Handbill Handout

So Bernie Madoff is getting his own trading card . Have I mentioned how difficult is it to try to be satirical or humorous about the modern world? You really can’t beat the truth. I mean if I came up with some short story or even a novel about a guy named Shyster or McFraud or something else obvious like “Made-off” who defrauded huge amounts of money from supposedly smart people and then wound up on a trading card everyone would think I was some kind of a hack of a complete jackass. And yet, there you have it: real life in all its glory. When I was a kid in the 1970’s card collecting as an investment tool was still in its infancy. I was a bit too young to be part of the generation that put cards in their bike wheels or anything like that although we did enter the world of gambling through baseball cards. Oh, and on Staten Island in the ‘70s it was always baseball cards. Sure you might occasionally buy a pack of football cards or hockey cards but the serious card aficionado specialize...

Every six to nine months or so I order a few new dress shirts from J.C. Penny to replace ones that are worn, stained or otherwise no longer fit for daily use. Each time I order I marvel at the amount of packaging that goes into a single dress shirt. I have a routine down to de -package the shirts but it still takes about 3-4 minutes of work per shirt to liberate the garment and try it on. The routine goes something like this. I set up three of our four garbage cans (there's no compostable material I'm aware of in the packing material). I remove the shirts from their plastic bags, those go in the regular garbage. Then I take the plastic thing that goes around the top button and toss that in the regular trash as well. Next out, all those pins which go into the metal/plastics recycling can (we have enough pins to open a tailor shop as it is). Finally out comes the cardboard under the collar and the larger piece of cardboard and tissue paper supporting the torso of the shir...

“Hey. Yeah I couldn’t hear you. Sounded like you were in a wind tunnel. So, how was your day?” Sigh. That’s when you know it’s not going to be a short conversation between the guy behind you on the bus and whoever is on the other end of the line. The weird thing about those conversations is they often seem to be between a married or at least otherwise involved couple. What will they have left to talk about when they see each other at home? My late father used to say “The telephone is an instrument of communication, not conversation.” He enforced his beliefs by limiting his children to 5 minute phone calls and refusing to pay for call waiting. There were two ways I would end-run around these regulations. One was to use the basement phone since he often wouldn’t notice I was on for a while. The other was that when I wanted to talk to the future Mrs. for any extended period of time I would call from a pay phone a few blocks from the house and have her call me back. We would tie...

(Picture lifted from 880 CBS’s website). I wonder if the new one will have all those terrible dank warrens smelling vaguely of stale beer and worse. The warrens that were stabbed at regular intervals by shafts of light and marked by numbers, odd toward one field, even toward the other always carefully arranged so that the number you needed was furthest from the entrance you used. I wonder if the green and blue explosion that hit you when you finally found that numbered tunnel and reached the end of it will still hit as hard. I wonder if some kid will see some pitcher like Nolan Ryan shut down the Yankees in the first ballgame he ever attends and have to wait a whole year, that whole terrible year between 9 and 10 years of age before he gets to go again and finally see them win. I wonder if during some lost season when the team is terrible some twenty something idiot and his best friend will get thrown out for being drunk and sitting in the first row behind the right field foul pole bec...

Looks like Britney Spears is ripping off James Joyce , among others including WFMU's own R. Stevie Moore . Or at least her songwriters are. Childish. Unquestionably not terribly original. Sort of funny though, in that Beavis and Butthead junior high school kind of way. Where did you learn how to swear? Did you have that Christmas Story moment? You know, the scene where Ralphie is helping his dad change the tire and the lug nuts get knocked all over the roadway and Ralphie lets loose with an “Oh Fudge”, except (naturally) the narrator notes “I didn ’t say fudge!” I don’t recall any particular moment like that with my parents. I do recall one bright early summer afternoon toward the end of 6 th grade when a kid came on the bus after school and announced to the teeming masses “Hey, you wanna know what fuck means?” Think anyone said “no”? Of course not. So our linguistics major continued with “It means…” and he proceeded to describe in some detail the act of insertion involved u...

(Photo ganked from SM. Thanks) The above is a picture from a hotel in Montreal. Over there on the right is the late, great Kaos , still young and healthy though I believe this is less than a year from his initial diagnosis with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Where am I? Giving the full nelson to the guy in the vintage 1987 team Canada sweater, of course. (You didn't think I would put a recognizable photo of myself here, did you dear readers?) Today is, or would have been, Pete K's 42nd birthday. He only got to use 34 of his birthdays, so I try to have a good time for both of us when his birthday or my birthday come around on the calendar. Unused birthdays are terrible things to waste. They should be noted, remembered, celebrated and then put away in a safe place. The picture up top is from a road trip we took to see one last game at the Montreal Forum before it closed. The Rangers were playing the Canadiens and while I was trying to soak in all the history in the bu...

Thanks Coach Ray for the text and Brion Gysin for the four pieces technique . ______________________ Fascinating Now that I’ve thought long and hard don’t get subtle on me before I’ve had the voting public had actually ever read moot. My bad. Go get some more java; cuz hasn’t read the Constitution either Sorry I had to go there. Nevermind. Oh, and this hope for a renaissance of hey, is this thread covered by Fair Use farmer? Congress is already working o Better get the jungle camo netting up WFMU is pretty involved in the Copyleft your garlic and tomatoes next. Actually I meant it as it applies to you. Care to join The Missus and me in a that about covers it. I thought Congress could only regulate response, all I can say is that if 51% of backyard ain’t in Jersey while my house the Constitution, his point would be yard is claimed by Indian tribe, then Oh, and sorry for missing your other j distributed in such a way as to gener right? Doctrine? The Community Supported Agricultu...

The news ticker crawling around the building said “Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Today, Everyone Is Irish”. Not me. I don’t feel the need to glom onto everyone else’s ethnic festival. I didn’t wear a mask for Purim last week and I’m not wearing green today. Besides, I’m Protestant. I prefer to stand back and watch the festivities and see if there’s anything interesting to be learned about people by observing folk rituals on occasions like this. One conclusion I’ve come to in both my observations of myself and others is that while many of us will never figure out exactly who it is we are, almost all of us experience moments in life where we discover who it is we aren’t. One such moment resonates clearly with me to this very day even though it took place nearly a quarter-century ago. It was in the spring of my freshman year in college. I had enrolled at Polytechnic University in downtown Brooklyn to become a civil engineer. I would be following in my brother’s footsteps. Except there were two...

There are restaurants I've been to that impress you with their flash, their creativity, their innovation, their bold determination to break new culinary ground. Le Bernardin is not one of them. Instead, Le Bernardin is a quiet, confident display of perfectly executed uncomplicated food. Not "easy to make" food, but simple preparations of high-quality ingredients prepared with a degree of finesse and skill unseen in virtually any other restaurant. The Mrs. and I had a tasting menu. Here's what it included (and we had wine as well but my wine writing is even worse than my food writing so here's the summary - we liked them all except for the sake with the first course): Thinly pounded smoked salmon carpaccio ; toasted brioche and caviar. The salmon component of this dish was merely excellent smoked salmon. Nothing I haven't eaten before. However the caviar on toasted brioche was a revelation. I've always thought that caviar is possibly the most overra...

Notes coming soon.

My previous entry about a dream I had got me thinking about those nightmares that everyone has from time to time. You know the ones. The “falling” dream that actually has somewhat of a medical explanation . I never believed the myth that if you actually hit the ground in your dream it means you’re dead, then again I’ ve never hit the ground and I am still alive as of this typing so who knows? Then of course there’s the “showing up at school/work/wherever naked” or the “in your underwear” variant. I’ ve had that one too, never been able to figure out why. For any psychologists or psychiatrists in the audience on the occasions that I have this nightmare it’s usually the underwear version. I have an interesting variant of this as well where instead of being undressed I’m simply under dressed . Just last night I dreamt I was on the bus heading to work when I realized I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans instead of the requisite biz-casual stuff I normally wear. Or I will often dream during ...

A new (to my knowledge ) word has been coined to describe the sort of relationship Leah Cohen and Hosea Rosenberg had on Top Chef NY: showmance . Welcome to the 21st century.

I had an odd dream the other night involving some folks from my curling club. It started off like this: a bunch of us were staying at some fancy mansion north of New York for some kind of social event. I have no idea what the function was but it was a pretty decent party that went on on a Friday. On Saturday folks were departing to go here and there and wherever. Well, a guy I curl with and against on Saturday nights turns up at this mansion in full curling gear saying he's at the Douglas bonspiel at the Ardsley Curling Club (which was going on the weekend I had the dream) and someone on his team got hurt and he needed a player to fill in for the Saturday night game. Well, I was the only male around so he had to take me. (When I told him about the dream, he said "So this is the point where it becomes a nightmare for me, right?" Anyone who has seen what I do on a curling sheet would understand that yes, that is true.) So anyway the Mrs. and I agree to follow him fr...

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Slow down. Look out the window. See which way the wind is blowing. Check the thermometer and see how cold it is. Walk slowly. Look out for ice patches. Look around at how the snow coats the topside of the phone lines and the trees. Notice the gaps where a bird or a squirrel had been. Look both ways. Kick the snow off your feet outside the door, slowly and deliberately. Not too hard, you'll bruise yourself. Unlace the shoes. Take them off. Hold the knife straight. Bisect the onion laterally. Pull the skin deliberately and surely. Make even cuts, don't let the pieces fall onto the floor. You're not racing anyone here and you're not proving anything by cutting yourself. Drizzle the oil slowly while you blend it into the rest of the dressing. If you see a slick stop. You have time. Notice the color. Smell. Wait. Watch. Remember.

Photos by the Mrs. from her snow day.