You Say Tomato I Say The Housing Market's Fine

Hoop recently welcomed us back to blogging and pointed us to this old Kneecapped post (reposted below) and made this comment:

I think we all know how that turned out. Fair and balanced my ass!

Here it is:

Repost from 12/27/06 (Note: Before we used the Royal we)

I don't know who's spinning what, but these two news wires (Yahoo! on top, Fox News below) took the same data and news story and attached completely opposite headlines to them, Fox being more optimistic. READERS NOTE: Please try and ignore the Penis Cartoon/STD story on the Fox wire.

It's Alive!

The new site I've been working on is now up and running! I'll be posting there Monday - Friday. Stop by and take a look, there's much more than blogging going on.

Stop EVERYTHING! Paris and Nicole Seen Together.

I found this hot off the Yahoo!(one of the most trafficked sites on the web, beacon of information) news wire. Check out the last item, "Hilton, Richie Seen Together at L.A. Steakhouse." Digest this information, take a few minutes, then get back to whatever it was you were doing. That is, if you can. Who'd have thought North Korea would be trumped on its first day as a nuclear power by this startling news? Wowzer. Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton together, at a steakhouse no less.

Unfortunately, I had "whore" and "crack" in the "What Kind of House Will Nicole and Paris Be Seen Together At First?" office pool. Oh well, can't win 'em all. Congrats, Jodi!

Travel from New York to New England (Three Different Ones)

I just got back from my third consecutive weekend in New England. I hit every state except Vermont. Plus, we only really drove through Connecticut, the Thruway of the North East, peeing at its rest areas. Sometimes I feel bad for Connecticut because all it really consists of is a piece of land on which highways are built. But then I think of the rich douche bags of Greenwich, the McMahon family of the WWE, the rich, pompous douche bags at Yale, and ESPN, and realize that Connecticut really is a place you just want to drive through. Not to mention the horrid condition of its urban centers. Let’s just say I’m glad the Patriots didn’t move there, and the Patriots play in Foxboro/Foxborough! No offense or anything. Each trip to New England we took a different mode of transportation and here's how it breaks down:

Weekend number one - Bus. For our trip to Maine with a detour in Newton we took a bus to Boston (gladly not the Chinatown/Sadly not the limoliner), rented a car and drove to Maine. Yes, that sounds about as awful as it actually was. I know the bus well. I’ve taken the New York to Boston trip more than any man has any right doing. It sucks the life out of you and leaves you a deflated shell of a human being. By trip’s end your ass feels like you've spent a month in prison. The cinnamon smells used to deodorize the cabin stings the nostrils. Your knees, due to the asshole reclining in front of you are bruised like you’ve spent a month in prison. If you’re lucky enough to have a movie it’s usually some piece of crap children’s movie that features chickens of the “run” or “little” variety. If the bus didn't stop in my hometown I would have ceased taking it long ago. But it does, so I endure the pain, much like a man sentenced to a month in prison.

Weekend number two - Borrowing a car and driving yourself. This worked out great for me, not so much for my wife. I didn’t have my license at the time (since remedied) so she did all the driving. She went to Jersey to pick up the car, drove it to Brooklyn, drove Rhode Island, drove back home and dropped me off with our cat, drove back to Jersey and returned the car, took the bus to Port Authority, and finally the subway home. Not good times for her and I felt terrible. I don't know who had it worse. Who am I kidding? Me. I offered to go to Jersey with her, but being the trooper she is she did it on her own. The other downside of the drive was the ride out of the city on the Friday of Labor Day weekend. It's the stuff of nightmares. Hours of stop and go traffic up that asphalt root canal they call I-95, but at least we had Ernesto to keep us company throughout the drive and weekend.

Weekend number three – Flying. On our third straight trip to New England we decided to treat ourselves and fly to Boston. Flying is relatively painless, the flight being only 35 minutes or so, but all told, it takes about as long as driving. Getting to the airport early, checking in, security, flying, baggage claim, taxi. God forbid they cancel your flight in the five minute window between when you check in and walk through security. In these rare cases they have to book you on a flight that leaves one hour later, adding more time to your travels. But, the airport has televisions. The airport has televisions in bars. The airport has televisions in bars on the opening weekend of the NFL season, so it’s not a bad place to waste and hour or two. In fact, I kind of liked the delay.

So to quickly sum up:
Bus - Bad, similar to a month in prison.
Car - Okay, but better to have your own car parked in your neighborhood, not your mom’s car in New Jersey.
Flying - Delays/cancellations = bad. Television, bars, football = good.

How to Save Your Marriage During Football Season

Tonight is the start of the NFL season, but it also marks the beginning of another season, the Trying to Stay Married season. Other than moving and maybe in-laws, nothing puts more stress on a marriage than the six month pro-football calendar. Tonight, I start my second post-marriage season, and I'm looking to build on last year's results.

My wife can tolerate football, but she's not setting the Tivo, signing up for Direct TV, or checking her fantasy line-ups. She doesn't have a lot of knowledge about the game, and to tell you the truth, I like that about her. So I'm starting out ahead of the curve. The trouble is sometimes it's me she can't tolerate. Now, I'm not going to stop watching football all day long on Sunday, but there are little things you can do to keep the pressure off yourself. So here are a few things I learned last year, as well as a few pointers to those who are beginning their rookie year.

1) Don't get (too) drunk - I don't have Direct TV (see above) and I root for a team outside of the area where I live. My team is the Patriots which makes things easier because they're awesome and they get a lot of nationally televised games. One year, I caught them here in New York about 7 - 8 times on free television, not bad. But for the other games I head out to a local bar with Direct TV and watch the games there. This is a problem for several reasons. I drink fast so the number of beers I can drink during a three hour period is substantial. If it's an early game I’m pretty much useless the rest of the day until The Simpsons come on. If it's a late game, then I'm drunk during dinner and that's not good, trust me. I learned early on that I need to pace myself. No Bloody Mary's (well, one, but only if you’re hungover.). No Stella (or other strong beers.) Drink some water. Eat a pizza. Eat some wings. Eat. Three beers max in the first half. This is a recipe for success, a good buzz, but nothing that will last the day. I'd advise the same thing to you.


2) Take advantage of Saturday - I don't care about college football so I plan for my Sunday's by taking advantage of Saturday. Go see a movie. Go apple picking. Take in a museum. Have a nice dinner in a restaurant of your wife’s choosing. Pay. Make Saturday your wife's day. Not only does it feel good that you're making your wife happy, but it buys you some leeway when you're still wearing your sweatpants at 7:00 PM on Sunday night.


3) Shower, get dressed, look active - Note my sweatpants comment above and don't make a habit out of it. Nothing makes you feel like a useless piece of crap more than the look your wife gives you when you've sat around the apartment all day in your sweatpants. Save the sweatpants for that cold and rainy Sunday. Maybe even encourage you wife to put on some comfortable clothes and watch football together. No one’s saying get rid of the sweatpants, just play that card at the right time.


4) If Monday night or Sunday night football blows and your team isn't playing don't stay up and watch the whole thing - This would be my rule even if I wasn't married. The Sunday/Monday night commercial marathon that happens to show a football game in-between car ads sucks the life out of you. It bores you and angers you. You contemplate killing the play by play announcer by beating him with your bare hands. Forces you to go to bed past 1:00 AM. More than half the time these games are a disappointment anyway so just go to bed and spend that time with your wife. I’m not saying watch Desperate Housewives, but it’s a long season and you don’t want to waste your good graces watching a typical night game suckfest. I don't care if you call me lame, or old, or a pussy whipped little bitch, this is how I roll.

5) These rules do not count towards the playoffs - Playoffs are a different matter altogether. I’ll get drunk at the bar in my sweatpants during the playoffs.

The 9th Circle of Bureaucratic Hell - A Trip to the DMV

I got a letter from the DMV
the other day.
I opened and read it
it said they were suckaz!

-The Pharcyde

Seven months ago my license expired, unfortunately, I just realized. Luckily, by living in New York I avoided blatant, although ignorant, law-breaking. But I did have to venture into the New York City bureaucracy and renew and transfer my license from Massachusetts.

Few things in our mass-marketed-over-hyped world live up to their reputations. You will sit in stop-and-go traffic on I-95 during a holiday weekend. You will wake up on March 18th with a hangover. And you will wait and wait in line at the DMV. So here are a few observations and thoughts while standing in line in a downtown Brooklyn DMV.

One minute in line and someone is already storming out having been turned away after a good 90 minute wait in line, muttering under her breath, "mutherfuckers, you could have told me that while I was standing here." The DMV, ladies and gentlemen! Now I'm really looking forward to my stay in line and beginning to second guess that I'm in the right one.

I sympathize with the workers a little bit. If I had to deal with stupid questions from even dumber people for 8 hours a day I probably wouldn't smile much either. Case in point, the man who’s arguing that his birth certificate should count as identification despite the fact that it is clearly marked on the website and the wall as counting for “zero points” towards your ID requirement. The workers don’t make the rules, but they do need to enforce them. There's a reason they made the two most loathsome and miserable Simpson's characters DMV employees.

90 minutes later I'm at the front of the line and I can't wait for my moment to shine. My palms sweat when I'm called, praying I've filled out the proper forms and have "six points" worth of identification. The woman scrutinizes my forms, passport and SS card, clips them together and tells me to wait for my number to be called. The good news, I'm through stage one! The bad news, there are two more stages.

20 minutes later I'm at stage two. I have a friendly chat with the Yankees fan employee who ribs me about the Red Sox. I take the punishment, he wields too much power at this point to call A-Rod gay or call Giambi a steroid abusing dickwad. He takes an awful photo of me (I look like I aged 10 years since my last photo taken only five years ago. Maybe it was the blinding light they shine in your face after telling you to stare at it.) Swallowing my pride get ready for stage three, the eye test.

I'm dreading the eye test and I brought my glasses along just in case. I always wear my glasses when I drive, but I don't want it noted on my license, because sometimes I forget my glasses. The eye test is taken at the cashiers desk. There's an eye chart about 5 feet away just behind the cashier and consists of one line of inch high, bold, capital letters. In other words, the eye test is a gimmie. After acing that I breath a sigh of relief. I also make a note to myself to keep a better watch of the cars in my surroundings because in all honesty Stevie Wonder could probably pass that test. I pay, take my temporary license and check the time. Two hours and five minutes since I first stepped into line. Not too, too bad and I feel like I've done my patriotic duty, withholding our nation’s great bureaucratic tradition, The DMV.

Mysteries of Human Biology - Beer Pong Edition

The human body is capable of amazing things when pushed to the limit. Stories of women getting the strength to lift automobiles off there trapped husbands, or the incredible man who cut off his arm with a Swiss army knife to avoid certain death, exemplify the will humans have to survive and succeed. On Friday night I too encountered this will. I won 20 games of beer-pong in a row.

What started out as an innocent and chilly night in Maine quickly morphed into a beer-pong tour de force not seen since the winter of 2000. Now six years older and far removed from my beer-pong playing peak I was touched by greatness once again, this time reaching heights I dared not dream. Winning 20 games in a row.

By win number fifteen I had lost the ability to speak full, intelligible, and lucid sentences, relying mostly on grunts and high-fives to get my point across. Trash talk was out of the question, but when you’re on a winning streak like this one, your shot does all the talking. It was clear that my brain was cutting off my oral capacities and re-routing that energy into my right arm while still saving a little leftover for vision.

By the end of the night my shirt was soaked with beer, my hands were pruned from repeatedly cleaning the ping-pong ball, and we were one cup away from immortality. I squinted hard focusing on the red plastic cup a mere 12 feet away and with a flick of the elbow released my final shot of the night. It flew through the air in a perfect arc heading directly into the middle of the cup, finally landing silently on beer foam. Victory.

There were only 12 or so people there to witness the feat, but in time that number will grow. Everyone will claim to be present on that crisp, late summer, Maine night when the unthinkable happened. The human body is truly amazing.

This is How We Slum It

Slumming It. Once a proud phrase describing those daring, radical, rich, and affluent members of our society willing to go against the grain and live amongst the lowly, yet surprisingly hip and trendy commoners. They smoked and drank in Harlem during the jazz age. In the 70s and 80s they blew coke with the artists in SoHo. Finally, they drank Pabst in the Lower East Side of the 90s and early 2000s. But for anyone who’s eaten at Schiller’s or fought through the Friday night Ludlow Street crowds the days of the LES as slum are over, with this soon to be opened gym as the death knell. Brooklyn looks to fill this new void, but can you still "slum it" in Manhattan? Being both rich and affluent, last Friday I decided to give it a try.

I started after a late day at work by heading to The Blarney Stone, 32nd Street, Herald Square. When you walk into this long dimly lit bar the first thing you notice is the humidity, the next is the smell. It’s not a bad smell but combined with the humid air makes for a unique odor. The reason for this are the steam trays that keep the food at the lunch station (luke) warm. Meats, gravies, sandwiches, mac n’ cheese served on cafeteria style trays that you carry to your table or to the bar. But I didn’t come here to eat, that comes later, I came here to drink and with the size of the bar you always can find a place to sit. Pints of Bud and Bud Light are $4.00 and the top rate bartenders buy back every 4th beer. Yes, this is a bar for drinkers. From a trendy and hip standpoint the bar ranks low, so now’s your chance to get in on the ground floor.

After my free 4th beer I headed out to meet my wife. She was walking down form 51st & 8th, so I said I’d get together with her on 8th Ave and go for a drink wherever we happened to meet. This couldn’t have worked out any better. We met at Port Authority (Yes, I walk fast) and went into McAnn's. McAnn's is actually a bar that I know well from my time living in Weehawken (a slumming it column of it’s own) and the time I came down for New Year’s in a blizzard and was stranded in POA for a good 4 hours. That particular night lead to a stay at the Plaza, but that too is another story.

When it comes to seediness Port Authority cannot be beat, and McAnn’s holds that torch proudly. This bar also features cheap Bud and Bud Lights as well as bright lighting and no hipsters. It’s more of a bridge and tunnel crowd, or more accurately, a tunnel crowd. Potential hip-ness is an absolute zero, but in this ironic age isn’t a zero really a 6? The highest rating any hipster could possibly give something.

It was after another three Bud drafts that I realized I probably should have eaten some mac n’ cheese at the Blarney Stone and we headed out to find some food. We could’ve walked west to Hell’s Kitchen, but if your slumming it from Port Authority you walk due east into the belly of the beast, Time Square.

Where to go to put an exclamation point on this night of slumming? Franchise restaurants. Franchise restaurants depress me, although I do have a soft spot for them, and are a perfect way to end the night. ESPN Zone, too classy. Olive Garden, too many bread sticks. TGIFriday’s, too much flair. No, instead we went to TGIFriday’s ugly little step daughter, Applebee’s. Needless to say, my wife was thrilled.

I ordered the Ribblets & French Fries basket for $13.50 and a Pepsi. My wife ordered water. The Ribblets, I’m not afraid to say, were fucking delicious. Plus, Ribblets help to promote good health. The place was jumping, the wait staff were teriffic and it’s a great place to pretend you’re one of the common folk. More importantly I felt like I belonged to a community. I felt like I was sitting in my very own neighborhood restaurant, the Applebee’s on Dekalb and Flatbush. Catch the trend before Applebee’s becomes too popular (we were seated next to Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal.) Before you know it they’ll be everywhere, maybe even on Ludlow.

The Zoo is on Our Side of the Bars - The Bronx Edition

Bear with me, I'm going to be a bit of a dick for a minute.

I went to The Bronx Zoo today and nothing stokes my hatred of the masses more than a large weekend crowd, especially when 99.7% are pushing oversized strollers. Now, if there's anyplace that should be chockfull of strollers it's the zoo, it's a great activity for the family, but people the doorways of the world are no place to park your fucking Bugaboo. I know they look cool and I know everyone was fighting to buy it off your baby shower registry, but the world does not stop because you need to speak slowly and in an educational tone to your child. The sound of a father talking in that voice makes my skin crawl.

Also, have you noticed that every last mutherfucker out there is an amateur photographer? Digital photography and Photoshop has every asshole with disposable income thinking they're Ansel Adams. This one douche bag was dressed like he was working for National Geographic shooting pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow in the Kalahari instead of a sleeping tiger through a Plexiglas wall in The Bronx. Oversized backpack to get in everyone's way? Check. 12 inch telescopic lens? Check. Water bottle strategically strapped to backpack in case of sudden drought? Check. Fannypack to prove you're a tourist? You betcha! The width of this guy from backpack to lens was wide enough to stop most NHL penalty shots without moving. But did he realize this? Of course not. He was spinning and turning and backing up and stopping short just to be sure to smack everyone in a 20 foot radius in the face with his bag.

And then there was this one middle aged balding man and his video camera. I think he was alone which immediately caught my attention. There’s nothing quite like a middle-age loner hanging out at the zoo to make you check the amber alert when you get home. Everywhere I stood he would come up right next to me and video tape whatever sleeping animal I was looking at, riveting. (Or as The Bronx Zoo gift shop advertising would say "ribbiting".) I for one would love to get the dailies back from this little shoot. The five minutes he spent filming the tapir's ass is sure to be a tour de force. What I would give to be a fly on the wall when he plays this video to some poor schmucks at a dinner party, “Guess what everybody, I went to the zoo today…and I tape every last second. Let’s watch! Dear, get the lights.”

The lessons are of course are a) don't do anything in New York on the weekends, period. We’re talking lines that would make a communist dictator drool. (b) Unless you're a professional photographer, creepy stalker, or confined to a wheel chair in your apartment, leave the telescopic lens at home. We're all impressed with your little hobby, but let's keep things under control shall we? And (c) birth control, though condemned by the Church, is a good thing and we shouldn’t be afraid to keep using it for as long as possible.

Other than that, The Bronx Zoo is awesome and you should all check it out if you haven't, seriously.