I Lived

It seemed like it was going to be close, though. On the odd chance anybody reads this blog, I just finished the radiation therapy that was the follow up to the surgery.

Here is the big thing about radiation therapy on your throat: even if they tell you you are getting a minor dose, you will probably lose the ability to eat solid food for a good while, especially enough to total over 1000 calories. Once the 4th (of 6) weeks began, I gave up. I went to drinking Ensure Plus (350 cals 13g protein per serving). Toward the end and for the week after the therapy, it was tough to even get that down. The tip off is the phrase "you may have some trouble swallowing". Indeed. They're cooking your throat, it's bound to put things off.

Another problem is that your throat tissues try to heal themselves by cranking out mucus. You spend your waking time spitting, and you don't sleep much because you wake up gagging. There is not much that can be done about this, so get used to it. The situation is made worse by the "trouble swallowing", so the mucus just kind of pools up.

All in all, nothing I'd recommend. I did lose 20 lbs though and am quite svelte at the moment.

Gratuitous

Date: May 22, 2007
Time: 23:20
Place: Still in this vale of tears.

I realize my course work is over, but the last few days were pretty bad and the grace note was struck today. All the following details are true.

On Friday, I went to the surgeon in Boston. He said the cancer wasn't that bad, he predicted a full recovery. He'd just cut out a chunk of the jaw and replace it with a graft from a tibia, a bone in the leg which he held in low regard as a leg bone, but a wonderful source of grafts. While it was blending in with its new surroundings, I would accomodate it by breathing through an esophageal airway and eating through a tube in my nose for a week or so in order not to disturb it.

I was expecting arthroscopy. I had to ask the guy to shut up because I was about to faint. Apparently, its quite a common phenomena. I always thought that "make sure you're sitting down" stuff was pure sit-com, but it's true, the nurse said particularly so among big guys like me. It's a fight-or-flight thing. I could feel the blood drawing deep into my body away from my skin.

So, anyway, as I'm enjoying my one pleasure these days, my bike ride home, a pigeon craps square on my forehead as I cross the Welfare Island Bridge.

That's gratuitous.

Sharpton & Hitchens

Date: May 16, 2007 for May 17th
Time: 22:00
Place: Swankadero of the Future

Sharpton made a funny yesterday( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lGi0SS4w6I&NR=1) while debating Chris Hitchens of "God Is Not Great" fame over the place of faith or somesuch crap. Anyway, Hitchens brought up that Mormons (religion of GOP candidate and fan of "Battlefield Earth" Mitt Romney) officially considered black people subhuman until about 1965. In the clip above, Sharpton says words to the effect of "as to the candidate being a Mormon, people who really believe in God will defeat him". The implication is that Mormons don't really believe in God, which is actually a widely held view among many Christians. Smith's revelations are heretical in the eyes of most Christian sects.

Anyway, this is pretty funny. After Sharpton's braying over the Imus affair, the next 3 weeks of O'Reilly, Hannity, and Glenn Beck are going to pretty much write themselves. To me though, the one truly interesting point is this odd couple of Hitchens and Sharpton. Each has lost almost all credibility for insisting on supporting particular causes centered on persons now known to be either extraordinarily deluded or dishonest. They carry the respective albatrosses of Wolfowitz and Brawley.

Sometimes rain means steady rain

Date: May 16, 2007
Time: 21:43
Place: The Dry-odero

Careful readers of this blog may have caught my post a few days ago in which I rhapsodically described the ability to bicycle 2 flat miles to work on these lovely spring days. True indeed for the most part, but add steady rain into the equation, and the prospects become unpleasing indeed.

Nothing has happened to me recently that would suggest that I was on a "good luck" streak, so why I chose to ride to work this morning fully aware of forecasted "PM showers" is mysterious even to me. Perhaps I suspected they meant intermittent showers but couldn't fit it in the little box with the sun, cloud, and rain drops. It was also a most clement morning, the type which one believes would preclude such an egregiously hideous turn.

I left the buiding around 7:20 PM and it was pouring steadily. I got the bike into the subway, road to Rockefeller Center, transferred, and got to Roosevelt Island, for such is the nexus of the V and F trains. The two mile trip is a 5 mile subway ride. Because of all the construction on Roosevelt Island, the roads are all very badly crowned, so the few hundred feet I road north of the subway to the covered sidewalks was enough to thoroughly drench my pants as I road through one deep puddle after another. Note to self: the middle of the road is the highest point.

I guess the rapture's here

Date: May 15, 2007
Time: 15:00
Place: The RI 'dero

Yep, whoop it up all you gays, secularists, and other causes of G*d's wrath the world over. Just call him Jerry "Farewell". It must have been a pretty narrow rapture, since I was driving around this afternoon and discerned no effects of suddenly vacated driver's seats. Maybe it's just that there is nobody worth saving in New York. I've often thought that, particularly while driving around. All this talk of Armageddon does remind me of a great Wodehouse line where Bertie has a hangover and describes his aunt's loud voice as giving him the impression that "Armageddon had set in with unusual severity".

Anyway, I just returned from getting a P.E.T. scan to make sure there was no cancer elsewhere in the old corpus. P.E.T. stands for "Positronic Emission Tomography". Positrons are technically anti-matter, positively charged analogs of the electron, so if you see someone who looks like me with a goatee, look out. It's probably my evil twin from an alternate dimension. I don't know what Tomography is, maybe painting with tomatoes or the history of people named Tom. I don't see what is has to do with positrons, though.

Back in the Saddle Again

Date: May 14, 2007
Time: 22:00
Place: Top-o-the-40

I felt the old left shoulder was finally limber enough to steer the bike, so this Saturday I took a trial commute to the office. It's only two miles away through pretty flat territory, especially when one takes the elevator to the Welfare Island Bridge. These beautiful spring days are the best time of year to ride, warm enough to not need a jacket yet cool enough to not work up a sweat. This morning was my first real commute by bike since the shoulder surgery.

It is actually faster to get to work by bike than car, since by the time one negotiates the various parking structures and stop lights, any velocity advantage is lost. I'm on the bike as soon as I'm out the door of my apartment building, and I chain it up right next to the door of the office building. It takes less than 15 minutes door-to-desk, whereas driving takes a little over 20.

I also feel like I'm getting away with something, in addition to all the environmental and exercise benefits. The car is convenient, but the lot costs over 10 bucks. The bus is only 4 bucks, but they usually conspire to leave me standing around for at least a half an hour. As long as it doesn't rain, the bike is the way to go.

Sean O'Hair sliding uphill

Date: May 13, 2007
Time: 21:45
Place: The RI 'dero

I was watching the Players Championship today which Phil Mickelsen won. He made it interesting on the very last hole by nearly putting his second shot in the lake, but I think he was losing interest in the game due to the incredibly slow play of his partner, Sean O'Hair. O'Hair could not hit a putt in any less than 5 minutes. One could argue that it was working for him since he was in second place but that evaporated when he put two shots in the lake at 17 on his way to a quadruple bogey. After chowdering the last two holes, he slipped to like 11th or 12th.

I can make a quadruple bogey. I also bogeyed Bethpage Black #1 within a month of Tigers Woods bogeying it.

You hate to be overly critical of the young man, but there is nobody more despised on the course than slow players. If you're going to choke , do it fast. NBC took the unusual step if reserving time until 7 PM, probably figuring they'd have plenty of time to chat with the winners. Instead, they ran a little late as O'Hair had to over-analyze every putt on a course he had played the previous 4 days. Perhaps that quadruple bogey was the golf gods' way of saying "TODAY, damn it".

Fecal matter sliding uphill

Date: May 12, 2007
Time: 21:25
Place: The Roosevelt Island Swankadero

A childhood friend's father used to use a version of this metaphor to describe the speed of people who ran slowly. I ran around Roosevelt Island today, which I've heard is 3.9 miles, in about 37-38 minutes. This isn't bad since this is the first time I've done it this year, but it is by no means fast. I don't pass many other runners but many of them pass me. They're all shorter than me too so I got to work on my stride. I feel like I'm wasting my height.

I've also heard the Roosevelt Island promenade was 3.5 miles but I don't think that's correct. That might not include the Goldwater Hospital grounds south of the Queensboro Bridge. Lots of low trees and people in wheelchairs and gurneys. It's a very tough stretch to sprint. You also feel kind of bad running around so many people in wheelchairs. It seems to be in poor taste, as if one is flaunting one's ambulatoriness.

By the way, you may note I said the Queensboro Bridge, not the 59th Street Bridge. It's the Brooklyn Bridge, not the Pearl St Bridge. It's the Manhattan Bridge, not the Canal St Bridge. It's the Williamsburg Bridge, not the Delancey Street Bridge.

It's the Queensboro Bridge, and Paul Simon damn well knew it. "Feelin' Groovy" my ass.

Dancing about architecture

Date: May 11, 2007
Time: 22:00
Place: Fernwood 2-night

Steven Colbert used this line as a preface to his interview with Jann Wenner on the 40th anniversary of the magazine "Rolling Stone". The quote "Writing (or talking) about music is like dancing about architecture". It's variously attributed to many people, the predominant suspects being Elvis Costello, Steve Martin, Frank Zappa, and Martin Mull.

My money is on Martin Mull. I own albums by all the contenders (several by Elvis and Frank) but that quote sounds to me like Martin Mull, of whose books I have owned two, "The History of White People in America", and the successor, "A Paler Shade of White" (if you're not laughing hysterically at this point, google (and I'm not making this up) "Procul Harem".

Martin Mull's 1978 epic "I'm EveryoneI've Ever Loved" is one of the great albums ever. Mull and Steve Martin were a team for awhile, writing for the Smothers Brothers. The song "Men" is from that collaboration. Martin used to have the rep as an edge comic, he kind of lost it due to exposure, but when you look at it, he's still there with something different. Like when in Roseanne, he plays a gay guy without the kind of "Will and Grace" trumpeting. Also, check out the Aristocrats.

The Left stages a comeback

Date: May 10, 2007
Time: 22:38
Place: The Welfare Island Swankadero

I made really remarkable progress with my shoulder today. After beating the crap out of myself on the Stairmaster (106 floors in 22 minutes, no hands) and then my right shoulder with 7 sets of (10 curls + 10 front raises + 10 military press) at the effeminate weight of 10 lbs., I was able to stand perpendicular to a wall and hold my left hand flat against it.

Originally, I thought it was going spectacularly well but then I realized I was using my right shoulder, which though tired was not surgically repaired. When I switched arms though, I was finally able to flatten my palm on the wall with my arm outstretched.

My goal is to play the Flushing Meadow pitch & putt in July. There's that one 80 yard monster around the 9th whole, over by the lake that smells like it has a very high urine content. Maybe I'll carry a pitching wedge in addition to the sand wedge for the added pop. I'd hate to have to lay up.

Life can be pretty humiliating these days. I'm lifting 10 lb dumbbells in public like Richard Freakin' Simmons and the 2003 long drive champ of the Yer Man's Irish Pub Golf Outing (i.e. me and I would have taken 2006 too but I pulled the drive slightly off the fairway) is worried about the 80-yarder at the pitch & putt.

My Boss Tom and why MGMT404 is so important

Date: May 9, 2007
Time: 21:32
Place: Swankadero 10044

I've often described myself as computer Amish, by which I mean I'm a mainframe programmer using skills I picked up at the You-Too-Can-Be-A-Computer-Programmer school back in 1982. The IEEE will confirm that it's not just my little corner of Citibank, but 95% of financial industry DP is "still" done on the mainframe. There's many reasons for this but it boils down to the fear of replacing or tampering with an audit-certified system when there are so many other less dangerous ways to build a career in these giant organizations. It was best summarized by George Kramer, a chain-smoking, privates(his own)-scratching, peri-retiree when I joined the bank. Talking to my current boss Tom about career advice, he said "Never f*ck with the financials".

Tom is retiring at the end of this month. He and I joined the bank on the same day, June 3, 1983. He came out of the government and took the "more demanding" job to distract himself from a fatal cancer diagnosis he had been given, which he has long since beat beyond the charts. It was my first job after the "You Too" school. After about 6 months we were hanging around laughing about how our perceptions about "the land of the giants" had turned to "where did they dig these people up"?

Tom built a career being one of the few people competent to "f*ck with the financials" though his respect for George Kramer continues unabated. He has always kept those who worked for him somewhat shielded from the usual goings-on in our organization which is something like the upper-middle rungs of Dante's inferno set to "Yakkety Sax", since as one of the few people capable of discerning bullshit, other managers avoided him. We'll miss him.

That's why MGMT404 is so important. If you can work MS Project, you can have a well-paid sinecure as an ignoramus who manages lists and commitments. That's where the industry is headed.

How did that get there

Date: May 8, 2007
Time: 23:50
Place: El Swankadero

I think it's the temple at Dome of the Rock where all the crusaders carved little crosses in one certain passageway. I went for a CT scan and MRI at a place over in Astoria today, and there were all kinds of strange marks and scratches in the MRI tube. Those tubes are pretty narrow but I still don't get the long black streaks on the "ceiling" so to speak. I have this image of someone clenching a Sharpie in their teeth in one of the most pointless "tagging" ventures imaginable.

Also, there was scotch tape on one part, and that never adds a professional touch to anything.
There was an episode of "House" where they put some 600 lb. dude in the MRI. That did not happen, either.

Anyway, I'm now the proud owner of a cd full of 3-dimensional glam shots of the inside of my jaw and salivary glands. Gotta go now. The phone's ringing and I think it's GQ.

DeVry Dissed

Date: May 07, 2007
Time: 21:34
Place: The R I

I have yet to see the call to arms emblazoned across e-College, but this slur against our fine institution from last night's "Family Guy" must not go unanswered. Please don't read too much into this, but at the moment I feel a little like a Rutger's Women's Basketball Team member.

This was in one of those random cutaway jokes the right-thinking (on this issue, normally they seem to be very garden variety heads-up-their-ass libertarians) "South Park" guys hate so much. There's no sense to try to fit it in with any of the "Family Guy" characters or the plot of the show. Anyway, one guy says "My son just got into DeVry" and the other guy says "Oh, yeah? What did he have to do? Open the door?"

Where's the outrage? Besides, it's not getting in to a given college that distinguishes it, it's what the students can take away. I do greeting cards also.

Actually, I like "Family Guy". Any comedy with a recurring child molester character, actually done very well in last night's episode in a "Skull and Bones" spoof, can't be all bad.

The Rocket Returns

Date: May 7th, 2007
Time: 22:14
Place: The Swankadero

It looks like Roger Clemens is attempting to illustrate the new paradigm of phased retirement. He saves himself the wear and tear of spring and comes out once all the prologue has been taken care of. At 45, he's been to that rodeo before. I'm sure he knows how to get himself in shape by this point. The big question is what the Yankees do with Pavano. I don't think they can trade him at this point, so they may have to eat all the zillions of dollars on their own.

Clemens may be the best superannuated pitcher , but he is not without precedent. Nolan Ryan was a dominant power pitcher well into his 40's. No one knew how old Satchel Paige was. He was rumored to be in his 50's. Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez is supposedly in his mid-40's as were the famed knuckle-ball brothers Joe and Phil Niekro.

Given the way Kayagawa and the Yankees bullpen pitched last Friday, I doubt my 45 year old arm could have fared any worse. My left shoulder is still frozen so I can't field well, but I have a feeling if they made contact the infield would not be an issue.

Good riddance, worst week ever

Date: May 5, 2007
Time: 21:09
Place: Welfare Island Swankadero

There's only 3 hours left for something else really crappy to happen to me this week. There was the usual shoulder PT, and of course, the exercise ball I bought today had no pin with the pump to add to background hum of petty annoyances. The highlights were the wonderful dental surgery of Monday, the malignancy diagnosis of Wednesday, and I managed to lose my Flash drive at some point. Tuesday was the fourth anniversary of my mother's death. Cheer all around!

The one thing I find therapeutic is sleeping late in the morning. I have reasonably flexible work hours, and I live very close to work, so usually I can get away with sleeping until 8:30 or 9. That one extra hour is a magic tonic, but of course when I could use it most, no go. The Swankadero is a penthouse (as are most Swankadero's) and Roosevelt Island law is that escalators and elevators need to be out of service at least 60% of the time. On Wednesday and Thursday at 8 the repair crew showed up and engaged in some kind of ritual that involved dropping chains on the floor of the elevator shed (exorcising Jacob Marley?) which is right over my bedroom.

On Friday, something of great interest to the local news organs took place in either Astoria or the upper east side since there was a helicopter hovering over my apartment complex for about an hour starting a little after 7 AM. I can see every direction but north from my patio and I couldn't see the chopper while I wished ardently for a Stinger missile. My right shoulder is still good and had a citronella candle to wing at them if they got close enough.

Friday Night's Post - Damn Yankees

Date: May 4, 2007 (backdated)
Time: 23:59
Place: Home from Yankee Stadium

My nephew called Friday afternoon with some tickets for the Yankee game. These were some spectacular seats. I think we were about 6 rows off the field and less than ten yards beyond the Yankee dugout. This was going to be a chance to see a good game up close.

It was not a good game. The final score was 15-11. The Yankees were up 8-6 in the 5th when ny nephew and I headed for the Stadium club to catch the end of the Rangers-Sabres playoff game. We kept glancing over at the Yankee game and as the Mariners pulled ahead 12-8. The inning lasted as long as half a hockey period and the overtime. The hockey game was exciting, the Rangers breaking a scoreless tie with less than three minutes left with a wrist shot the likes of which I haven't seen since Mike Bossy. The Sabres tied it with 7 seconds left (power play on a ticky tacky penalty) and won in overtime.

We went back to the seats. Normally with really good seats like this, I like to heckle the first base coach, whose only job during the game is to pat other men on the butt, like some kind of greeter at the Ramrod. The first base coach for the Mariners name was Goff, so I figured he'd heard the "Whats' your first name, Jack?" line several times so I let him slide. The Mariners pushed the limit by bringing in a pitcher named Putz. You can't come into a city with a big Jewish population and trot out a pitcher named Putz. I had to announce in a comical Yiddish accent, "Putz? What, did Schmuck pull a hamstring?"

Day 2 as a cancer patient vs UTBAL moobs

Date: May 3, 2007
Time: 23:59
Place: Still south of Coler

That's a Roosevelt Island joke. Coler Hospital on the north end of the island is a terminal care facility. Besides, it's just a crummy little mucoepidermoid carcinoma of the saliva gland which has a 90% cure rate. Even Derek Jeter makes errors, though.

Another problem on my mind is that because of the shoulder surgery, I have not been able to bench press anything in over four months for the first time in about 20 years. The problem, UTBAL moobs, or used-to-bench-a-lot man-boobs. It's like that old Hans and Franz bit, "I don't know whether to pummel him or to milk him". They're at least letting me do some isometrics now but all I have to do is hear a pop out of the shoulder and I stop.

Anyway, this mucoepidermoid carcinoma has me bugged. None of my direct family has had cancer. I don't smoke but a cigar every two years. I did start working with these big ass IBM dumb terminals of the 3270 class many years ago. They had these powerful CRT's that could cook a potato 15 feet behind you.

Getting my money's worth out of Aetna

Date: May 2, 2007
Time: 22:00
Place: Roosevelt Island Swankadero

Prior to this year I pretty much lost out on healh insurance. I rarely went to the doctor and there was not much wrong with me. This year started with the major rotator cuff surgery, and the result of last Monday's fishing expedition in my mouth yielded a "malignancy" though not a really bad one. This is starting to suck pretty convincingly.

It may just be instant karma. If this image uploaded, you'll see maybe Charlie Rodrigues just wasn't so damn funny afterall. Ok, well the image didn't upload, but it's this guy sitting in a doctor's office with his face all stitched up and half his jaw cut away. The doctor say "I realize it's not easy to whistle, Mr Chase, but give it time." I seemed to get this other Rodriguez cartoon to load though.

the unthinkable

Date: May 1, 2003
Time: 21:18
Place: Beside myself with embarrassment

About 4 hours ago I became the punchline to a joke. Perhaps not as momentous a punchline to as hideous a joke as Bush's "Mission Accomplished" stunt 4 years ago, but a true "duh" moment. Being unable to eat much else, I figured I'd treat myself to some ice cream. I tried to buy some right after the surgery yesterday, but the cashier at the Gristede's (from hell, where food goes to expire) would not sell it to me because the freezer had broken earlier. Good thing they treat the regulars well, or I could be adding botulism to my list of complaints.

Anyway, I stopped in at a grocery store a tad further away which is a much cleaner enterprise with a higher turnover. I'm partial to Ben and Jerry's Phish Phood, but they didn't have any. I saw something reasonably interesting and instinctively grabbed the one behind it, because everyone knows the front one has been fondled in some disgusting manner and placed back there. It LOOKED like the same stuff, but no. When I got home, I discovered that I had bought Ben and Jerry Vanilla Ice Cream. I should rinse out the carton and put it next to the chunk of fence board that was white-washed by Jackson Pollack and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory nail clippers.

The vanilla beans are guarnteed not to be from any country getting ripped of by the IMF/Wolfowitz World Bank (no link to Eddie Clontz and the WWN, puhleez!) . Still, I feel even a bigger chump than usual. To extend Christopher Hitchens' contention that god is not great, he is also gratuitous.

yum! chum!

Date: April 30, 2007
Time: 21:47
Place: Out of the dentist chair and damn glad

I now know how a bass feels. I had more barbs, hooks, and lines in my mouth today than a Minnesota lake. I'd feel let down of they don't find something serious. Fortunately, I'm getting a chance to use all that pain medication I got for my shoulder surgery. Don't need that stuff hanging around.

Speaking of hook, line, and sinker, yesterday's Times insinuates that "Cousin Bandar Bush" is no longer considered a reliable source in the White House because he hasn't been able to predict King Abdullah's behavior. KA snubbed Condi and then let fly some line about the US occupation of Iraq being illegal at an Arab leaders conference.

W must feel like he's received history's least deserved pimp-slap. Everything he's done for that man and now this. Bush and Cheney are now at the point where their best option, based on precedent, is to shave their heads and go into rehab.

lack-o-ambition Sunday

Date: April 29th, 2007
Time: 18:33
Place: My apartment, which I really should clean up

One of the reasons I resumed my college career in my mid-40's was that I had discovered I was doing damn little on the weekends other than lying on the couch, yelling at C-Span (or the Jets and Giants during the football season). DeVry was offering weekend courses with which I could upgrade my Amish computer skills, so it seemed like a good idea.

This weekend, I reverted to form a bit. There were some forums from the LA Festival of Books. There was a big push for Slate's Chris Hedges' book on the radical Christian right and its cronies in the Bush administration.

I think people accord way to much influence to philosophy in the Bush administration. If you look at them simply as interested only in the smooth perpetuation of the oil industry, everything makes a lot more sense. For instance, al Qaeda's main "campaign issue" in Saudi Arabia (where they are more popular certainly than the Royal family) was that American troops were on holy Muslim soil, i.e. Saudi Arabia. American troops were there to protect the Royal family from Saddam Hussein. Guess what?

Today's vocabulary word is "lucubration". It means roughly burning the midnight oil to contrive bloated gibberish, and in the dictionary they have a picture of Paul Wolfowitz testifying to Congress about the need to invade Iraq. Even he once included in his testimony that one of the benefits to this policy was that we could remove our troops from Saudi Arabia, where they were proving an irritant to local sensibilities.

This PBS series better end with a devouring

Date: April 28, 2007
Time: 21:36
Place: Welfare Island Swankadero

By PBS, I mean Pearls Before Swine, a comic strip I recommended in this space a few days back. The current story arc has the son of the idiot crocs in love with the niece of the zebra over his parents objections. It's starting to look downright treacly and damn it, it better stop. The only way to redeem it is for Junior to discover his inner predator, preferably at some comedically rich time.

It's bad enough Battle Star Galactica went down the toilet at the end. The only interest generated by the "cliffhanger" ending is morbid interest, in how are they going to cobble a season's worth of shows behind the muddled mess of story lines. Maybe those four clowns who just discovered they were Cylons by humming "All Along The Watchtower" will upgrade the act to use wax-paper/comb kazoos. It used to improve the Bullwinkle episodes.

My favorite cliff hanger ending was the Dirty Harry spoof "Sledge Hammer". He's supposedly disarming a nuclear bomb ("Trust me, I know what I'm doing.") and it apparently goes off. The next year, they reveal it did go off. They then start playing the theme music, and right after the Sledge Hammer title goes up, they stick "The Early Years" right under it.

I don't know if that will help BSG. Maybe they can have Mary McConnell's character wake up and say "It was all a dream, all just a terrible dream".

Make up for yesterday

Date: April 28, 2007
Time: 21:04
Place: Ever so humble but no place like it, home

Got home late and tired last night so I just went to bed. The topic around the office yesterday was the Richard Gere arrest warrant for kissing that actress at the Indian film festival. Being a data processing area, over half the people are Indian so they thought it was pretty funny. Most of them were not aware of the "gerbil" rumor, and I just don't see how one can truly appreciate this story without that bit of background.

There are temples in India with carvings from the Kama Sutra on the walls. Apparently, this is all a manifestation of a parliamentary system where the religious right can complain loud enough to get an arrest warrant, but the case gets dismissed the second it enters the court. No word on the gerbil statutes, though.

It made me wonder, though, if there is some kind of Bollywood porn industry. Do they have some cheesy, signature sitar riff as a counterpart to the American wa-wa pedal boooowwww-wacka-wacka-wacka-boooowwwwww that serves as background music? Do the actresses denote arousal in that very high shrill voice, and do about 80 people just pop in and break into a choreographed line dance?

Pig Bitin' Mad

Date: April 26th, 2007
Time: 22:44
Place: a mile north of haunted ruins

My SPCH275 presentation was RUINED by a balky projector in the classroom. A last minute substitute projector was wheeled in and misaligned so that navigating the desktop was a crapshoot, forcing me to tip the gag of my "Accuracy in Media" presentation with the subsequent "Weekly World News" front page before the speech started. Surprise, timing, all lost. Feh.

Worse, a truly inspirational slide I had prepared, "We're in a constant struggle against science, medicine, and religion" over a picture of the American icon and my personal hero, Eddie Clontz, was split in half, with the "We're in a constant struggle" projected worthlessly on the ceiling.

All Americans should be inspired by the story of Weekly World News creator Eddie Clontz, even if they didn't know he was the author of the "Ed Anger" (what makes me so pig-bitin' mad ...) columns. Eddie's brother Derek wrote the advice column from Countess Serena Sabak, giving very specific answers to questions like "your lost bracelet is in the top drawer beneath a pair of grey socks. Derek would boast how no one ever wrote in to say the answers were wrong, but then again, since none of the questions were real, this is not quite as great a feat as it seems.

These kids today and their anime

Date: April 24, 2007
Time: 22:33
Place: Welfare Island Swankadero

Bullwinkle was my favorite cartoon. From the standpoint of drawing arts, it was one step above Clutch Cargo, where they'd project human lips onto static cutouts, a technique Conan O'Brien has kept alive. Bullwinkle evolved from Crusader Rabbit, or more accurately Rocky the Flying squirrel evolved from the rabbit, but I'll leave that debate to the zoologists.

These cartoons were made in the late 50's and early 60's. They were preceded by and shared TV time the big studio cartoons of Warner Brothers and MGM. Warner Brothers produced the excellent Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Taz, et al. MGM produced the consistently unfunny Tom & Jerry that somehow managed to endure for years, kind of like a full motion "Cathy". The animation was top notch and the background music actually employed two of the largest private orchestras in the country. When a Bullwinkle episode had any background music at all, it was a solo kazoo.

God, I loved those guys.

Speculate to Accumulate

Date: April 23, 2007
Time: 22:29
Place: 100 yards from Tomorrow

Tomorrow being a metaphor for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy pilot project, which in turn represents the harvesting of renewable and non-polluting resources.

If anybody needs any further proof of what a treasonous gaggle of bastards the harem of slaves to the Saudi Royal family that calls itself the Bush administration is, consider how much alternative energy companies like Verdant Energy, who built the project, have to scramble for funds.

One of the founding pipe dreams among the edible paste and blunt scissors think tankers meandering under the "neoconservative" banner is missile defense. I can recall Richard Perle's blitherings on this subject from the late 70's. He was a shill for Boeing back then. Hey, he's gotta eat. Even back then, everybody knew that every dollar spent on missile defense could be defeated by 5 cents worth of countermeasures.

While adminstration apologists will stretch to come up with a 4 billion annual number for alternative fuels (by including tangentially related tax breaks for ethanol), this administration has spent 50 billion alone on two failed ABM systems. 40 billion went for those rocket interceptors that will work as long as there is a homing beacon in the nose of the target, and 11 billion for the airborne laser, that pre-supposed the enemy was weak enough to allow a 747 (with an incredibly toxic load of chemicals aboard) to wallow in its airspace AND, characteristic of most neocon pipe-dreams, reality-based rules about air diffracting light would not apply.

The free market will not get involved because at its bravest, capital is cowardly. From computers to jet planes, governments had to assume the initial risk, often betting on 3 horses in a 5 horse race, before the private companies will come in.

Roosevelt Island - Movietown

Date: April 23rd, 2007
Time: 22:44
Place: The back lot

There was somebody shooting a movie here today on Roosevelt Island. It's quite a popular spot, particularly the parking garage. Unfortunately, the garage is usually used for the gritty, industrial look. Parts of "Inside Job" and "Dark Water" were filmed here. Some of the neighbors were saying that it looked like they were trying to film a hooker scene. They kept filming this thin women with black leather pants and a white tube top smoking. I saw her and I think it might have been some humorless rock video. They did have one elaborate tour bus with loads of wardrobe and food though.

The had this weird lighting gismo that looked like a balloon on a stick. It was black on the bottom and luminescent in the upper hemisphere. Perhaps they filming a remake of "Plan 9 From Outer Space" and that was the space ship. I doubt it. It looked like humorless artsy types.

The south end of the island is where they constructed the cemetery set for Zoolander, where David Duchovny's character ducks behind tomb stones with Manhattan in the background. Queens is 100 yeards away with loads of cemeteries (PEOPLE ARE DYING TO GET IN! BA-DA-BING!) and they build a fake one for the movie. Go figure.

To appreciate Jeter, you must suffer Michael

Date: April 22, 2007
Time: 16:40
Place: Yankee-town

I grew up in north-east Queens, in an apartment complex populated largely by displaced Brooklynites. This was hard-core Mets territory. The Mets were born the year after I was so by the time I became aware of baseball, my contrarian nature dictated that I must become a Yankee fan. This was a tough time to be a Yankee fan, around 68-69. The Mets would take the World Series, while the Yankees completed one of the fastest disintegrations of a team conceivable prior to free agency. Mantle, Maris, Ford, Howard, Kubek, and even Tresh may as well have been Civil War generals by the time I understood baseball.

Apart from their clearly drug-addicted first baseman Joe Pepitone, the woes of the Yankees of this era were personified by their second baseman and shortstop, Horace Clarke and Gene Michael. I'd seen both make 3 errors in a game, but at least Clarke could bat his weight. Michael couldn't, despite being notoriously thin. Worse was the fact that they held on to him for about 6 years of consistently putrid performance.

I was out enjoying the marvelously clement weather just before and noticed a lttle kid wearing a Jeter shirt. He is truly fortunate to be living in this marvelous age where the Yankees have a shortstop worthy of the high calling of "Yankee".

Rat Humor

Date: April 21, 2007
Time: 21:09
Place: Balmy Roosevelt Island in the Sunshine!

One of my favorite comic strips these days is "Pearls Before Swine" http://www.comics.com/comics/pearls/ . The main characters are Rat and Pig, but the strip is tending toward some extraordinarily inept crocodiles from the Zeeba Zeeba Eata fraternity. They moved in next door to the zebra character and try unsuccessfully to devour him. Their dialect is supposed to be read as a 60's farce movie Soviet accent. It's also refreshing to see a comic strip that is unafraid of directly slagging horribly unfunny strips like Cathy and Family Circus.

What put me in mind of it today was a pretty good rat joke I heard. It also kind of ties in with one of the themes of this blog, me whining about my shoulder, teeth, and plantar wart.

Early in the space program they decide to shoot a rat into space. They grab a lab rat and spin him around in a centrifuge until he's squashed to death (almost). They then take him out to field and shoot him across it with a cannon. They then put him a contraption that flips him upside down and sideways for about an hour.

They put the rat back in his cage and another rat says, "How was it?"

The astro-rat says,"Pretty bad, but it's better than cancer!"

Real War On Terror in the East Channel

Date: April 20, 2007
Time: 22:43
Place: A hundred yards north of the vanguard

I saw a couple of the six new electricity generating turbines installed over by the Welfare Island Bridge this morning. This pilot project will generate the electricity to run the Gristede's and the Motorgate garage. Eventually, between 300 and 500 of these 15 foot wide turbines will sit in the East Channel, supplying about 10 MW, which is adequate for 8,000 homes, which is about the projected size of Roosevelt Island. No story is more important to national security, the economy, or the environment than these six turbines.

Our foreign policy is bizarrely and ludicrously warped beyond logic or sense by the fact that we need to import over fifty percent of our oil from a market where prices are set by Saudi Arabia. Our addiction dictates that we can't say "Boo" to the very people who fund Al Qaeda. This situation will only worsen as India and China modernize and demand more of this limited commodity. World Wars have started this way. Anybody who frets about Islamo-fascism and then says nothing about energy independence is just not serious.

That is why these six turbines are such a big story. Each turn of the blades pulls another bit of greenhouse gas back into the sea. Each turn of the blades brings back another bit of America's engineering and manufacturing base. Each turn of the blades strikes another blow in the real war on terror. Also, as I said before, each turn of these three blade propellers is an upraised middle finger to King Abdullah, Osama Bin Laden, and Dick Cheney.

We've nothing to fear but roaring asswipes

Date: Still April 19th in Albuquerque
Time: 22:46 ditto
Place: Not Albuquerque

The discussion topic for an on-line history course I am taking is terrorism, and the presumption that they have goals. One glaring exception to this rule is Timothy McVeigh. If there was any motive, itwas an obtuse attempt at revenge for Waco and Ruby Ridge. It's not clear that he was part of any large organization, he and his friends were just ticked off.

The scary part about modern weaponry and population density is that there is a whole lot more damage one can do without all that much sophistication. This last event at Virginia Tech was an example. Large ammunition clips and large groups of people to empty them at. Also scary is the prevalence of mass media. Apparently, this guy was largely incoherent but the one end he did have in mind was to have his video all over TV. He succeeded. We are all in deep trouble if many people share his pathetically modest goal to feed the beast of cable news for a week.

Drama queens are now our most serious terror threat.

Failed a test

Date: April 18th, 2007
Time: 20:50
Place: Not imprisoned in a volcano on Venus

I haven't seen the Weekly World News in the supermarket for a while, so I went looking online. "On line" as opposed to "in line" as "in the supermarket checkout line", for I am a man who dearly loves his pun of the day. The first one I ever bought was "Siamese Twins Face Firing Squad", back at some point in 1987.

One of the links that came up for the home of Batboy and Ed Anger was this http://www.thenetw0rk.com/games/scientology.php which was listed as Scientology vs. The Weekly World News. It consists of a quiz where you are given a quote and you are supposed to decide if it comes from one of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology cosmology or the Weekly World News ("Couple Chased From Yellowstone by Talking Bear").

I made a sincere effort (and I've read both "Dianetics" and "Ed Anger's My America") and scored 53.3 percent. That Hoi Polloi stuff, who knew? Now that I gave you all that hint, don't come over all snooty on me just because you scored 65+.

and yet more tax

Date: April 17th, 2007
Time: 20:10
Place: Good graces of the IRS

Just finished watching another episode of House, where Hugh Laurie continues to amaze playing the least Bertie Wooster-ish character imaginable, the role in which he started to amaze.

Bertie's creator, the great British author P. G. Wodehouse, was an unflinchingly genial, quiet man who had a fierce distaste for paying taxes. I am a member of the Wodehouse Society. I read an article in the newsletter about how Wodehouse, though scrupulously apolitical in his life, had donated heavily to some wingnut in the 50's who was trying to have the federal income tax declared unconstitutional.

Wodehouse lived much of his life under the accusation of being a Nazi collaborator, which was a nonsense charge, but it all stemmed from him being too cheap to pay taxes. In 1939, he was a British tax exile living Le Touquet, France. When the Germans overran Le Touquet, they imprisoned Wodehouse along with all the other foreign nationals of hostile countries.

Wodehouse was still getting paid by the Saturday Evening Post, and a German Wodehouse fan set up some broadcasts for Wodehouse from the camp. He made some very light references to the British Army which were exagerated by the British press. He didn't live it down until he was knighted in 1975.

Taxed

Date: Morning after Tax Day
Time: 07:45
Place: Welfare Island Swankadero

I hammered out the old Turbo Tax last night. The amount I owed was bad but not as bad as I thought, and there is always the comforting thought that you had to have income to be taxed on it (usually). I couldn't find my1099 so I had to add up figures off bank statements. The one brokerage statement I could not find was the one where I bought some stocks that I had to sell at a near total loss, so I had to low ball it a bit.

Then agan, to quote William F Buckley in a debate about taxation and the defnese budget, "to paraphrase Patrick Henry, the price of Liberty is not cheap!" I saw him say that on Firing Line, and a few months later it came out that he had paid no taxes on income received from his syndicated column. He claimed it was something like "sweat equty" from his editorship of the National Review. He "settled with the government".

He is one of our most prominent libertarians.

Abcess makes the heart grow fonder

Date: Apr 15, 2007
Time: 11:49
Place: High and dry

For those that may have been concerned over that tooth problem I had at the last conclave of SPCH275, whatever it was appears to have worked itself out by the next morning. I did go to the Roosevelt Island dentist and get myself involved in anti-biotics, H202 (peroxide) syringes, and a novacaine class cleaning for next Friday. Something to look forward to!

I still haven't done my taxes, I can't find my 1099 from the bank, and it appears I neglected to pay estimated tax on a hefty stock option I exercised back last March. Oops. What really has me pissed is this weather. I got dental work ahead, my shoulder's screwed up, I got a huge plantar wart in my heel, my tax situation has me headed for Leavenworth, and I'm supposed to fend of seasonal affective disorder with this constant 40 degrees and pissing rain bullsh*t.

Oh, yeah, the best part of the Welfare Island Swankadero being on the top floor is that the high hat over the foyer leaks whenever there is a big rain storm.

The laughs keep coming.

Here's a little game. Don Ho's dead. Don Imus got fired for calling scholar athletes (nappy headed) hos. Make up a pun. On the Rodney Anonymous site I posted Don Ho's obit with the title Nap Well, Ho.

More Wolf-man Howlers

Date: Holy sh*t, where's my W-2?
Time: 10:00
Place: Amidst the rubble that is my desk top

Ray Handley took the defending Superbowl champion New York Giants and turned them into an 8-8 team. He was absolutely terrible at his job. If the Giants were up by two touchdowns or less at half-time, it seemed they always managed to lose the game. He seemed incapable of adapting in mid-game. The players were largly the same ones that won the Superowl and so were many of the coaches with a few notable exceptions. At he end of his tenure, Ray Handley had the decency to bow out gracefully. I'm sure he could have gotten a second-tier college job to balm his ego, but no. I think I heard that he coached at a local high school, but he stayed off the national stage.

Speaking of "absolutely terrible at his job", but that Paul Wolfowitz had the grace of Ray Handley. The scandal of him raising his girl friend's "World Bank" salary to dizzying heights turned even uglier this week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/world/13wolfowitz.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Paul now allows that he was perhaps unwisely directly involved in the "negotiations" and apologized, as the assembled WB workers booed and yelled "Resign!".

Since the World Bank is paid for by government donations, the next time the Faux News and talk radio blowhards cry about the money-wasting UN, tell them to start trying to get some money back from their intellectual mentor, old Dr. Spittlecomb.

Les Payne wins!

Date: Friday the 13th
Time: Ask Freddy or Jason
Place: Welfae Island Swankadero - not Newsday territory

I don't think I've looked at a copy of Newsday (the Long Island paper) since I moved to Roosevelt Island. Before that, living in Long Island and Queens between 1988 and 2004, I read it quite a bit and had many (4 or 5) comedic masterpieces (IMHO) published in the "letters to the editor" column. One of the people to share the editorial space with me was Les Payne.

Les Payne was an African American editor of Newsday who would regularly point out, through the 80's and 90's, that Don Imus would, "indiscriminately" (!) take low cheap racial shots at every Black person on the public radar, defaulting every person to Rastus-level minstrelsry regardless of their achievement or character. He was dead on right. As Bob Herbert points out in his column this Monday, Imus was quoted as saying "Bernard McGuirk is there to make nigger jokes." on 60 Minutes. Any sentient being who listened to 3 Imus programs could not conclude otherwise.

Imus's target audience is guys like me, middle-aged (plus) white guys in NY's financial industry.
It's why he can outbill Stern. Many of us think this rote crap is hysterical, and it is certainly never going to directly offend any of us. I've been personally offended by the laziness of it for a long time. That enough people drew the line at the "nappy headed ho's" characterization of the Rutger's Women's Basketball Team is more a testament to the lattitude he was given than anything else.

Just because you're a white humorist who says "nigger", it doesn't make you Mark Twain, or Kurt Vonnegut (Innocent Bystander High in "B of C") for that matter.

So he's gone

Date: April 12, 2007
Time: 21:36
Place: In the chronosynclastic infindibulum

Kurt Vonnegut claimed he was going to sue the tobacco companies. He said they'd been promising to kill him for the last 40 years and hadn't delivered their end of the bargain. He died yesterday from irreversible head wounds suffered in a reent fall. So it goes.

I started reading all his stuff back when I was in about 6th grade. Breakfast of Champions was just out that year and somewhat scandalized the world with his crudely drawn sketch of a vagina. Even 12 year old me was able to understand from the text that what was being parodied was the trumped up, idiotic, and pointlessly infantile sexual fixation predominant in society at large.

I can get several of these 10 minute blogs out of Kurt, and I know he would have approved. He was a big advocate for writing whenever and wherever you could, and he claimed the anyone who managed to get paid for writing was among the most fabulously lucky people on earth.

Kurt was one of those shameless hack authors who made no bones about the commercial aspect of his trade. That puts him in esteemed company of P.G.Wodehouse, whose books I saw in a segregated "literature" section which would have no doubt amused Mr. Wodehouse greatly. As an Irish American who drank a lot of Guiness at a bar called Bloom's in Sunnyside, Queens, I felt compelled to read Ulysses. One of the great literary features associated with that highly regarded novel is Joyce's use of different techniques, hence the term "technical novel". Vonnegut managed to blend narration styles, prose styles ("Cat's Cradle" written in the "rat-a-tat staccato rhythms of journalism") and work in an otherwise deprecated science fiction framework. Kurt, of course, had plots and points to make which also distinguished his work from Ulysses.

I never was able to enjoy sci-fi to which my otherwise nerdy tendencies would dispose me, but I would be expecting "Sirens of Titan" and be confronted in a book with a guy milking the bitchy robot joke long past death.

Tom Carson, the literary critic of the New Yorker, once wrote that there are two types of people who consider Vonnegut a great literary author, those who don't read much literature and those who read a lot of literature.

Cataclysm averted

Date: April 11, 2007
Time: 21:21
Place: On solid ground

Chuck ->Prince<- is a drama ->queen<-. For those of you who don't know and hadn't guessed, he is the CEO of Citibank under whose guidance the past 4 years the stock has stayed basically flat. He made this huge point of telling the investment world, which perks up whenever he coughs badly or eats oysters in a month with an "r" in it, that he was going to make all these operating cuts. He would make the big announcement today. One would think this was well planned and all the specific notifications would be made throughout the company today in a coordinated fashion.

Every on e-mail got the 3 paragraph "vision statement" fluff from Chuck but that was about it. No specific detail was given to anyone as far I can tell. People spent most of the day talking about what might happen. Of course, productivity soared. Morale jumped from the mountaintops to the ionosphere.

In truth, the financial press from Barron's last year to the NY Post a few weeks ago has been fairly unanimous. There's really only one layoff they are interested in and that is Chuck himself. He reminds me of the pig on the lifeboat. Everybody else is convinced that he should be bacon, but the pig feels otherwise.

Citi-Cataclysm announced tomorrow

Date: April 9th, 2007
Time: 22:38
Place: Tenterhooks

The financial press is all a-twitter about tomorrow's big announcement about the shake-ups at Citibank. Some reports have "layoffs AND (emphasis mine) relocations" totalling 36,000. I don't think it's going to affect me or many of the people in my direct area.

There are some new rental apartments going up in Long Island City near the old Pepsi-Cola plant. The want around 4K per month for a 2 bedroom apartment in a middle-of-nowhere area. Has there been a new glut of 6-figure jobs that appeared in NY recently of which I am unaware? The pay scales at the banks and brokerage houses have been flat to down, and there are fewer banks and brokerages than there were. Chase, MHT, Chemical, and JP Morgan are all part of Bank One. Smith Barney and Merrill are the only big brokers left. Even the remaining financial companies have been moving their operations and DP out of the city of not out of the country.

I guess it must be from real estate, the price of which rises as people swap it among themselves in anticipation of rising value. Tulip bulbs, anyone?

Ambassador Al

Date: April 9, 2007
Time: 21:30
Place: Roosevelt Island's Queens Embassy

Aside from 2 years in Wisconsin and 6 years in Nassau County, for the first 42 years of my life I lived in Queens. I was born in Little Neck, the north-easternmost town in Queens and later I moved to Forest Hills in central Queens. For the past 14 years I've worked in the westernmost part of Queens, Long Island City. 3 years ago, feeling that the real estate market was topped off, I sold my Forest Hills condo and moved to a rental here on Roosevelt Island. Being only several dozen yards from Queens by the Welfare Island bridge, an extension of 36th Avenue, I expected it would be rather Queens like. Wrong.

Queens ends rather abruptly on Vernon Boulevard. I am pretty much of an ambassador from the mainland here. 50% of my apartment complex is occupied by UN delegates. The apartments are cheaper than Manhattan, it's very parklike, and the tram lets you off reasonably close to UN and the embassies. Nobody gets my references to old sitcoms. Diplomacy does indeed have a language all its own.

On the other side of the bridge, if I saw an African diplomat in flowing robes, his traditional hat barely fitting in the driver's ed car as he takes a driving lesson, I'd expect to see fellow Queens native Eddie Murphy nearby shooting a movie. Here, of course, the man is actually an African diplomat taking a driving lesson.

A lot of the Fiji diplomats are in my building. Oddly enough, Rugby is their national sport.

Who Laid Out These Bunkers, Hitler?

Date: April 8th, 2007
Time: 23:00
Place: In the clubhouse

Actually, I think he might have been mowing the greens, too. Him or Marquis de Sade. This was about the ugliest Master's I've seen, in terms of bogies and double bogies by top ranked pros. The guy who won said he felt Jeebus with him the whole time but it seemed the old testament Lord God Smites-a-lot was working everyone else's bag.

It even looked like Augusta finally had enough of Tiger Woods, he who humiliated the course by playing its par 5's as 3-wood-wedge. After getting wet at the par 5 15th, he had a fairly easy short iron to the 16th. He took a pretty good swing, but a bizarre wind came up knocking him down short of the green, causing him to exclaim "Can someone explain to me what the hell just happened there?" It got picked up on tape pretty clearly so we're probably going to be hearing it for another month as the sportscasters babble about it.

They should have heard me on Sunken Meadow Red #7 a few years ago. Those little kids at the pool party in the adjacent house sure did. I nailed a pretty good drive and was going for the par 5 green in 2. The little kids were down splashing and shrieking as one would expect. Unfortunately, I hit a very bad 3 wood after which my playing partner Ed says I hollered out 600 words in 20 seconds, all of which began with the letter "F".

The kids went dead silent. I doubt they've recovered yet.

If Libertarians hate him, he can't be all bad

Date: April 8, 2007
Time: 22:22
Place: In my apartment with the heat cranked up and not happy about it

I'm fending off a bit of a head cold. Roosevelt Island was where they quarantined Typhoid Mary and apparently some woman on the tram last week was doing one of those "historical reenactments". She sat there next to me hacking away. So I did damn little today other than walk down to our "Starbucks", watch TV, sneeze off about 25% of a box of Kleenex, and surf the web.

I've always been amazed at the demented, reactionary hatred of Al Gore. The press coverage of him in 2000 was too loony to be believed and it was also largely in the "liberal" press. Read the Daily Howler website for the "War on Gore" articles. I was over at the Rodney Anonymous Tells You How to Live (the former lead singer of the Dead Milkmen if you haven't been paying attention) arguing with a bunch of Nader supporters how, yes, it IS Nader's fault that Bush is President. Gore lost Florida by less than 600 votes, Nader got 97,000, the lowest estimate is that Gore would have gotten 12,000 of those votes.

Most of these people identify themselves as Libertarians. How loony and pathological is the hatred of Gore? The allegedly environmentalist Green Party would aggressively spurn him in favor of a consumer advocate with slim environmental credentials; and Libertarians, who profess to eschew government regulations, would vote for a consumer advocate lawyer from the environmentalist party.

I got skills

Date: Apr 06. 2007
Time: 11:50
Place: By the banks of the Suir that rolls down by MoonCoin

I hate to disappoint those looking for insightful Master's commentary, but the winds have died, Augusta is back to itself, and I do believe the US will rise again desoite Phil Mickelson's ridiculous showing on the 11th hole.

And how do I know? Because I am a soulful individual and an award winning poet.

Okay, I can't prove the former but I did win a "First Prize" in the Murphy's Stout Limerick contest which wil be attested to by Mark Brown who tends bar Friday nights at "THe Grandstand" on Grand Ave just off Queens Blvd in Elmhurst and Ronan Conlan, proprietor of the Banc Cafe and Antartica,downn around 30th St and 3rd Ave in Manhattam.

Anyhoo, I submitted two and I'm not sure which one won.

It was a very restrictive form of poetry, much more so than Haiku. IT had to start "There once as a man from Cork", it had to mention Murphy's Stout, and eschew profanity.

My two entries. one of which won an award

There once was a man from Cork,
Whose poor pet pig was made pork
He felt down and out
Til he drank Murphy's Stout
And yelled "Somebody bring me a fork"

The second, perhaps too politically hot entry was

There once was a man from Cork,
Off a tryst with the Duchess of York (these were "Fergie" days)
Said "gwan pound the turf,
Stay away from me Murph's,
And good luck you don't hear from the stork"!

I must be physic!

Date: Apr 06, 2007
Time: 22:50
Place: In the wolf-zone

Something made me write that "Dumbo's Ears" post a few days ago. I've certainly never forgotten Wolfowitz, he even stands out among this administration for brazen incompetence and stupidity, and that takes some doing. I heard about this http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/4282 today. Apparently, as head of the World Bank, Paul has managed to bump his girlfriend's salary up past the 200K mark, which is a very high number for such positions.

My personal take on this is that he realized that his trumped-up war will not kill as many people as Robert McNamara's did. The competive juices probably started flowing thick enough to moisten 200,000 combs (ref: Farenheit 911) . He had to do something conspicuously worse than McNamara at the WB, having failed to worst him at the Department of Defense. This seems pretty tepid though. Unless you know (alert Dan Brown) --> the code <--. When the large bank I work for had some sloppy cases of managers dating underlings, we all went to training about what was legal in this area. The class was called "Respect At Work" thus the acronym RAW. As anyone who watches pro wrestling on cable knows, RAW is WAR, or at least if you spell it backwards. So Wolfowitz has finally trumped McNamara at disastrous war! It may seem a contrived stretch, but remember, this is the moron who said the occupation of Iraq was going o be like the occupation of France after WWII. http://www.lossless-audio.com/usa/index0.php?page=982808416.htm

Dad gum cockeyed falcon sons of benches

Date: Apr 04, 2007
Time: 21:40
Place: The f-bomb shelter

Several years back, MAD TV did a skit about the Pax Network (a stridently family friendly enterprise) showing the Sopranos. They'd start bleeping every third word, and they cut away as soon as Big Pussy walks in the door. The announcer comes on and says, "Join us tomorrow between 9:00 and 9:04 for the next episode of the 'Sopranos' on PAX. "

I just flipped past A&E showing the "Sopranos" and the effect was not that much different. I'm sure there is some word like "sibilant" for "s" sound and "percussive" for the "p" sound that applies to the letter "f". The utterer must force upper teeth against lower lip so there is a strong visual indication of what the person is saying. The short "u" requires a distinctive drop of the jaw. The point here is that one can amuse oneself by counting the bleeped f-bombs and the bowdlerizations that are substituted. They're fond of "freakin'".

At work, we like to parody the network TV version of "Glengary Glen Ross" by ginning up pointless arguments and then yelling "Forget you!".

Battlestar Galactica liberally sprinkles "frak" throughout the dialogue. For those readers of this blog who've linked to Nina Gordon's cover of NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" and share my dismay at the closer of BSG, can you imagine if that was the song the unwitting Cylons heard in the ship's walls? ... An AK47 is a tool, don't make me play the mother-frakkin fool ...

Insert your own Yes pun here

Date: April 03, 2007
Time: 22:22
Place: In the court of the crimson kiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnngggggggggg

And who doesn't love pretentious 70's art rock. I think Adrian Belew spent his life trying to atone for that crap. One of my pet personal theories is that this is the way punk started. How does one respond to "In and around the lake, mountains come out of the sky and they stand there" other than "gabba gabba hey". When they try that hard to sound artsy smart, jiu-jitsu suggests you go as dumb as possible.

That "in and around the lake" drivel was from the song Roundabout by a band called "Yes". To make matters worse, they had this truly annoying vocalist named Jon Andersen who threw down the ersatz Elizabethan rhymes in a high pitched chortle. To see a very close-on parody by "They Might Be Giants" go to http://www.tmbg.com/venue.html and click on the Dallas tab, wait for John Hodgeman to finish, and enjoy. Yes had a very similar song about telling the moon and the March hare that made far less sense.

Another problem was that the musicians in Yes, aside from a merely very good drummer, were some of the best of their day and they practiced really, really hard. Behind the chortling bs coming out of Andersen were intricate scales being played at a furious pace. These guys made Cream and Hendrix sound like slobs. "Heart of the Sunrise" would be the greatest instrumental track ever recorded except it wasn't an instrumental. True to form, the song stops while Andersen bleats out "Sharp .... Distance" because I suppose he felt he had to.

Again, for the garage band, this was unapproachable. You could practice all your life and never be that good. You could however, sound pretty close to the Ramones in a few weeks.

I been lied to ....

Date: April 2, 2007
Time: 22:22
Place: In NY for a while to come

I was watching Countdown tonight and they had the list of the top 16 foolish people of 2007. Mel Gibson wound up tied for 5th with Dick Cheney. The reason I mention it is for one of his memorable quotes from that fateful evening. It wasn't the rant. There is little point to ranting, because none of them can ever compare to http://www.lyricstime.com/dead-milkmen-stuart-lyrics.html whether set to music or not. No, the quote of which I am speaking is his inquiry of a female officer, "What're you looking at, sugartits?"

At some point in their history, the Kentucky counties just south of Cincinnati (whose airport is in Covington KY) let a bunch of drunk fratboys name their towns. There's Sugartit (near or part of Florence) and the Big Bone Lick state park. The way I became aware of all this was not from a pamphlet from Pueblo, Colorado (see lyrics to "Stuart") but Citibank was threatening to move me and my colleagues there. The genius who decided on this course of action was sumarily canned last November after crippling the division and getting into a disastrous contract with an Indian outsourcer (side note: NY Times columnist Tom Friedman is wrong about the flat world, wrong about small companies solving the energy crisis, and was laughably wrong about Iraq. Then again, his league has Brooks, Dowd, and Rich). The relocation was stopped dead.

Anyway, in this Dilbert-esque world in which managers don't admit mistakes, just this past week the CEO of Citibank announced how well the site consolidation to the Cincinnati area was going. Actually, I think the shareholders are getting ready to move him there.

Dumbo's Ears and Nothing Between

Date: April 1, 2007
Time: none for foolin'
Place: In high dudgeon

I speak of course here of Paul Wolfowitz, the intellectual force behind the early Bush Iraq policy. This is almost as funny a title as his neocon ally Bill Kristol's claim to fame, the "brains behind Dan Quayle". That's like having the best teeth in Britain.

Apparently his father-in-law got him a job as the dean of the Nitze School of International Studies . I hear it's still accredited, probably due to lazy oversight.

Paul was the under-secretary of defense who said the war would pay for itself with oil revenues. He also said that JCS General Eric Shiseki was "wildly off the mark" with the estimate of several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq. Why he said this is a mystery, for when asked (shortly after the "Mission Accomplished" photo-op) by noted commie Republican Senator Richard Lugar whether there was any concensus in Iraq to stay one country, he replied that he didn't know, we'd have to wait and see.

He'll go down in history as having locked up the dumbest thing said in the 21st century only three years in, by proclaiming that the occupation of Iraq would be like the occupation of France after World War II. Don't let him in your Lotto pool!

He's a Libertarian now

Date: April 1, 2007
Time: 21:30
Place: Straight outta Roosevelt Island

I found this on the web and hope it makes it in to the soundtrack of the next movie in which Ice Cube plays a role that might as well have be filled by Cedric the Entertainer.
http://download.wbr.com/mirror/ninagordon.com/media/sounds/covers-straightouttacompton.mp3

Ice Cube's metamorphosis is no less amazing than that of Christopher Hitchens, literary critic of the Atlantic, unapologetic Trotskyite, former columnist for the Nation, and current Iraq War supporter. I think Bill Clinton pushed him over the edge. Clinton tried to plant the "Monica as stalker" story on him. In response, he wrote a very entertaining short book called "Nobody Left To Lie To" which contained one of my favorite paragraphs that starts something like "The vacuous language of uplift and therapy combined with the tawdry pieties of Baptist and Methodist hypcrisy cling to both Clintons like b.o." He opines that the Clintons have betrayed the liberal cause with their triangulations, left wing words and right wing policies. Not a word from either could be believed.

Unfortunately, he seemed to believe everything from the current administration and now finds himself somewhat homeless. Worse, he's helped promulgate the howlers like a White House appointed NASA press agent. He's pimped the stories of the one-legged Zarqawi and has even ferreted out that a Iraqi diplomat visiting Niger had once been part of the bomb project. (note: the WMD argument was always b.s. A uranium centrifuge facility is about a mile long and can't be missed) He also keeps playing the violin for the Kurds, who even while Saddam was gassing them managed to fight a civil war among each other. He also accepted uncritically the prognostications of Paul Wolfowitz, who appears to have locked up the "dumbest things said in the 21st century" award by 2003.

The last shreds of his credibility lay clotted in the filter of Bill Kristol's hot tub.

Date: Mar 30, 2007
Time: 10:13
Place: Mine


Bill O'Reilly is boldly standing up to pedophiles and their advocates in the liberal media! This is comedy at its basic cable best. As the Iraq body count mounts, the real estate bubble collapses, and the imprint of Alberto Gonzales' strong pimp hand on those eight fired US attorneys gets clearer with every witness that goes before congress, what is there left for for the Faux News channel to broadcast? Who can a "Bushie" look down on these days? Well, at least none of them got caught molesting children (yet), regardless of how much Bill O. might have thought that the kids would have enjoyed it like that kid in Missouri.

As I flip past Faux News these days, which is just north of Comedy Central on the my cable network, I often see Bill now declaiming his ardor against child molesters. Perhaps the sentiment leached over from Steven Colbert's "Kittens in a wood chipper, I'm against it" debate. I'm reminded of a quote from Arlo Guthrie's line about how "all folk musicians steal from each other. We used to call it stealing too until Pete Seeger came along and renamed it the folk process". Unfortunately for Bill though, Colbert's has exceeded his performance art. The envelope has been pushed beyond his limited skills and he is stuck playing old standards to his state fair base.

PT 101

Date: Mar 29, 2007
Time: 13:17
Place: Welfare Island Swankadero

I started physical therapy for my left shoulder this morning. Not much to report and not as terribly painful as several people insisted on telling me it would be. After just moving it up and down for a bit, he slapped some electrodes on and threw an icepack on over it. He let that cook for about 12 minutes. They wanted me to go three times a week but I think I'll wait for the doctor to get back from Switzerland in two weeks before I commit to that.

The worst part of it was that I slept on my right elbow at some kind of odd angle or something. It's now stiff and painful as well. It will not lower all the way down, preferring about 120 degrees as the default position. Considering the left side will come up to only about 30 degrees, I almost have the spectrum covered.

So the next time some one smugly tells you they're a libertarian, ask them why they hate the middle class, why they deny in the face of all history that capital accumulates, and if they actually prefer leaving their fate in corporatist hands.

Libertarians suck

Date: My best friend Steve's birthday
Time: Too late to call him
Place: Beverly Hills 10044

I consider myself a centrist Democrat, one who realizes that our American economy is a tightly, to paraphrase Paul Krugman, "raveled" phenomenon, and that the broad prosperous middle class is a highly artificial though sustainable construct depending on redistributionist and protectionist government policies, and is in no way remotely a natural offshoot of laissez-faire economics, despite all the braying to that effect you may hear on CNBC or Faux News.

That being said, I realize also that no American politician can say this, for we are a nation of self-deluded, er, sufficient libertarians and if asked to formulate our own beliefs on the point above, would probably come up with stuff like this apologia from St. Ronald Reagan upon being caught with his pants down on Iran-Contra,

REAGAN (3/4/87): A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

How do you argue with logic like that? Anyhow, the reason I bring this up is that I saw Dennis Miller on the Daily Show the other night. To me he epitomizes the desperation of the American conservative movement at this point in time. The poor sad bastard came out trying to spit as many shots at as many Democrats as he could, all so that no time could be left for Stewart to ask, "Man, did you clowns get ANYTHING right about Iraq?" In future posts, statistical correlations between Bush's approval rating and Bill O denouncing pedophiles, Chris Hitchens, and the bizarro world oracles of the neocon movement.

House back in the house

Date: Mar 27, 2007
Time: 22:26
Place: In tall cotton


Thankfully, the pool of American Idol minnows has thinned out enough that they no longer commandeer the 9 PM slot, and the adventures of everybody's favorite Vicodin-addicted, hyper-insulting, misanthropic, crippled pathologist have resumed. House was back in full effect with an episode featuring a guy with vaginosis in his mouth, self-catheterization, laugh-a-minute sexual politics, and a nifty is-it-or-is-it-not-a-dream sequence.

I can't help of thinking of Bertie Wooster when I see Hugh Laurie and think of how here is an actor with exceptional range. In one of Bertie's musings he claimed to prefer to think of his insides as similar to that of a potato, a white homogenous mass. He found the actual structure rather vulgar. Bertie was of course unflinchingly polite as well, drawing an even starker distinction. The way he keeps his Brit in check is worth watching in its own right.

The Jeeves and Wooster series is out on DVD and well worth it.

BSG halfway over shark tank

Date: March 26th, 2007
Time: 21:22
Place: Welfare Island Silverfish Hatchery

The greatest literary achievement of the 21st century will be if the writers of Battlestar Galactica can salvage anything less than horribly lame from last night's cliff hanger ending. The writing started to wobble badly this year, with the Starbuck/Apollo soap opera, culminating in the "boxing ring" episode that had Fonzi's bike halfway up the ramp over the shark tank. It was followed by a great episode about the hyper-radioactive nebula that retrieved the show's visceral grimness with ships being lost and vomitting pilots dying of radiation sickness.

During the last two or three episodes, a few of the crew members started hearing a strange song coming from the walls. Toward the end of the show, in completely different parts of the ship, one says "There must be some kind of way out of here", the next says "said the joker to the thief", the third "there's too much confusion", the fourth said "oooo, foxy lady!", no just kidding, she said "I can't get no relief". In a nod to the better written shows, she vomits. They then all run to the same room, start humming "All Along the Watchtower", and for some reason decide that they're Cylons. Thankfully, they stopped short of having the one-eyed alkie colonel start jamming away on air guitar.

Of course, Starbuck pops back to life after pretty convincingly exploding in a previous episode.

Usually, the best BSG episodes ended with forbodings of doom hanging over the human characters in the next episode, but this episode foretells crap awaiting the audience in the next season.

Freedom and the Fred-ster

Date: March 25, 2007
Time: 09:35
Place: Welfare Island Swankadero

Huzzah and great cheers. I'm mostly out of the immobolization sling now! The doctor wants me to wear it when I'm travelling and there is a chance my arm might get jostled, but this is a small inconvenience. I don't have to sleep with it anymore (is there a country-western song in this?) nor do I have to contort my body so I can get my left hand into the necessary proximity to the keyboard.

I drove my car around a bit yesterday. Since my left arm only has a few degrees of motion, I had to contrive a way to get the access pass out the driver-side window so I can get in and out of the garage. I eventually improvised a solution using a rubber band and an old putter. My right side front tire was flat after a month off. I tried filling it but I think the air machine was not adequately powerful.

Speaking of putters, Tiger Woods may have won the tournament today, but he stunk up the greens at Doral. He better not bring that game to Augusta in two weeks, or everybody is going to speculate about what's wrong with him again.

Of course, that's just one less guy for Fred Couples to defeat. Go, Fred!

I solve the world's problems

Date: March 22, 2007
Time: 23:50
Place: Deep in Thought

The famed historian Arnold Toynbee wrote this in his 1970 article "Human Savagery Cracks Thin Veneer"

"We realize now that Hitlerism was not just an isolated aberration. It was an ominous sign of the times. It portended the present resurgence of the savage human nature that is breaking out, through the veneer of civilization all over the world today."
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1103-05.htm

The "thin veneer" is a common metaphor for civilization, a pleasingly finished surface that is not very deep nor strong. When a society is under stress like that created by a depression, tribalism reasserts itself and people will seek a "them" to blame for the problems of "us". The Jews, with their complex religious-ethnic-national identity, presented an easy target for Hitler and his bumper-sticker "Deutchland uber alles" hyper-nationalism.

There is an article in the April 2007 Atlantic by Stephen Faris called "The Real Roots of Darfur". The article identifies the real stress as desertification probably caused by global warming.
What we normally hear about Darfur is that an Arab population is commiting atrocities against an African one is not quite true. The two "ethnic" groups are genetically identical! "Arabs" refers to a group that lives a nomadic, livestock-herding lifestyle. "Africans" refers to farmers. Before the desertification, the farmers tolerated the herders coming across the land. Once the land started to dry up, they tried to block the herders, and the war ensued.

The trick is apparently to avoid such stresses. Fortunately, according to a flood of e-mails I've gotten, all these people have to do is invest in Nanking Telecom (NKT OTC:BB), which is guaranteed to skyrocket! Also, they're right over near Nigeria, and anyone with a bank account can earn thousands on each transaction assisting the former finance minister ...

The Great Republican Hope

Date: Still Friday in Tucson
Time: Late, I'm too old fir this
Place: Back Home, Finally

The other day I mentioned the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy project. Senator Lisa Murkatowski of Alaska (you know you're old when you think a US Senator looks that HOTT!) mentions it frequently in special session on CSPAN. Others ignore it (Chuck and Hillary, I'm looking at you!). The current on the east side of Roosevelt Island, or "East Channel" as we locals call it, is damn fast. A company called Verdant Power tried to install some underwater propellors to capture the power, but the blades on both protototype turbines snapped. Those are some powerful currents.

This is an example of lunar power. National concensus will admit that for at least the last 5000 years, the moon has rolled by overhead, lifted the oceans up by three feet and dropped them.
The world is awash in free energy, we just have to get better at harvesting it. Anyway, the next four turbines (with enhanced blades) will be going down in April. To me, every turn of the blade drags back some greenhouse gas back ino the ocean. Every turn of the blade is a strike for American engineers and manufacturers. Best of all, each turn of the blade points an upraised middle finger to all the oil powers from Prince Abdullah to Osama to Dick Cheney.

RIP LBM

Date: March 22, 2007
Time: 21:30
Place: Right near the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project

Poor old Larry "Bud" Melman from the David Letterman Show died yesterday. His real name was Calvin DeForrest. He used that on his occasional appearances on the CBs show because I believe NBC had a copyright on the L"B"M name. It didn't matter. The dyspeptic little lisping character with the odd stilted phrasing needed no name.

My two favorite Larry Bud Melman bits were:

Job Interview Do's and Don't's - Don't insult photographs on the interviewer's desk "What a hideous (sibilants + LBM = comedy gold) looking family. Yuck. Do you mind turning that around?" Don't cry and plead - On cue, Larry starts sobbing and begging

Larry goes to London - after a vacation to England, Letterman asks him to compare the theater in London with the theater in NY - "Of course the theater in London is fabulous, David, but what could compare to the theater in NY? The heavy curtains, your own private booth, and as many choices as you have quarters, and all around the felicitous aroma of men enjoying themselves!"

That joke may be aging since the advent of the Disney-fied Times Square, but LBM will stay with me always.

What up with Sanjaya, yo?

Date: Spring, for freaking cryin out loud
Time: 21:15 or sp
Place: Above the madding crowd

I just got through watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and apparently the answer to Prof Kinsley's friend, who posed the question above, is that he or his handlers are now employing screaming teary young girls to show up when he performs, not unlike professional mourners who wail beside the casket of anyone no matter how big a bastard they may have been.

The Beatles did it. They were essentialy a hair band when they broke, and they're venerated. Frank Sinatra did the exact same thing and everybody, especially retired Italians, want him canonized. The galling part to me was that Sanjaya was covering "You Really Got Me" by one of the greatest song-writers of the "British Invasion", to me far greater than Lennon and/or McCartney, nor the truly sphincter sucking Jagger/Richards, Ray Davies of the Kinks. This song was also covered by an all-time great guitar virtuoso who never gets his due respect, Eddie Van Halen.

Ray Davies had a real empathy for London and its citizens. It shows on "Village Green Preservation Society", the first rock opera. Pete Townsend himself suggested that if England ever does appoint another poet laureate, it should be Ray Davies. Unfortunately, there's only about 20 words in "You Really Got Me", so it's a bit hard to prove your case on that alone.

"Dedicated Follwer of Fashion" and "Waterloo Sunset" were unanticipated and in the formulaic world of pop, heretical and never duplicated (ReJoyce by the Jefferson Airplane doesn't count because Grace Slick is from another and cooler planet than the rest of us).

The current standard is set by, unsurprisingly, Rodney Anonymous of the Dead Milkmen.
Click this link and then "Watch This Movie"
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=86889

A Tale of Woe

Date: March 20, 2007
Time: 21:36
Place: The Welfare Island Swankadero

I''ve just gotten past three weeks in the immobilization sling required to allow my severely damaged rotator cuff to heal. This is really annoying. Prior to last night, the straps on it functioned like a stickball bat hitting me in the kidneys all night long. I've arranged a formidable slope of pillows that seems to work. I didn't feel like Franklin Roosevelt (for whom Welfare Island was renamed in 1974) when I woke up this morning.

I stopped taking the pain pills two days after the surgery (sold the spares for a nifty profit down at the high school!) but I had to take one the other night over this damn sling.

I suspect it's messing up my elbow, wrist, and back. I think the hospital is using this to drum up future business. It's like those car mechanics who slit your serpentine built while they're changing your oil. I'll bet there's a secret schedule book where these bastards have me slated for surgeries out until 2020. Paranoid, am I? Like a fox, I say.

Mr Douglas, I am shocked!

The PAX network has been showing episodes of Green Acres recently. One of the fictional characters I've always admired is Mr. Haney. There was a certain truth to his character I've discovered in all the truly major BS artists I've met throughout my life. The real artistes have no shame at all about getting caught. It will not abate the ferocity of their shoveling one little bit the next time you deal with them either.

One of the great things about all the news channels is that you get to see these people all the time. I never get tired of it. You get Bill O'Reilly saying that kid who was held captive was actually enjoying the lifestyle, then it turns out the kid was raped and the kidnapper threatened to kill his family if he escaped.

Not only does Bill not offer an apology or a word of self-criticism, he goes and accepts an award for helping abused kids. I don't know who the group was but I would not be surprised if Bill was just the alternate. The award was probably intended for Florida congressman Mark Foley, but he couldn't make it to the ceremony.

Nasty Rabbits

Greetings, teenage tuba tooters!

That's not my own, but comes from Rodney Anonymous, former lead singer of the Dead Milkmen and perhaps America's greatest poet. I recommend the Beelzebubba album, particularly "Stuart" as evidence of this claim.

One of his other greetings was "Greetings, teenage thrill-killers" which reminded me of a teenage thrill killer movie called "The Sadist" that actually is considered good. The remarkable part of that is it invovled a lot of the same people who were involved in "The Nasty Rabbit" which makes "Plan 9 from Outer Space" look like "Citizen Kane".

This is truly the worst film ever made. I found it in the Blockbuster "Le Bad Cinema" aisle amidst a population predominated by the 1950's girls-in-reform-school genre. It seemed like a combination of "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming" and "Mad, Mad, Mad World" with lamer humor and less continuity. The basic plot is as follows. A nuclear device is smuggled by Russian sub into the US. It heads for a dude ranch on the continental divide as a variety of spies try to track it down.

It is most notable as one of the first roles for Richard Kiel, noted for his role as "Jaws" from the James Bond movies. He plays a ranch hand who does little but guffaw and slap a Russian diplomat on back repeatedly and forcefully.

See it if you dare!

Go Bragh Yourself

Date: March 17, 2007
Time: 15:40
Place: O'Roosevelt Island Penthouse

Happy St. Patrick's Day to one and all!

I used to drain a considerable amount of Guinness but due to my immobilization brace from the notorious rotator cuff surgery, I will not be able to share a jar with the crowd on this one.

The first place I acquired the taste was Tom O'Reilly's Pub on Lexington Avenue in the early 80's. The legend is that when St Patrick's Day fell on a weekend they moved something like 28 barrels of Guinness, which was an impressive total for a bar that size.

At some point in the 90's, Guinness came up with a new gas system for its taps. Prior to that, it was very important to only go to places where they would kill a barrel in no more than two, preferable one, day(s). The beer (I know, it's stout) would go flat pretty quickly and acquire a sour and unctuous taste, sort of what I'd imagine lemon juice in milk would taste like. I've never tried lemon juice in milk so I can't say for sure. It's one of those things that the poison control center suggests as a rapidly effective, home-made emetic.

The nitrogen taps did a lot to improve the barrel life of the Guinness. You can get drinkable Guinness in many more places now. It still helps if it moves quickly.

Slainte.

just in time

Date : March 16, 2007
Time 22:00
Place: Welfare Island Swankadero

Blogspot.com is in le crapper so I'm typing this off net.

Hopefully, this is not causing excessive angst among those who are awaiting today's flash of insight. Paul Krugman is on vacation from the Times today so there is a clear dearth of intellectual leadership in cyberspace today. Hopefully, blogspot will rise before midnight so that I can post this, and March 16, 2007 in the Eastern Daylight timezone will not go down in history as having been an entirely benighted affair.

The weather today sure did suck. Talk about putting the "ugh" in ugly. I know it's still technically winter for another 5 days but this snow-ice-rain-cold mixture is gratuitous. Please, one or two aspects of crappiness at a time. This does make for good speech writing weather. It's not like one would be tempted to go out and stroll along the ever so lovely Welfare (now Roosevelt since the mid-70's) Island promenade.

This took two hours to post. Never block the cookies from this site.

Ten-Minutes-o-Brilliance

Date: March 15, 2007
Time: 10:06
Place: Welfare Island Swankadero

This is the first in a series of daily posts for Professor Kinsley's SPCH275 class at DeVry-LIC.

In it I shall attempt to share 10 minutes (writing time) of enlightenment, humor, uplift, and perhaps some insightful self-revelations.

Allow me to start with the title of this blog, Good Thinking Al. This comes from an episode of "Bewitched" that I must have seen over 30 years ago. Some colleague of Darren's (named Al apparently) was boasting that this was his nickname at work, because they were always exclaiming "Good thinking, Al". Thus (in way of disclosure, my name is Al as well, I had not stated so explicitly) this phrase stuck in my brain. I dust it off and bring it out every now and then when I come up with a flash or flicker of brilliance.

My ISP RoadRunner has been having trouble coming up with 10 minutes of continous service, so I'm almost at the threshold of borrowed time now. Perhaps in the future I will cheat a bit, and first type these pearls up in Word using the local spelling and grammar check to appear more polished.

I do intent to stick to the 10 minutes though.