Handbill Handout

Back from the Left Coast after three days of work and a travel day yesterday. You go into a bubble when you go out there (or anywhere for business, I guess) where life becomes get up, have meetings and working sessions, go out to dinner with co-workers and consume large amounts of alcohol, fall down in bed late, get up early and repeat. There's no favorite TV show watching, no family time except via phone and the internet , no time reading your friends' blogs (sorry guys), no sports viewing unless the game happens to be on in the bar where you're engaging in your required socialization, none of the normal rootedness and structure of home. So now I'm back in the real world trying to get my legs under me. I can only imagine what this is like for people who travel a lot for work, I guess eventually you figure out how to make the road more homelike and develop regular routines. Me, I'm glad I only travel for work a few times a year. What does this have to do with a...

Warning, this post is rated PG-13 at the very least. Depending on your place of employment, it may even be rated NSFW. You've been warned. These folks are creative , but they are not original. While I am even prouder of my Scandinavian heritage than ever before, I have to admit this idea was first executed in the United States. In fact, we did it first, right here in NYC at the so-called World's Most Famous Arena. I may have told this story before, or mentioned it in passing, but it's one that bears retelling. Let us go back to the halcyon days of the spring of 1995. The NHL had thrown away half a season on a pointless lockout thus murdering any marketing momentum they may have had from the New York Rangers epic Stanley Cup victory the spring before. It was about to enter a ten-year spiral of numbingly boring neutral-zone trap teams with extremely limited fan bases dominating the championship scene broken only by the years Detroit and Colorado prevailed. The damage done to ...

There’s a new show on WFMU in the overnight hours called Night People . Last night’s topic was ostensibly ghosts but the first hour experienced a little topic drift into what scared the crap out of you when you were a kid including one male caller who claimed to never have, er, sexual dreams because he was petrified by the scene in Ghostbusters where a guy was sleeping and a ghost (probably a succubus ) floated above the bed and undid the guy’s fly. Who knew that that movie could be so psychologically damaging? I mean sure, you may never want to eat marshmallows or green jello again but I would’ve thought that would be the end of it. Anyway, it reminded me of some of the things that scared me as a kid and with Halloween approaching and me probably not having time to write much next week since I’m traveling on business to the most frightening and unreal place on Earth (Los Angeles) I figured I’d write about ‘em today. One thing that sent me running from the room on a regular basis was...

No, I'm not going to tell you how your eternal soul is going to be saved. Got no idea on that one, no sir. However, there has been too much navel-gazing negativity on here lately. So today we will concentrate on happy things. The new cats are making slow but sure progress adjusting to their new home. Curling season starts tomorrow for the Mrs. and I, it'll be good to see our curling friends on a regular basis again. The game itself will be even more of an adventure than usual since I haven't set foot on the ice in 6 months. Sorry in advance about that Aaron. Fall is a great season. Good sleeping weather. WFMU is having "Singles Going Steady" week to promote the record fair this weekend with many DJ's playing nothing but old-fashioned 45 RPM records. A lot of fun shows so far this week. The Habs are off to a good start. The Rangers are up and down but not terrible. See, there's plenty going on to distract or detract from the creeping doom. The ceaseless...

There is a certain cynical part of my brain that says the recent defections of conservative columnists and Colin Powell to the Obama camp is based on the realization that the country is screwed for at least the next few years. The strategy? "Let's put the other party in charge so whatever happens next is hung on their neck and we can breeze back in as saviors four years hence." Never mind the positive revenue impact on the conservative press which will have a ratings/circulation/web site viewing windfall as like-minded folk gather to fulminate at the perceived horrors of a Democratic administration. Note that this has nothing to do with my own political inclinations (or stock holdings, such as they are) but rather my opinion of how humans behave when power is at stake or when a contest is underway. The World Series will get underway Wednesday in Tampa in front of what could be an interesting crowd. Most Rays fans were, in all likelihood, Yankees fans until about a month a...

Cooked up that expensive bird last night and I have to say it came out darn near perfect. What did I do? Simple: First, remove the neck, heart and liver package, cut the backbone out and flatten out the critter to increase surface-to-mass ratio which promotes even cooking. You don have to pound it or anything, just press down on the center of the breast like you're giving it CPR until the keel bone snaps and your bird looks like two mirror-image half-chickens. Then, toss flattened bird into a nice cold saltwater bath for a couple hours. You can search around the web for brine prep techniques or you can do what I do which is dump kosher or sea salt into water, stir, and taste increasing the salt until the mixture tastes like a mouthful of water you accidentally swallowed at the beach. While the bird is soaking, melt a stick or so of butter in a pot and add in some honey (a tablespoon or so) and chopped rosemary and thyme. Stir and then pour into a ramekin or small metal bowl and put...

For the last couple of days, the Mrs. has been complaining that it's too cold in the house. "Put a sweater on" I tell her. "Do you know how much money we've lost from our retirement accounts in this financial boondoggle?" I'm trying to do what my friend Aaron calls "Getting in touch with your inner cheapskate." I love that phrase. It's what we all need to do in these times. Of course, it's hard to argue saving a few bucks on heat when I just dropped $25 on one heritage breed chicken that I'll be roasting up today. Yeah, Boston Market has whole chickens already cooked for eight bucks or whatever so I must be crazy or an idiot, right? My values are a little different. I'd rather pay a premium for a bird that had a life outside of a cramped piss-scented concrete warehouse than support that kind of cruelty. Plus heritage breeds taste better and we'll get at least two meals each out of this bird and the bones will go into...

I am standing on the southwest corner of 48 th and 6 th waiting for the light to change. Across on the northwest corner I see a young female jogger-type running in place among the crowd of suits and tourists waiting to continue her run when the signal glows green. It does, and as we pass each other I notice that in her right hand she has one of those Dunkin Donuts frozen beverage-type drinks. You know, the ones that contain roughly, oh, I’d say about a million and a half calories. She slurped it as she ran by and I wondered if she even knew that unless she was running all the way to the end of Manhattan Island and back she was never going to break even on the caloric burn vs. intake for tonight’s run. She was, essentially, running in place. I see that kind of thing all the time in my neighborhood. A few weeks ago I had just crossed the street at that very same corner when I heard the sound of chanting young voices coming from the opposite direction. It sounded like they were yelling...

I came across the most fascinating and revealing piece of Web art that I've ever seen. It's a site that somehow taps into people's search terms and anonymously displays them once every couple of seconds. If there is a better catalogue of the needs, neuroses, interests and desires of the segment of humanity that is connected to the Internet I haven't seen it. No idea how it works. Maybe technical types like Coach Ray or Plover Jeff can offer some insight. Here's a list of ten things that came up on the site when last I checked. lyssy and echol colormatrix free indian porn temple finches as pets evangelical covenant church what causes heatstroke harley davidson clothing morgan fallon what is a courtesy clerk ann taylor I don't think you can get a full picture of humanity out of ten results, but watch it for, oh, a half an hour and you'll probably see all you need to see . And it looks like this only covers English language searches or maybe it translates...

Pictures by the Mrs.

The line whirred out over the rocks and punched a hole in the water about 20 feet from the pier. The guy at the other end of the line looked to be in his late 50s or early 60s, black, and tired. The fishermen up and down the pier had been hauling it in today all right. Hauling in seaweed. Every cast turned out the same way: the line went taut, the owner of the line went over and started reeling it in, and at some point in the process he knew that it “was more goddamn seaweed”. One of the frustrated many at least had his sense of humor intact. As he untangled the plants from his line he exclaimed “I caught a salad! You want a salad?” The day was warm, the wind not too unpleasant and the water crashed and gurgled into the rocks under the pier just enough to remind you that when the sea got really angry it could remove you from the planet out without thinking twice. The sun was present but not blinding. It was just bright enough to frame the scene unobtrusively. The fishermen (and they we...

The annual LBI Bonspiel/Annual Meeting/Drunkapalooza went down over the weekend. Details can be found on the club blog . Beware of the NASCAR Ninjas. For those that don't check out the comments, you missed a pretty good link from Jen who made an interesting discovery by making a slight typo on her way here. Everything you need to know about our times is right there. Or at least that's what they say.

The two newest additions to the household are slowly adjusting to their new surroundings. We cleaned out the second bedroom for them with the exception of a few things, one of them being my footlocker full of vinyl LPs . That stayed because I didn ’t want to store it in the basement for fear of water damage since we do get a little bit of moisture in the basement now and again when the rains are particularly heavy. To protect the records from cat damage we covered them with blankets and naturally that became one of their favorite resting places. Hopefully no long term damage will occur. The two newbies seem to have a little more of that cat aloofness than previous felines that shared our household. They have had a tough life so far: they came to our vet's office as 4-5 month old strays and lived for about 10 months in a large cage in the back of the office until we adopted them. The vet would only allow people to adopt them as a pair because they're very attached to one anothe...

From Coach Ray Some Guy Who Would Rather Remain Anonymous.

More than once in the last few weeks I've started to tell someone a story and they stopped me with "Oh yeah, I saw that on your blog." Wow. You know that Bugs Bunny cartoon with Gossamer where at the end Bugs asks Gossamer (in dramatic horror movie narrator voice, naturally) if he ever had the feeling that he was being watched, that hundreds of eyes were on him, look, out there in the audience and Gossamer yells "PEOPLE!" and runs in terror? Well, I don't feel that way at all. In fact it's interesting (and make no mistake, flattering) to me that anyone would drop by here on any kind of a regular basis. I started doing this because I realized that somewhere in the 18 years since I left college I lost the ability to write and I wanted it back. Not that I was ever the mostest super-duper writer there ever was but I was OK- ish . What I wanted now a place to practice writing again but it couldn't be some journal or notebook or something that nobody woul...

There’s a frost warning for NYC tonight and we still have several tomatoes ripening in the back yard. I don’t want to risk damaging them so we’ll have to do the old pick and toss in the brown paper bag bit. As much as I enjoy autumn, it’s still a little sad to reach this point. Time to get out the root vegetable soup and meat braises and chili and stew recipes. The change of seasons usually would imply, well, change but it looks like some things will always stay the same. It is perhaps comforting however that in a time of war with the global economy melting down that some people can make being outraged over a weenie flash that was only visible in slow motion a priority . Warms my heart, really it does. It’s good to see that the kids who stood disapprovingly in the corner during college parties while the rest of us were shotgunning cheap beer have found something to do with their lives. I’m sure they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife. And you know, there’s something to be said for ...

"It's the save of the year , and it's not even the year yet!" Who says preseason hockey is boring?