Division championship paraphernalia

I was trolling around on the NFL.com website this week and they were blasting their viewers with an opportunity to buy a Chicago Bears NFC North Championship hat. Tell me exactly who the NFL is appealing to when the ask their fans to shell out $24.99 for something like this? The first question is..why does this league feel like it needs to gouge its fans after at every opportunity?
The second question is bit different but when did we turn into France?? Who gives a crap about anything but the ultimate prize, there is no glory in second place. I have never in my life bought any championship piece of paraphernalia and wouldn't be caught dead wearing an NFL Wildcard participant hat.

First of all it is incredibly stupid and a colossal waste of money because even if you were dumb enough to lay out $25 on one when exactly would you wear it. Maybe in the week before the playoffs but then again you'd never get it delivered in time. But assuming you do get it in time, what happens if your team loses in the first round why would you give a crap that they won the NFC West as your only goal should to win a championship.
But then what happens if your team wins do you get a hat for being the winner of a playoff game too. And if you did what if they win the Conference then you'll need a new hat (which I still wouldn't buy) and then if you win the Superbowl you've laid out $100 total dollars on four shitty looking hats. I hate this everybody deserves a prize little league mentality, when was it OK to treat your sports-team like a Kindergarten shoe-tying test where you get a sticker even if Joey ties his shoe to a chair.

But there must be a market for it unless this one of those CafePress deals where the NFL only makes a hat if it actually ordered or then again maybe this is just part of the NFL outreach program to be able to hand out a bunch of shirts and hats in Uganda.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Lint

I once heard somebody ask a question about the color of lint, noting that the lint he finds in his dyer is always gray. He asked if lint was inherently gray, where maybe certain colored fibers tend to accumulate in belly buttons. I have no idea but it seems like an interesting enough question that I thought I'd look it up the next time I was bored.
What I noticed today was after a long day where I got up before 4AM, flew to Chicago and flew back that evening was that my heel was hurting. Not a splitting pain but more of a general irritation. I finally get home and look at my feet which during the winter months get very dry and start to crack especially in the heel area.  I must have 4 or 5 one-inch long cracks running from top to bottom of each heel. They are about an 1/8th of an inch thick where they cut through the dead skin and expose some flesh.   Well as opposed to seeing the fleshy cracks I usually last night the cracks in my heel are all dark colored  I thought it might be dried blood or an infection.   After throroughly inspecting them, I found that each was stuffed with what appears to be sock- lint. Who could guess that some cotton run-off could make my life so bad, by the end of the day I was literally hobbling.

The only good news is that I can report unequivocally that lint is not always gray, it can in fact be dark black.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Surprised?

The shooting in Tucson reminds us all that you can't trust freedom if it's not in your hands. The combo of freedom of Speech and the Right to bear arms has gotten everybody in tiff.
Now I have to believe that the dudes who got together 200 years ago to write the Constitution probably didn't intend to give some dude the ability to carry a semi-automatic with a 30 round clip to a political event..
I don't own a gun, have no interest in owning one, have no problem with hunters but am not thrilled knowing some 22 year old psychopath should be allowed to carry one.
One of the dumbest comments I have read is that Jared Loughner must have had mental issues. Yes and water is wet.
Of course the guy has mental issues, it's like asking if a homeless guy might possibly be schizophrenic. Give me the guy of normal mind who would pull a gun at a Pathway and shoot up a community regardless of who he voted for? Whether it's the Unibomber, Timothy McVeigh, the beltway sniper or this jackass they all should not have been allowed to be anywhere near explosives
As soon as they ask people who knew this guy you hear people say he was a loner who kept to himself (check) who didn't have a girlfriend (check), has the middle name 'Lee' (check), has theories of governmental conspiracies (check) and would go on rants about taking situations into his own hands on his myspace page (check) while dropping out of community college (check) to work at an Arby's (check) We ask people to be vigilant when it comes to fighting terrorism, there are signs all over with 'see something, say something'. plastered on them. How about doing the same for situations like this..
I know we are all looking for motive and there are enough people who want to throw this all on the lap or Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin for creating an environment which breeds this mentality. They do create a divisive atmosphere but I'm not going so far as saying they were the 2011 version of Charlie Manson either.
So the way I see it, you need to pass a test to get a drivers license to make sure you can drive and if abuse your right (DWI, DUI, speeding) they take that license away. If you get thrown out of community college for situations where they call the cops because you are going off on some violent rant then maybe we don't want you to have an uzi. I don't even want to allow a homeless person to have a metro-card, those psychos are always a risk of shoving you in front of a train.
How about this, if you want to own a gun you should bring a note from a doctor to make sure you are of sound mind, proof you have had a steady job with a reference letter your boss and throw another two or three reference letters in the envelope too from neighbors, friends and colleagues.
Or better yet make anybody who's obsessed with governmental conspiracy theories get thrown right in Sing-Sing before he even has a chance to apply for a gun.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Take on Goodell

To Mr. Roger Goodell

January 10^th 2011

From TakeOnRighetti.blogspot.com

 

Mr. Goodell

     As an ardent fan of your league I have decided to write you today to try to help you deal with the one of the major issues you have in your league today.   The NFL has long been a league where you try to balance your schedule to create the most parity by giving teams coming off good seasons harder schedules and teams coming off bad seasons easier schedules.    Although we could argue that sports should not be about parity but instead about dominance we understand your need for competitiveness and believe your league has done an excellent job ensuring a competitive product.  One issue which has come up year in and year out is what can be done to get more competition late in the season as teams headed for the playoffs will often rest starters and teams out of it may not put their most competitive lineup on the field as they try to develop their younger players.     

  This year you created an unbalanced schedule where teams would play more division games later in the season which we all hoped would generate more buzz and would keep teams playing their most competitive lineups into week 17 but after seeing what happened this year when we counted roughly 14 out of 16 games in week 17 had major players missing large chunks of the game.

I think you will notice that your issue comes down to one of pure mathematics, see a divisional game has no more or less bearing on overall record.   You can say that they mean more because of rivalries but if one team has no incentive to play their starters as they prefer to rest them to achieve their ultimate goal which would be a trip to the SuperBowl it will not matter if the Eagles play the Giants or the Browns in that week.    Even hoping it would spur interest because it may determine a divisional champion on the field it does not click with pure mathematics.    If one team needs to win to have a chance to make the playoffs they will play hard regardless of who is in front of them .  For example the Seahawks and Rams each had a chance to win the NFC West in the last week of the playoffs but both teams had to win to have a chance.   Whether they played on another was ultimately irrelevant.

We believe we have come up with a solution in order to fix this inherent problem which involves incentives.  The incentive we have in mind would need one thing..you to dispel a belief which is ingrained in the NFL mantra, that the Super-Bowl must be held on a neutral site. 

Other proposed incentives including extra draft-picks, player payouts or other compensation will actual skew your competitive balance by rewarding teams and/or players on good teams which will can only lead to players wanting to play for teams that have a chance to make more money outside of the additional pay they will already receive for making the playoffs not to mention exposure which can lead to endorsements and other off the field exploits.

We believe that the only 'fair' answer is by giving a true home-field advantage to the team with the best record throughout the entire playoffs including the Super-Bowl.     Yeah we realize that this could mean the Super Bowl could be held in Green Bay or at New England or in Seattle and weather may be a factor but guess what having the biggest football game of the season in a city which actually cares about football is a good thing..   The arguments we will hear is that there could be weather factors, hotel rooms, half-time shows, celebrities and the entire two weeks of SuperBowl pre-action and frankly they are all tired arguments.  At the end of the day, the chance to host a SuperBowl will be enough of an incentive for any team to play 16 games and since there are now 11 other teams whose record you have to consider there will be less scenarios where any particular team will have no reason to sit players.

Let's take them one at a time

-          Weather.  You have already decided to have a super-bowl in New York in 2014 so there really is no arguement here anymore.   The chance to host a super-bowl for the best team in the league will lead to .   Obviously some of your most memorable games have happened in bad weather including the Ice Bowl, the Raiders-Patriots and countless cold games in places like Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Lambeau

-          Celebrities.. These people live to get onto camera.  If  Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight will be there so will Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.  

-          Half Time Show..   Just like the elements will add something to the elements, it will add something to the half-time show too.. plus 99% of your audience will be sitting cozy in their living room so who cares.   The added benefit for you (not me) is that the chances of Janet Jackson flashing a boob is much less likely when she's got a chance of frost-bite on her nipple

-          The Game.. a true homefield advantage will only make the game better, it will allow teams like the Steelers to play to their own strength.    They work all year on being a tough running team but then in the most important game of their season you put them on a fast track.   This is a clear disadvantage to them as it will force them to gameplan differently.  

-          The Event..  Why can't the NFL be about helping teams not located in California, Florida or a dome?    A city like Chicago or Pittsburgh or Buffalo could use the economic boom as much as a city like Tampa or San Diego.  

-     The City..  people will come out to any city in any state and every town to see their team in a Superbowl.  They'll find restaurants, bars and clubs regardless if they are in Miami, Las Vegas or Detroit.   

-          Attendance..  you will be sell out..don't worry about it.  Every NFL team has 65,000 seat stadiums so there is no issue with filling seats.   Fans will love to be able to brag about having seen a superbowl when it snowed, your stadium will be filled with passionate fans.   Can you just imagine how rawkus a crowd you'd have in New England, Washington or Dallas if they had won the right to host their own game because of what they accomplished on the field.

-          Your events which lead up to the Superbowl.   I fail to see how some lame punt-catch-throw competition on the Tuesday 10 days before the Superbowl is bringing any kind of revenue to anybody.     If you are striving for community service then bring the Superbowl to cities who could use the revenue, if you want to give back to your young fans I don't see any issue with giving that opportunity to a kid in Cleveland who by the way wont' be afraid to field a punt in 10 degree weather.

-          Hotel-Rooms.   You might have a point here and this will be difficult but look at Nascar.. People will travel and find ways to go to the Superbowl .  They will sleep in Trailers, RV's, Mobile Homes and Motel rooms if they have to..  It's supposed to be about the game but play to your audience..football fans will stand topless in 0 degree weather with a piece of cheese on their head..they won't mind sleeping in a Holiday Inn Express.

 

But to get back to our original point, the revenue you think you may lose will be made up 10 folds by the enthusiasm for your event, the ability to help the heartland of this country not to mention giving you the ability to field a full schedule of competitive games in week 17 (or 19) of your regular season.

You will see that you will have a better product and you will go back to appealing to your true base.

 

Sincerely

Take on Righetti

Those wooden nubs

So between Christmas and New Years I made the colossal mistake of ordering a shelving unit online. Now I'm not disparaging the online shopping experience or shelving units in general but when you get your delivery and start to put it together and one of the main 'tools' they provide you with is wood-glue you are probably better of returning it.
But nobody has ever accused me of being all too bright, so there I went and put this unit together using a couple of allan wrenches, a few screws and a tube of glue.
Now I'm not exactly Jesus but I can put together a piece of IKEA furniture so there I went screwing, and gluing and allen wrenching till it came to putting the final piece together which would turn this pile of particle board into a fully functioning shelving system. Well I was more than a bit surprised when a couple of those little wooden pegs which are designed to hold together two pieces of particle board stood up a little higher than the wooden pegs next to them but I couldn't wedge any further into their intended holes (think Dirk Diggler meets a bathroom glory hole in Japan). I couldn't figure out if some where not in deep enough or other ones in too deep but I knew something was not exactly kosher. We'll as I didn't want to force the nubs more than I had already so I line up the nubs and screws to the last piece of wood, press down and voila... I bust through the thing like I'm a pitcher of Kool-Aid.
So here I am with a kitchen shelving unit with four random nubs which have punctured the side of this piece of garbage and somehow I have managed to get ripped off on yet another item.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Over-compensation

After the NY Post exposed the sanitation department last week for their less than stellar snow-removal job you knew what would happened the next time. There were wide-spread reports of trucks driving through south Brooklyn with their plows slightly raised or cruising down streets without their plows down if they were even in the borough at all.
Reports starting flooding in that there had been a major snow-job by the Sanitation department in retaliation for job cuts and demotions and then the writing was on the wall. Before you knew it, you had the perfect combination of hysteria, villains and politicians. Everybody smelled blood in the water and every jackass politician jumped on board calling for hearings and investigations basically to get their names in the paper well after TOR was making the same assessments just from looking out of our own window.

After a few days even Bloomberg got off his 'everything is fine' soap-box and stopped suggesting New Yorkers go catch a show on Broadway and turned on the heat. All of a sudden with the spotlight on the sanitation department there were hundred of plows roaming the streets in South Brooklyn. It was as if somebody was giving out free pizza's for anybody who had a plow on this city owned truck. I counted 4 trucks down one ancillary street in an hour.

The issue was that this was on Wednesday well after the snow on the streets had mostly melted. One truck would drive down and push the snow onto the sidewalk and another would come and shove it back into the street.

Don't tell me that these guys weren't half-assing it before when now they are causing a traffic jam with the amount of passes they were making.
Then today we see a picture on the front page of the Times of a row of trucks waiting at the ready during yesterday's 1 inch of snow and it just reeks of inefficiency and over-compensation. We don't need 50 trucks parading down our streets we need just enough to remove the snow.

Now it is 10 times better than some empty-promises politician but there is an issue with having a business man running a city... they over-compensate. It like when you complain at Outback that your steak is over-cooked, the manager comes out with a free dessert....yeah it might make you shut up but it's not making your steak taste any better.

At the end of the day when it comes to running a city or state, what you need is the practical thought of a business man with the ingrained desire to get things done and the political clout to demand it from his overpaid unions.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

So apparently the Mayans were wrong….

Forget Peak-Oil, Peak-Money or Peak Money.. I think we are on the verge of Peak-Life.. In the last few days there have been sightings of 3000 dead-birds in Arkansas followed by a similar sighting of 100’s more dead birds Louisiana. Then there are reports of 2 million dead fish popping up at the Chesapeake Bay. Add to that 50 random dead birds in Sweden, 25,000 dead crabs in England and 100 tons of dead sardines in Brazil.   The way I see it the Mayans were off by a year and 2011 is the real 2012

Now not everybody believes me as scientist all around the world are coming up with reasons like cold weather off the shores in Great Britain, Fire Works in Little Rock, electric wires in Baton Rouge and Samba in Rio but come on man we all know this is end..

This sounds an awful lot like those nasty plagues the Egyptians got or that nasty case of crabs that was going around NYC in the early 90’s so let me tell you…and if you aren’t yet convinced then take into consideration the 2 feet of snow that landed on my car, the price increases on the tolls on the bridges and the fact my knee feels like some 400 pound San Francisco Giant fan stomped on it.

I think it’s time to clean out that bank-account and go sit on the beach drinking frozen Margaritas in Punta Cana for 10 days cause the world is going to hell.

I guess this is what $450 million dollars of cash gets you

 

So I logged onto Facebook for the first time in almost 4 months when a customer sent me a picture of his family vacationing in Disney World and let me tell you I was not impressed.   Not because the content was as lame as ever, not because I had 20 friend requests for kids I hardly knew in High School and not because the place has turned the internet from a fun seedy place to some Disney inspired playard.    It was like seeing 42^nd street's 'revitalization' all over again.

But what really bothered me was that not 2 minutes after I logged off again I got bombarded with emails from Facebook welcoming me back and inviting me to post pictures, stories and quirky status updates and then invited me to reconnect with friends.   The two people they mentioned were my buddy Otis who I just had lunch with earlier in the day and Mrs TakeOnRighetti.

This is where Facebook gets it all wrong..first they don't even let you ease back into it and then they make suggestions that are just ridiculous.. 

Watching Covers

TOR keeps a tab on all things NYC by watching for the front pages of the two NYC tabloid rags.  I find that when done right the wrong or back pages of the Post or the News can give you a better sense of what is on the minds of New Yorkers.   The copy-editors whose job it is to come up with catchy headlines to entice the average commuter to plunk down $0.50 must be pretty intense but rewarding because I know that I've often picked up a copy of the Daily News or the Post only because I saw what they had plastered  as a teaser on their front or back page.   When they are doing it right it's usually a very quick line with a play-on words that accurately describes the entire city's sentiment, when it's done poorly it is lazy and unappealing.     Although not always the case, the best ones are usually a quick clever rhyme or a quirky Haiku while the worst ones are a carbon copy of the crap they've thrown on their cover for weeks on end  

The thing is that there isn't nearly as much consistency as I'd like to see.  The coverage goes from enticing to silly, to stunning, to ridiculous from day to day and the copy-writing goes the full gamut from innovative and clever to tired and lame. 

I know that coming up with original material every day is difficult but I always feel like these guys coming up with the headlines get incredibly lazy, I mean how often have you seen 'Andy's Dandy' when Andy Pettitte pitched a solid game?   The best ones are the ones that get you to pick up the paper because you just have to know what Mike Lupica has to say about Obama's job approval.

Well today's Post has a front page picture of Obama from his Hawaiian vacation dressed like a Japanese Tourist to South Beach with the question 'should the leader of the free world ever dress like this?
Now with Rupert Murdock as the head of your corporation you know this is all part of Political Theater while trying to sell as many copies of your newspaper as possible but it does beg the question whether the President is always expected to look "presidential"  

I gotta say that we over at TOR really don't give a crap what a president does on his free-time…We're of the opinion that the best thing Clinton ever did was bang the fat chick in the oval office.   We have no issue with a president dressing like some dorky fanny-pack having tourist as long as he's getting us out of this economic mess. 

But as a man we would like to see a little more style cause he looks like a god-damn flamingo..you are in Hawaii, how about putting on a Hawaiian shirt, putting Michelle in one of those coconut bikinis, putting out a couple of beach-chairs and sipping on some frozen margaritas as opposed to looking like some slurry drinking child-touching pervert.

BBM

BBM

 I'm often asked by friends who have an Iphone what is so great about BBM, the instant messaging service available exclusively to BlackBerry users.   They always ask what makes it any different than normal SMS texts and I've always had a hard time explaining it.   It basically comes down to me trying to convince them that it's just better but after putting some thought to it I've come up with the following reasons that BBM is a far greater experience.

-          Unlike SMS there is no cost for sending or receiving a BBM message.   This doesn't seem like it's a big deal because we all have bundled text-packages where you get some all-you-can-eat combination of 2500 messages but if you could pair down to only needing  1000 SMS messages that would save you a couple of bucks

-          Regardless of the cost of standard SMS which is maybe not all that important but when you are sending a message to somebody overseas there is also no cost. If anybody has ever travelled overseas and looked over their bill the next time they are home, they'll notice that outgoing SMS messages are easily $0.50 a piece

-          The fact that unlike SMS, the BBM is more 'conversation' like.   It's the difference between G-Chat and an email.   It just feels more interactive

-          No character limitation.   I haven't exactly checked but you can send 1000's of characters in a single message.

-          Free MMS.  Although most plans have unlimited or very high limited SMS options, MMS is still often limited or expensive.   BBM lets you send pictures (and other files) for free.

-          The ability to one conversation with multiple parties is nice.. especially when you are making plans or.   It's a bit like those wacky 1-900 party lines from 1988 but still handy.

-          The ability to mark yourself as being away or updating your status… actually this is annoying

-          Being able to see when somebody is replying to you with a small message which reads  "Righetti is typing a message' 

-          But most importantly is a very small item.. it's the S,D or R icon which appears next to every message on your BBM.   It lets you see if your message was sent (S), Delivered (D) and Read (R ).  It's a bit big-brother but handy never-the-less.  

 

 

So if Steve Jobs is listening.. there are only a few things to fix to completely supplant BBM in my mind… 

-          Put together some kind of BBM like program and have it installed on each Iphone with the next software update..

-          Find a way to figures out that "Can't Undo Cancel" message I get 10 times per day

-          Figure out a way to shrink my fat thumbs so I can actually type on your piece-of-crap device

$50 BILLION

With some kind of cash infusement from Goldman Sachs and some Russian outfit the total value of Facebook is now valued at $50 Billion Dollars(that is Billion with a B).   The NY Times reports that this now makes Facebook worth more than Time Warner, EBay and Yahoo but still worth less than Google which is valued at almost $200 Billion.   It will also make Zuckerberg's personal value somewhere in the range of $15 Billion.   In a related note those two crazy twins have decided to sue Facebook again saying that the $100 million they were awarded the first time wasn't enough money. 

My first thought was….'how the hell is Yahoo worth anywhere near $50 billion'?    I went to Yahoo! by accident the other day and it was like going to a male review.   You know they exist but you have no interest in ever going there and was afraid somebody was peeking over your shoulder.

My second thought was .. how  can those twins claim that it was an original  idea anyway?…..it was just called Friendster, MySpace or Asian Avenue the first time around, this one is just more popular. 

Now those twins might have a point about helping to hatch the idea but just because you were sitting in a room smoking a bong when this idea was hatched does not mean you helped it grow to what it is today.    Yeah you might have thought it was a hot idea but Zuckerberg was the one who grew the thing from some lame college message sharing board to a company bigger than Boeing.   Take your $100 mil and go buy an island and set up your very own male-review.  

My last thought is.. sell sell sell .. whoever doesn't realize that Facebook will crash and burn the second the kids find a new better cooler option is also hoping for Clinton Portis to be a #1 running back in Fantasy again.   Look at Microsoft, look at Yahoo!, look at Pets.com.  These things have a shelf life and that shelf-life is getting shorter every year, now Microsoft is worth half what it was before, the fact that the Yahoo! url doesn't come up with some GoDaddy ad is astonishing and  Pets.com is done.    

What Facebook's ultimate demise will be is also what makes it so popular..the fact that everybody is on it.. there is no privacy left when everybody can see everything you do regarless of what level of relationship you have with them.   Think about it, what 19 year old kid wants his mother to see him doing a 6 foot bong-hit or tagging some 18 year old with firm C's?

Now maybe I'm wrong but I haven't been on Facebook in over 4 months and don't miss it at all and I am sure there will be other people who will start to peel off.   I know I will miss a few vacation pictures or a couple of baby-pictures and that sucks but on the positive side I also haven't had to wade through 1000 'happy new year' posts or lame blizzard posts so it's still a net win any way you cut it.

Eat Love Pray Suck

So I got caught into 2 hours and 20 minutes of hell when I got pulled into Romantic Comedy Night. Now granted it could have been worse (Maid of Honor 3) but not much.. Now I was glad to find out that despite my fat thighs and sensitive side, after sitting through this I can still claim to be all dude because there was not one second that I enjoyed it.


Now this movie sucked the first time I saw it when it was called Eat Drink Man Woman but somehow this version was worse because as opposed to four smoking hot Asian chicks we get stuck with a very old looking Julia Roberts. Although the movie sucked I wasted 2 hours of my life so you are stuck reading my review.


The premise of the movie is that Julia Roberts goes through some mid-life crisis and decides to dump her husband for some younger dude who looks remarkably similar to her husband. I can’t seem to figure out if she's got a fetish for dudes who like the dude from Entourage or maybe she's just some chick who is unhappy for the sake of being unhappy.

Now we come across the first big plot-twist of this train-wreck…after banging the young dude for a few months she goes through her second mid-life crisis and dumps him and instead of jumping into the sack with some kid in Middle School she decides to quit her job and spend a year traveling the world in search of enlightenment.

So basically it is How Stella Got Her Groove Back meets Where in the World is Carmen Santiago.

The problem is that not only does she not bang any dudes; she also doesn't find a lot of enlightenment. You basically spend the next hour and a half watching some boring travel diary of Erin Brockovich meetings lame people in a bunch of foreign countries.

Finding enlightenment by going to some temple in India to meditate sounds boring enough if you were going to do it yourself but watching somebody else try to find enlightenment by going to some temple in India is like jamming an ice pick into your urethra. You watch her sit in some temple, you watch her talk to some people, you see her ride a bicycle, you see here eating a bunch of food.  This chick does nothing but eat like she is some midwesterner sitting at one of those all-you-can-eat buffets and the only thing that really surprises you is that she isn't 300 lbs by the end of it.  Well she doesn't find a lot of enlightenment and goes on some kind of sex hiatus till she finally meets some new dude who looks like a cross between a boar and a sixty year old version of Entourage guy.  Not only are you surprised her can even get his dinky up without a handful of blue pills but you wonder what she even sees in the boar.  
Anyway as this chick travels the world, I traveled through my IPhone and the good news is that I have 1300 pictures and none of them are of Julia Roberts or the boar.


Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Anno Domini

What has always bothered me is the inconsistency in the Gregorian calendar. If you want to be considered the world-leader in terms of time diction than I don't think it's too much to ask for you to be accurate.

See BC is referred to the 6 Billion Years before Christ and AD is referred to the 2000 some-odd years after his birth. Now obviously there is a lot more information about the last 2010 than before it but there are some major flaws in this concept.

- if BC is the time before Christ and we assume he was born on December 25th like I was taught in bible-studies when I was a kid than AD should have started on Christmas. But as it stands now the way I see it there are 6 unrecorded days in history -kind of like the Y2K but except this one was real- sometime between Mary having the kid and a few days before those three dudes showed up in robes.

Now my Brother in Law will tell you that Jesus was actually born at the end of March which he says they can prove using computer models, star alignments and carbon dating in which case there will have been about nine and a half months between his 'birth' and the AD calendar and i paid attention in Biology class so . I know it also takes 9 months from conception to birth so maybe Mary was fooling around with one of those wise-guys and this was just Julius Ceasar method of covering up her indiscretion.
:tinfoilhat:

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Team Game

There are a ton of articles knocking Governor Rendell for calling the NFL as a bunch of pussies cause they postponed the Eagles-Viking game. They criticize Rendell's assertion that the Chinese wouldn't allow something as trivial as a blizzard keep them from going to see a sporting event.

Now I actually agree with Rendell about the fact we are becoming a countries of pansies but I disagree with him when it comes to discussing his team as he referred to the Eagles inclusively on a number of occasion..

Let's be clear once and for all..just because you follow a sports team does not give you any reason to refer to them inclusively. I know that guys will say they live and die by their favorite teams but there is no bigger loser than the one who also refers to his favorite team as we just because he bought a Robinson Cano jersey and has season tickets.. It's very unlikely that if Cano breaks an ankle that Joe Girardi will look in the stands and see you sporting the pinstripes and ask you to play 2nd Base.

I hate to burst your bubble but you are NOT part of the team. As much as you root for Mark Sanchez or David Wright, you are not allowed in the locker room. You can buy a Derek Jeter jersey but the Yankees aren't inviting you to Spring training. David Harris goes through two-a-days in the blistering summer heat while you stand on the sideline drinking a diet-coke. Amar'e Stoudemire wouldn't know you if he ran you over in his H2. Mara isn't going to ask you for your opinion on giving Tom Coughlin an extension.
Yeah you can be a big fan and there is nothing wrong with rooting so hard your voice is hoarse or kicking a garbage can so hard you go airborne and land on your ass when your favorite football team blows a 10 point lead in the AFC championship game against the Broncos but there is something wrong with believing you are part of the squad.
See if you love Avatar you don't refer to it as your movie. You wouldn't sit through the Oscars and say that we won the award for best lighting. It's pretty obvious when your name isn't on the credits being that all you have done is paid to see it.
So make it your New Years Resolution..cause otherwise I'll relegate you to a life as a Browns fan.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

WTF is this??

I walk into a unisex bathroom in a restaurant today and am met with one of the most disgusting sights I have ever seen and I'm looking for somebody to explain it.

See chicks are always knocking guys for pissing all over the seat. I agree that it is a disgusting habit and we've dedicated a lot of blog space discussing how filthy this is. One thing which has come back are the overwhelming comments I get from women who tell me that a woman's public bathroom is even more gross which I honestly could not imagine considering I have plopped my naked arse down on seats so wet they may as well not have been one at all..

I imagined it was some twinkling which inadvertently hit the seat when chicks squat as opposed to sitting but today I saw what women are capable of and honestly I am sick to my stomach. This was a brown-yellow stain on the bottom of the seat. Please take a minute and imagine how this could possibly even happened. Now the stain -if you could even call it that- had both the color and the consistency of a huge chunk of phlegm.

Now first of all, who knew that your stream -if that is where this smudge of yellow-brown filthy even originated from- could curl up and hit the bottom of the seat. How thick is your liquid where it adheres to porcelain like a loogie? How many dudes have without knowing parked their racers or planted their faces in places where this can even grow?

Please do us guys a favor and shape up.. Cause my stomach can't take it.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Really!!!??!?

I'm a dog lover, having had a companion for most of my youth and still secretly wish for one today but I am not a dog owner lover. I walk out of my house today to find a heaping pile of dog crap sitting right on my sidewalk. Now maybe this Brooklyn thinks that leaving a pile of dog feces on a neighbors stoop is acceptable but this Brooklynite thinks it's repulsive and disgusting. The sad thing is that this kind of behavior isn't isolated especially in the winter.
I have noticed that when it snows, common courtesy seems to go out the window as people are so much less likely to bend down and pick up their dog-crap. Maybe they feel less inclined because there are less critical eyes out there to notice or because the cops are even less likely than usual to actually patrol the street or maybe it's this socialist nature of feeling like others should pick up the slack for you like another welfare, medicare or other bullshit assistance program which just promotes laziness.

Now what bothers me the most about this is not just the laziness of it but rather the anti-social nature of it. If you feel the need to own a filthy mutt then you should be obligated to clean up after it.

So I offer the following.. The ability to make a citizens arrest upon sight of non dog pooper scooping with the penalty being smothered by the evidence.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

12 white inches... Every girl's dream.

Can somebody explain to me how I walk onto the subway platform and there are mounds of snow piled up. Now I am not talking about an above-ground platform but rather an underground one which is a full story below street level. I guess I can tell my grandkids about the blizzard of 2010 when it was so bad that it snowed underground too.
See NYC is usually pretty responsive to this kind of storm but I guess with the holidays they weren't all that well prepared this time. There was some MTA bus which got stuck down the block and the driver had to spend the night in the bus. I'd like to see what kind of overtime that dude rightfully collected. I'm totally anti-government waste and people gaming the system but when it's 20 degrees on the day after Christmas and you have to sleep on a bus then you are either a homeless guy or can qualify as the MTA's man of the year.
I'm sure there is a baked ham in it for him

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

The Other Borough

I have lived in NYC for a decade and have seen my share of snowstorms, blackouts, terrorist attacks and subway strikes and I always thought that there was some solidarity between the Manhattanites and their other borough compadres. See I always assumed we live mostly similar lives with similar issues and get similar services and that misconception was only reinforced when I spent 6 years in Park Slope or better known as the lower East East Side.
But when I moved my family further South away from food CoOps, play-dates for both kids and adults and bars completely content to be patronized by dogs and owners alike, I found a second Brooklyn.
Unlik Park Slope this Brooklyn is a long way to NYC both figuratively and literally., this Brooklyn is blue-collar, this Brooklyn is neighborly not because somebody else is watching, this Brooklyn is not afraid to call it Christmas, this Brooklyn is outrageous decorations not simple holiday decor, this Brooklyn is unpretentious but this Brooklyn is also cliquey, this Brooklyn is also a place where they keep kids away from the parks because they can just as well watch TV at home but more importantly this Brooklyn is shovel your own street. I'm not talking about your sidewalk or shoveling out you car but rather shovel the entire block.
See we all pay taxes but the guys in Manhattan see more snow-plows in an hour than we do in a day. Park Slope probably has block-committees who lobby the local assemblyman for early street sweeping duty.
But in the rest of the city where there are blocks which don't ever see a plow hooked up to a garbage truck we refer to snow removal as spring.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Apollo 13 was a great movie but I prefer the first hollywood production

I've heard for years that there are wackos who believe the moon landing was a complete sham. Now generally I don't believe in this crap as 2010 conspiracies always seem politically motivated but after putting some of our best TOR researchers behind it, something just isn't right. See I've always been one who cannot in good conscious believe that in the middle of the Cold War that Neil Armstrong wasn't standing on a Hollywood sound-stage. I.'m sure if you search the interwebs there are thousands of guys with metal-pots on their heads coming up with thousands of crazy theories about flags waving in the air or third party leaks 'proving' that it was a hoax but to me it's more basic..

Now obviously the entire concept seems crazy especially because we haven't been back in about 50 years and even if you consider the fact that when it 'happened' every computer screen only had a black screen with green lettering so like the NBA in the 50's nobody will convince me that they could compete

What I always thing about is that I can't even hit a receiver running a post pattern playing touch football in the street and somehow these NASA scientists have some mathematical formula to hit a needle in a milky way. But even that seems plausible..
See to me it comes down to one thing.... When a spaceship takes off there is this big event where they take wind patterns, weather conditions and the latest football spreads into consideration and after a few days they finally launch. Fast forward a few days and a couple of astronauts ice-cream bars and three dudes land a tin-can onto the face of the moon using a parachute, they hang out for a couple of hours, collect a couple of rocks and finally they get back into their space-craft and shoot back to earth.
Please tell me how the hell does it take two huge rockets to take off from Cape Canaveral which can only take place in the perfect weather conditions but then three days later they generate the horsepower and the thrust to propel that porta-pottie through the moon's own gravitational pull to shoot through it's atmosphere and then slingshot themselves perfectly back into earth???

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Urge Overkill

The Dutch are a bunch of racist pigs but they do one thing right. In Holland they keep the gifts out of the religious holiday of Christmas by giving kids their presents on December 5th which keeps the focus on the 25th on the whole birth of Christ thing. In this country we feel like we always need to outdo each other by giving bigger gifts and more of them and when you literally can't step into the living room because there is no floor space left you know it'll be a cramped ride back home
but at some point it isn't even about the individual gift anymore as they all get lost in the tidal wave of generosity. What I hate is that I spend time trying to find the perfect gift but when it just becomes one of 30 boxes the thought gets lost.. But even the fact that my well meant thought-out gifts go unnoticed what is worse is what I bring back. Nothing like $1000 worth of lead painted chinese made plastic to show how much you care.

The good news is there is a Salvation Army only 2 miles away.


Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry