don’t trust any player who doesn’t have the sense to sit there with his parents, you can’t be sitting there with only entourage, not in Goodell’s league Something tells me that although he wasn’t at the draft to be personally congratulated by Goodell, he’ll be having some conversations with him soon.

8:40PM The Bills take CJ Spiller which now means they have drafted a first-round RB every other year although somehow they haven’t been able to amass the next Jim Brown, Barry Sanders and Ladanian Tomlinson. Spiller’s fantasy value goes into the sh!tter.

8:50 PM.. they just cut to the Tim Tebow war-room, it looks like an outtake for Jersey Shore II.

9:00 PM.. First of all Steve Young looks like he should be part of a class-action suit against the NFL for how they ignored the after-effects of concussions on their former stars. Steve Young is about 9 yards short of a first down, he’s completely lost any sensibility or rational, it’s as if you are sitting in a room with your 90 year old grandfather who keeps yelling random comments out. It also doesn’t help that for some reason he needs to wear TWO ear-pieces. Fellow ESPN analyst Tom Jackson who kept getting interrupted by Young looked like he was going to stab Young in the throat with his BIC pen.

9:10pm .. there are a ton of trades and ESPN keeps screwing them up, either the Broncos are trading up or down but they are moving. It’s like Josh McDaniels and Bill Bellichick are playing a game of trading chicken. Neither guy may make a pick at all today.

9:15pm. Jimmy Clausen still looks like he is taking a shit. Goodell snickers as he reads some pick. John Gruden is the best guy on this set, I think there might be Weekend at Bernie’s situation going on with Mel Kiper.

9:30PM.. some RB from Fresno State goes to the Chargers and everybody's Fantasty Rookie drafts are thrown for a loop

9:40 PM  I make it over to the Pictures that May or MayNot Rule and somehow I lose myself for about an hour. I check the draft-board and there were a bunch of defensive players taken all of whom could suck

10:30PM.. Adam Schefter reports that if the Bengals draft Dez Bryant that Ochocinco has offered to live with him. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.. instead they take a Tight-End because taking a TE in the first round always works out so well.

10:40PM.. After the Cowboys draft WR Dez Bryant, Steve Young keeps referring to Miles Austin as Austin Miles. Tom Jackson starts applauding in the middle of it.

10:50PM. The Packers take some big white lineman from Iowa.. Nobody says it but everybody thinks it makes sense and I’m not talking about the need for a lineman.

11:00PM WOW.. "TIM TEBOW IS NO 1 MILE CLOSER TO GOD"…RaiderNation

11:10PM The Jets are about to draft.. I crack open another Seltzer water

11:20PM.. Righetti is excited about Kyle Wilson.. not exactly sure but I like the fact the Jets draft towards their strengths. Sexy Rexy is the man

11:30PM.. The Colts keep getting better ..and more boring

11:40PM.. how great would it be if Drew Brees turns over that card and it says “Jimmy Clausen”

11:50 PM Although Jimmy Clausen had a tough night, I hope he built a peep-hole into the guest bedroom

Midnight.. Post Game Live with Bill Daugherty has been superseded by a special edition of NY Football tonight on 1050.. I’m a happy camper.

Is that a coffin?

I oftentimes see cars with these huge plastic things strapped to their roofs and wonder what the hell compels anybody who is not on a camping trip from driving around town with some plastic coffin tied to the roof. I see them everywhere lately as if they are procreating like Gremlins which has done nothing to make them appear slightly hip which has not deterred anybody apparently.

As if there isn't enough indignation in driving a Volvo or a Subaru this thing makes you look like you are driving a double-decker station-wagon. You have five rows of seats, a trunk the size of a dumpster and you are driving back and forth to ballet lessons and tee-ball practice, what do you need an extra 40 cubic feet of space for?

These thing offer nothing in the way of aerodynamics so you are probably crawling down the highway in the center-line at 15mpg but I wonder what exactly are people lugging around in these things?
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A good deal

Nothing makes me more convinced that I am getting ripped off then when somebody tells me that they can make me a good deal. This has to be the oldest trick in the book and makes you feel more ripped off that anything else. If you walk into a BestBuy and you see a TV for $1800 you may realize you are getting ripped off but that price can’t really be negotiated. The concept when a salesguy offers you a ‘good deal’ usually means that the only deal you are getting is a thorough colonic. A few months ago I got this treatment while trying to buy a car but it doesn't seem to end with shady car-dealers.


I have spent the last few days getting some price quotes for some scaffolding to be put up in front of a building and getting a price quote for something you know nothing about is near impossible because you have absolutely no idea what a fair price should be. I don’t need the cheapest thing in the world but want to feel like I have some idea about price quotes. I can’t even imagine what the price for something like this could be, the guy can quote you $2500 or $25000 and either way I would have no idea if it’s a good deal.

You’ve heard about bait-and-switch well what some people do is bait and rubber-glove but these things usually come from two fronts. First they stroke your ego and then they confuse you, basically they tell you that you look pretty and then stick an ice-pick into your five hole.

This is basically how my conversation goes

TOR: I’m looking for a sidewalk bridge and scaffolding

Scaffolding Guy: OK we can do that.

TOR: The building is five stories high and about 60 feet across.

Scaffolding Guy: oh you will need ____________ plus ____ and _____. (I am leaving this blank as I have no idea what he said)

TOR: OK, I guess so what is the price?

Scaffolding Guy "For you my Friend, I will make you a deal, 225 and three months free, it is usually 240".

Mind you I had never spoken with him before today, so starting any quote with “my friend” basically means he’s going to bend you over. Then he quotes me something ‘225’ which means nothing to me, is that $225 for the entire tower, $225 per day, $2.25 per foot? If it is per foot I have no idea if that’s $2.25 or $225 and how the hell is it measured by linear feet or cubic feet???

TOR: What does that mean, how much in total?

Scaffolding Guy: well the cost of the tower and the plants (typing away at a calculator) and taking it down and putting it up, plus you’ll need a X4509 and a 3Y26 permit plus the insurance because you don’t want somebody to fall but don’t worry we got a net and that will be extra but worth it and you will have two or three decks and you have to figure that there are costs but I’ll give you a good deal for you my friend. It should be $22250 but for you it’s $22000

So now I know what one price is, I guess, I told him that you and I would get back to me

Since then I’ve gotten two unsolicited phone calls from him, first one to tell me that it would be ‘only’ $20000 and then that he can make me a special deal for $17000. I haven’t so much as thought about the quote and he’s come down $5000..



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Hey Beamer, stay your lane

There can’t be anything more frustrating than sitting in traffic waiting to get off an exit when some ahole cuts in front of the entire lane and tries to merge right before the exit. Everybody else has had to sit in this traffic for the last hour but there is always the one guy (it’s almost always a dude) who feels like he is above waiting with the rest of the simpletons.

I’ve always found this some of the most despicable behavior which is only marginally made better when the culprit waves you a thank you. But have you noticed that a disproportioned amount of times that you get cut off on line you are being cut off in a guy driving a German automobile.   It's never a woman in a mini-van driving her kid's to school or even a schmo in an SUV, it's always a guy driving some fuck-me three-series with the leather gloves on

It’s been well documented that guys driving Beamers have smaller winkies, so maybe this is their way of getting back at the rest of the world. There is something extremely pompous about the nonchalant way these guys cut the line too, they never creep in and at least act gracious, they race to the absolute front and then cut in without so much as a hand-wave.

The funniest thing about it is that these guys think they rule the road, although they often times are driving a 3 series. Come on man, if you are going to act like you got a big dick, at least drive a 5 series

the RightNetwork

Apparently FoxNews isn’t right-wing enough… Just this weekend a new addition to the cable-news wars entered the fray and I have to imagine it will make some waves. It already has a catchy name The Right Network and it’s got some celebrity oompf with Actor Kelsey Grammer as one of its financial backers. It is flaunting that it will have opinion based programming which is more conservative than FoxNews, which basically means they will have to bring in David Duke on steroids in their attempt to out-fox Fox. Rupert Murdock isn’t this arch-conservative using his own empire to get out his views; he’s a shrewd businessman who is preying on the stupidity of the American public.

What is incredibly smart about going head-to-head with Fox is not that you’ll beat them right away but I think the total pool of people who are interested in opinions on cable-news seem like they are 3-1 in favor of the right.

What I like about The Right Network is that Kelsey Grammer probably looked over the empire that is NewsCorp and decided to beat the Foxies as their own game. See MSNBC and CNN have been getting trounced in the ratings by FoxNews for a decade and –especially MSNBC- tried to become as politically bias as FoxNews but coming from the Left Side with the hope that the other half of the country would tune in. The issue is that liberal programming doesn’t resonate on cable-television, there is no shock-factor to saying “people should be guaranteed health-insurance’ or ‘stop this war.’ Where MSNBC really got it wrong was the fact that they spend half their programming day calling out FoxNews for its lack of credibility and then spend the rest of the day proving that they have no credibility either. When your entire day revolves around making fun of somebody else, it becomes very clear that you aren’t bringing a lot of original thought to the medium yourself (note to self..)


So this is what TOR recommends for The Right Channel. If you are going to succeed you will first need to get yourself some loud-mouth talkies.. I think that Mark Levin and Michael Savaage are available past that you need to have a few vital ingredients to the recipe

1- Programming aimed at the lowest possibly denominator, ever wonder why there are more combined copies of the NY Post and NY Daily News sold than the NY Times? It has nothing to do with views but rather these two tabloids exploit the fact that the average person doesn’t care to think when they are sitting on the train.

2- A conservative message with a hawkish foreign policy

3- An army of people who will believe treat your content as gospel

So if you are going to go into cable-news it makes sense that you don’t follow MSNBC into the kiddie pool but try to dive into the deep end of the Shark-Pool and feed off some of the scraps left over by the Great White while you bide your time to eventually take out the big fish. The issue though is that if you hope to go further right than Fox than Levin and Savage might not be good enough, maybe you can dig up Goebbels.

I am like an 80's rock-star except the rip in my jeans isn't in the knee

For all the fun I poke at the overweight, I have finally been put in my place. I did what is only supposed to happened in sitcoms and I can only assume there is a laugh-track in my life.
Two weeks ago I put a freshly washed pair of jeans on and noticed they felt a little tight around the thighs. Now I like tight-jeans on chicks but can't fathom a reason a guy would ever go this route. I kicked myself for having let myself go as I haven't been running as regularly as I should while increasing the amount of crap I ate. Add to this the fact that have picked up a nasty dark chocolate habit and that I a lazy slob it wasn't that surprising that my 33x34 jeans felt a little tight around my fat thighs.
I vowed to get back in shape as buying a larger pair of jeans is akin to letting the terrorist win and I hit the road running but after a couple of weeks I noticed very little difference in my thighs or gut and everything on my felt sloppy while everything I wore felt tight.. I plopped down on the couch discouraged when all of a sudden RRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPP. There was no laugh-track, no music, no candid camera nothing just a guy sitting on the couch with his head hung in shame.

My first fear was that I had ripped my boxers again or worse yet ripped my sack but this time the item that ripped was the denim from my crotch to my seat. How does somebody become so heavy in such a short period of time that their fat ass can literally bust through the seat of a piece of denim?
There I sat like a fat Bret Michaels with no real talent, a sloppy belly and ripped jeans on and only hoping for somebody to take me away.


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is it 2012 yet?

The Mayan calendar has long predicted the end of the world in 2012 which a few years ago (Y2K not withstanding) seemed ludicrous but with what we have seen in the last years maybe it's time to pack up and get ready.

We know our infrastructure is crumbling, our government is spying on us, we are in debt to the Chinese, our bodies are getting bloated by sugars, our banks are getting bailed out, the insurance companies are ensured profits from the crooked health-care bill, more people read US Weekly than do the NY Times and the only thing still 'green' is the color of money.  Our air is thick in smog, our rivers are infested with chemicals, Katrina from a few years ago, the Great Recession, Katrina, Britney Spears being photographed in a bikini again and the fact that the Knicks haven't had a significant run in a decade, something major is about to happened you can just feel it.

The Icelandic Volcano eruption which by all accounts wasn't even a very large one just took down all air-travel in and around Europe for three straight days and virtually brought all commerce to a screeching halt.     The last time that Iceland was responsible for this kind of havoc was when that Icelandic banks collapsed which crumbled the Icelandic economy and then threatened to bankrupted the rest of Europe and forced  the Dutch and British governments to try to recover it from the tax-payers of Iceland which will only force them into more isolationism.

See it's crazy how intertwined we all are when you see the havoc that a small volcano can do, Al Qaeda could only hope to do this.  What the hell would have happened if it was a bigger volcano, I mean that Tsunami took out the entire southern hemisphere. Maybe out battle isn't with extremists as much as it is with the extremes of our own planet.  

Big Brother is watching

As the TOR faithful knows, I am addicted to the Blackberry even with all its warts, flaws and hiccups. I have my issues which mostly stem from the fact it is not an Iphone but also Verizon has inexplicably turned off the WiFi option while 3G is AOL slow and the CAP and ALT keys are reversed but considering it all I am more than content.
I should rephrase that... I WAS content until I noticed that a new icon for an app had magically appeared onto my screen. Somehow without my knowing or doing, BlackBerry had added Skype to my phone. Now I like the Skype product but I felt an invasion of privacy. I am not sure why it is in either BB or Verizon's interest for me to have Skype but I am sure somebody is greasing somebody's palm Pre.
Now I wonder if they are adding apps without my consent, what else are they doing? I know the government is listening into my conversations and monitoring my internet usage already but maybe Skype is their newest incarceration of domestic spying.
I realize that nothing I do online is completely safe and I can live with that but when the invasion is so blatant and in your face it gives me reason to worry. Now had they put a YouPorn icon I may have felt differently (mostly more worried) but this had the whole Internet Explorer on Windows feel to it and when it comes to my privacy I am Anti Trust
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Return to Sender, Address unknown

Some Chico American woman named Torry Hansen from Tennessee who adopted a Siberian Boy a few months ago has sent back the seven-year old by himself with a note pinned to his chest that read

To Whom It May Concern," the letter reads, "This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues/behaviors. I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability. ... After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child. As he is a Russian National, I am returning him to your guardianship and would like the adoption disannulled."

Now I understand that this having a kid thing may have been more than Ms Hansen realized but this just returning the kid for credit seems like it’s gone overboard

First of all I didn’t realize that adopted kids came with a warranty? I can’t even send back a pair of running shoes from Amazon without paying some kind of restocking fee and people are sending kids across the globe with a simple letter

Now I can see where this stems from, people like Miss Hansen probably saw that people routinely adopt a young puppy or a couple of cats and after a few weeks decide that this is no longer something they are interested in but we have to be better than that when it comes to a person right?

First of all, what the hell do you expect when you take a seven-year old kid from Siberia and plop him down in the south. It takes most people a few weeks to wear in a new set of shoes, maybe you should give the kid some time to assimilate to the fact he’s surrounded by a bunch of hicks.

Lastly this kid was from Siberia but Torry Hansen sent him back to Moscow, that’s like dropping a seven-year old from Tennessee off in Alaska and ask him to find his way home

so who exactly is paying for all this tea?

I have to think there are people everywhere who will try to make things happened. I know that people are generally in it for themselves but I really laugh when i see this Tea Party movement

Now I applaud the concept, the organization of it and the way they are trying to keep people accountable. Honestly a lot of what is on their platform resonates with the public and most people agree with the concept of no corporate bailouts, weeding out corruption and even the Reaganomics theory of smaller government but what gets me is who the actual Tea-Partiers are..

The Times had an extensive piece on them recently where they interviewed a bunch of guys at rallies across the country who were up-in-arms with the fact that the Banks, the car companies and the Insurance companies were getting bailouts, handouts and sweetheart deals. The article gave a good cross-section of the people who identified themselves with the TeaParty movement and the cross-section of people was fascinating. Obviously many were white and older although there were a lot of younger people, a scattering of minorities and at least a representation of people who would identify themselves as liberal. The head of one of the initial movements is some chick with crazy tattoos and a nose ring,

But one other identifying characteristic stuck out. There were many people out of work which with 10% unemployment doesn't seem out of the ordinary especially since those unemployed may have more time on their hands and feel the most disenfranchised. But what struck me was how man people were depending on government assistance and how nobody saw that as even slightly ironic.

This is a movement of people who talk about accountability, personal responsibility and minimum government interference yet the amount of people 'benefiting' from extended unemployment benefits, food stamps and other government assistance was staggering. I won't even go into the over 65 year old crazies who bitched about government takeover of healthcare while they themselves receive Medicare. As you can imagine nobody they interviewed saw the irony in this.

See it goes back to the old concept of people bitching about their neighbors yard while their own house isn't in order.

There are tons of radio commercials villifying the greedy banks taking bailouts and then ask the rhetorical question "where is the bailout for the regular people?". Then they go on to describe ways to cut your credit-card payments in half, or find ways to avoid paying them all together. So a bailout for a greedy bank is bad but when the bailout happens for a guy who put $30,000 on his Visa for a vacation to the bahamas that should be taken care of..

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You can't say they are athletes and then get annoyed when they act like athletes.

You know what annoys me the most about this Tiger Woods thing? It's not the fact that the media wants him to grovel for forgiveness which is so ridiculous it doesn't deserve more of our time and it's not that a sport story has now become great fodder for TMZ and US weekly.

 

What annoys me is the following

 

I heard Jim Nantz the blowhard lead play-by-play commentator for CBS Sports complain that Tiger cursed on the course this past weekend which Tiger had vowed not to do anymore and to be more respectful of the game and its traditions. My opinion about showing emotions in a sporting event is that it is par for the course, some people may overdo it but it's part of the game

The issue for Nantz was that Tiger was caught cursing on the golf course after a bad shot which Nantz found an offense more egregious than if Tiger had verbally assaulted Nantz' mother and then kicked the Nantz family dog for good measure. Nantz went on to say that other top golfers like Phil Mickelson and Ernie Els don't have these emotional outbursts like this and never curse and Tiger doesn't want it any more than his contemporaries.

 What annoys me is that I don't believe for a second that Vijay or Ernie or Phil has never cursed, they probably don't do it as often as Tiger does but they also aren't being watched like a hawk. How about other athletes? Roger Clemens, Kobe Bryant, Brett Favre, Usain Bolt, David Beckham are they all choir-boys or are golfers held to a different standard because they wear khakis in their sport?

What really annoys me is that you can't have it both ways; the golf community always argues that golf is a sport but when their players start acting like athletes the old-guard gets their panties in a bunch.

If Tiger is to be considered an athlete than you can't be surprised when he acts like one. Athletes are emotional, they have disappointments and they aren't always the nicest guys but that's OK.

Hey Nantz have you ever hear of a guy named Michael Jordan? MJ was ruthless and did more than curse if he was pissed off he verbally assaulted everybody in sight.

If you are disappointed because they are ruining your precious sport then it might be time for you to start covering an even lamer excuse for a sport. What Nantz sees as Tiger's immaturity is what he would identify as Jordan's incredible drive to be the best. Jordan isn't just Tiger's idol, he IS Michael Jordan with all the accolades, trophy's, extra-marital affairs, warts, bad habits and need to be the best.

 But because Tiger plays a white-guy country club sport he gets vilified. Tiger is an athlete playing (and dominating) a fat white-guys game and this annoys Jim Nantz and his buddies.

 

So once and for all.. is golf a sport or a game?

 

-The way I see it any 'sport' where people go and sit down for a hot-dog and a beer at the turn is not much of an athletic event, I've never decided to crack open a Corona while running the marathon.

 

-During a baseball game there are 40,000 people screaming at the top of their lungs and a batter is asked to hit a ball flung from 60 feet 6 inches at 98 miles per hour, in golf if somebody sneezes in a guy's backswing he can be thrown out of the event.

 

-In football guys grind it out in full gear for 60 minutes leaving their blood, sweat and tears on the field played in temperatures from 90 degrees during the summer to -20 in the winter, in professional golf they don't even carry their own bags.

 

-In basketball players are asked to shoot a 10 inch diameter ball into a 20 inch hoop which is propped 10 feet in the air with a guy jumping in his face from 25 feet away, in golf the other guys on your foursome stand far behind you so their shadow don't interfere with your read.

 

-In Soccer guys are in phenomenal shape, running up and down for 90 minutes, in golf guys routinely look like they swallowed a soccer ball.

 

-In Hockey the champions hoist Lord Stanley's cup, in golf the winner gets a blazer.

 

I love golf and its traditions but I also know that calling it a sport is lunacy, it's a skill mastered by elitists and the golf community wouldn't have it any other way

 Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

 

I might be a bit skeptical

Like everybody else TOR was shocked to hear about the plane-crash over the weekend which took the life of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski. The issue wasn’t just that the president perished but that the plane carried a large delegation of senior officials and cabinet members so the plane crash single-handily took down almost the entire Polish government. This is the reason that during the State-of-the-Union there is always some mid-ranking schmo who hides in some bunker in case the capital went down in flames taking out the entire leadership. Of course this contingency plan probably means that Dennis Kucinich becomes the leader of the free-world which will not make anybody sleep well at night.


The thing about this crash was that the delegation was en-route to Russia for the 70th anniversary of the Russian massacre of Polish prisoners of war in the village of Katyn where 20,000 Poles were executed there during World War II. Up until recently the Russians/Soviets had denied any responsibility until the 90’s although there were mass-graves discovered in the 40’s but now nearly ¾ of a century of denial later it was supposed to come full circle as this trip was suppose to be a consolatory moment for Russians and Poles.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedez immediately went to the Polish Embassy to offer his condolences and put Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in charge of the investigation which is like having Pope Benedict investigate the pedophilia scandal

So for 70 years the Russians deny any involvement for 20,000 people being massacred then they decide to reverse course and invite a delegation of Poles including anybody who is anybody in the government to and all of a sudden said Russian Built Plane crashes in some Buddy Holly fog.

I bet that if we got the Google-Earth images and zoomed in we would see Vladimir Putin with a grenade launcher on his shoulder overlooking the runway. TOR now increases the Katyn Massacre total human-toll from 20,000 to 20,096.

WhiteBoy accessory

We've often heard about women accessorizing with handbags, earrings, necklaces etc but I have been noticing more dudes doing the same. Walking through the shopping center in Brooklyn yesterday, it occurred to me that 9 out of 10 white dudes apparently won't leave the house with at least one head-accessory. The most obvious choices are the dirty baseball-cap or maybe the white guy with the Samuel L Jackson cap (which by the way is a horrible white-guy look). But it doesn't end with hats, white guys are wearing bandannas like they are rocking Poison, head-bands like they are rocking John McEnroe and Sun Glasses like they are Don Johnson. Now it's not that I'm anti accessory, I am a main culprit when it comes to the baseball cap but the level of accessorizing is getting dangerously feminine or at least Latino Gay.. Although not a 'new' look more and more dudes are rocking sunglasses on top of their heads, long gone are the sunglasses that are functional or sweat headbands which I guess are necessary when building up a sweat while buying a 48 pack of toilet paper at Target.
Look around and a white-guy will be wearing one of these things and if not sun-glasses or a hat of some sort, he's probably got some scruffy looking white-guy beard.

What is it about white people? Are we sop insecure with our white-washed looks that we feel we need to now jazz it up. The problem is that the accessories are so common-place that it has lost any concept of uniqueness. It's as if we use it to try to look more like one another.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry