Handbill Handout

Around 6 weeks ago I put in to get tickets to a Phillies game at the office. The Mrs. and I sort of "collect" ballparks and we hadn't been to the new Phillies park yet and we figured why not go down the last weekend of the regular season, they're playing a crummy team and the game probably won't matter anyway so it should be an easy ticket from work and it was. So that's how we wound up witnessing the Phillies clinch the NL East on Saturday from a skybox in which we were served free champagne right after the final out. The game also brought our Major League Baseball stadium total to 16 near as we can figure. We've probably been to almost that many minor league parks as well. I complain pretty often about my job, but once in a while it comes through with a cool perk like that. It was a big sports day in South Philly as the Flyers played their last game in the Spectrum. It was a preseason game vs. Carolina at 1pm and some folks were late arriving to

I walked into the elevator lobby and a sound not entirely unlike thunder or maybe a hundred bowling balls falling out of a closet boomed over my head. I looked over at the office services guy who was waiting for the elevator and said “What the hell was that?” “Financial firm upstairs. They’re gone. Taking all their stuff out today. Wheeling it out in those big hampers.” So it continues. I walked across Times Square and looked up at the Lehman Brothers building and saw that the video of waterfalls and sunsets and other stuff that is kind of like the stuff that they put on airline television screens during boarding interspersed with the Lehman logo and whatever their slogan was gone. In its place was a static, bright blue plain screen with the Barclays logo. I looked at the reflection on the building across the street and wondered how the people who worked there felt about the constant, static blue light burning at them all day instead of the old video. At my corner there’s a card store

Some of you may remember when I wrote about properly positioning yourself on subway platforms and other keys to executing a successful commute. Many who don’t go through the relentless daily grind of trying to transport yourself more than a couple miles within the tri-state area probably thought I was insane, or some kind of obsessive at the very least. Well, I’m not alone. The notion of properly positioning yourself on the subway went mainstream today in a NY Times article . I quote: “Which side of the car should you stand on?" “The nonplatform side, so you’re not hurled onto the platform at the next stop by angry-looking passengers” getting on or off, Mr. Russianoff said. “I grew up on the D line, the Brighton line, in Brooklyn. It opens on either side, depending. To know the 11 stations from Sheepshead Bay to DeKalb Avenue, that’s knowledge given only to native sons and daughters. You ping-pong back and forth.” What subway car should you ride in if you’re going to Yankee Stadi

Ken Freedman supplies the soundtrack to the global economic collapse here .

So the early word out of Rangers camp is that the organization wants more productivity out of the fourth line. Blair Betts in particular. Um, OK, I may not pay as close attention to all of the nuances of the Rangers like I used to but it seems to me that dumping on a hard-working, reliable, shot-blocking forward who is an anchor on your penalty killing unit is a dumb way to open camp. So of course Sather follows it up by doing what he always does when in doubt: picking up another talented, soft forward with a questionable work ethic. Hello Petr Nedved , we never missed you while you were gone. Yes, the masterstroke to force Blair Betts into scoring more goals is to dig Petr Nedved out from the bottom of God-knows-what European league scrap heap he was quietly moldering in. Sounds like genius to you too, right? I mean seriously, Alexdander Daigle wasn't available? Alexei Yashin wanted too much money? If you're really going to put pressure on Betts , how about bringing in

I am sitting in a midtown pub tucking into a chicken wrap and a pint when the thought strikes me. Is anyone in here a telemarketer? I had, quite by accident, a nice chat with a telemarketer the evening before at my office. The phone rang and the caller ID came up with a number I didn ’t recognize but for some reason thought might be a recruiter come to offer me the Dream Job of a Lifetime to Take Me Away From All Of This (I was working late and the prospect of employment anywhere else seemed like a good idea at the time). Instead it was a telemarketer. On my work phone. The area code was 515 which Google reveals is in Iowa. Des Moines particularly. I didn ’t realize she was a telemarketer at the outset because she said she was calling on behalf of a company that my company is partnered with on a particular venture. I stayed on the line thinking she was going to offer me That Job. Instead, she offered me something that I could get for free from work. I told her this and she laughed. Th

Go here and see what your name would be if you were Sarah Palin's offspring. Feel free to post'em in the comments. Fun for the whole family! I'm Mole Valdez Palin, thank you very much.

I suspect that there are many people out there who have a “Ha, good on those greedy bastards, they had it coming to them” feeling about the amazing collapse that has been ongoing in the financial sector for some time now. Here’s the real bad news: the greedy bastards are going to come out of this just fine. They always do. The people who are going to be screwed, as always, are those of us who are small-time investors trying to sock away enough money to live off of so we can retire while there’s few years left in our lives that we can enjoy. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to maximize the time between the end of work and the beginning of the tube-filled bedridden years where I stare at the lengthening rays of the sun and wonder what time the mailman is going to show up tomorrow. It is amazing here in the West how we are brainwashed from the time we’re in college to the time the first shovelful of dirt hits the roof of the casket to trust an industry that is essentially filled with

I recently read a kiddie-lit story called “The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters”. It’s a Moomin story written by Tove Jansson . We discovered the Moomins on our trip to Sweden and Finland last month and I’m completely, utterly in love with the whole Moomin mythology. It is ostensibly kid-lit like I said but there’s an underlying sensibility to the stories that’s pretty grown-up. Like, oh, say, the vintage Warner Brothers cartoons you can enjoy the stories on different levels; on the one hand they’re basic, enjoyable silly kid stories with a slightly dark edge but on the other hand they can be read as allegories about people’s possessiveness or interaction with nature or friendship or about trying to live life with a sense of curiosity and wonder taking joy in the simple things that are often overlooked. They are often just an elegant expression of the old “stop and smell the flowers” cliché. Discovering the Moomin mythology has also given me a kind of cultural pride for probably th

They call September 11 Patriot Day nowadays. At least that’s what it says on my company issued desk calendar. I don’t like that. I’m not sure what else to call it since Memorial Day and Remembrance Day are already spoken for. Patriot Day sounds like an old Soviet holiday. It sounds like a name for a holiday that comes from “them”, not “us”. I walked downstairs at about 10:45 to clear my head after a couple hours of meetings and phone calls and e-mail answering. The work that the office-worker type like me has to do that keeps him from getting to his actual work, the work that produces something be it a summary, a report, an analysis, whatever. They were having a ceremony in the plaza in front of the building. I had seen an e-mail a few weeks prior asking for people who wanted to be readers. I only know two people that died that day and really only very peripherally; one was a guy I worked with at the deli back in college and the other was my sister’s ex-boss who I had met a few times y

I was giving a presentation with my boss at a conference held in a Times Square hotel. The assistant to the president of our company came in and interrupted telling us all to take a break and check in with our families because there had been some kind of explosion downtown at the World Trade Center. Cell phones came out, and information came in. Someone said that a small plane had flown into one of the buildings. “Wow”. I remarked. “I remember my mom telling me about the time that a small plane hit the Empire State Building but that was on a day with crappy weather, I think. It’s clear as a bell out today. How the hell did that happen?” In relatively short order we found out that both towers had been damaged and one had already collapsed. Hotel security recommended that everyone at the conference stay in the building for their safety due to concerns about “panic and rioting in the streets”. The heads of my company decided to continue with the meeting since there was nothing else anyone

Thai politics, actually. Seems that the prime minster of Thailand has finally stepped down after weeks of protests and a takeover of his compound. Supposedly none of those things forced him out. What did him in? Paid guest appearances on a cooking show that he used to host prior to becoming prime minister. It seems that in Thailand it's a constitutional violation to do such a thing when you're the PM. Now I wonder how long it'll be before some TV or radio host comes up with "Boy, don't you wish we had a rule like that in the US and (insert name of hated political office-holder) had been a guest judge on Iron Chef?" Man I could make some dough punching up material for those guys. Back to ex-PM Sundaravej : What recipes did he demo? Or was he just a taster? What food did in a political career? Maybe someone will post clips on somewhere out there on the vast interwebs . Maybe I'll be motivated to go searching for them. Or maybe not. Screw it, onc

I'm not sure how Wordpress works exactly, but one of the features it has is that when you roll over a link it pulls up a handful of keywords or key phrases. Presumably, these keywords have something to do with the site that the link leads to. Well, I'm not sure how to take what it says about this here little corner of the web based on the following that pops up when I roll over the link from the PCC blog : "Are we there yet" "Widgets" "Feces" "Tic" "Psychosis" "TV Reviews" I try not to be too self-referential here, but that was too weird to ignore. I mean those words might sum up SOME weekend nights in my life, but not all of them (zing!)

Autumn doesn't officially arrive for another couple of weeks, but the beer season changes on Labor Day when the Octoberfest and other harvest ales begin to show up at good beer bars and stores. A standout this year for me is Wolavers Pumpkin Ale, not because its USDA certified organic (a pretty meaningless designation, but marketing is marketing) but because it's a nicely balance ale that's not overpoweringly pumpkiny but also doesn't taste like a brown ale with only a hint of pumpkin. There are some breweries out there who make the stuff so overpoweringly pumpkin and spice laden that you feel like you've just eaten dessert after having a bottle or a pint. Not good. Wolavers doesn't make that mistake offering just enough pumpkin and spice to remind you of a warm toddy next to the fire and a cool late fall evening without making you run for a glass of water or Pabst Blue Ribbon to clear the coating off your tongue. It also is pretty darn good to cook wit

Today’s story is about America’s favorite reality show: the Presidential election. I have been chastised by a regular reader of this site for not engaging in political discussion so I’ve decided to put my cards on the table, lay it all on the line and throw my hands in the air like I just don’t care and let my freak flag fly. Here are my carefully considered thoughts on the candidates: Barack Obama: It’s nice to see the Democrats honoring the long legacy of the Kennedy clan by nominating an Irishman for the Oval Office. Having him accept the nomination on a stage lifted from Leonard’s of Great Neck was also inspiring, though I was disappointed that he didn’t come up out of the floor with lasers flashing and techno music thumping to introduce “Invesco Field at Mile High’s World Famous Viennese Hour Dessert Bar” while ladling out flaming bowls of Baked Alaska. Although the content of the speech was not particularly memorable, Barry Obama (as his friends know him – his evil right-wing ene

So it looks like the city of New Orleans made it through and folks living in more rural areas were not as hard-hit as was feared. It's not really a cause for celebration; rather it is a cause for relief and for hope that those who were hard hit (especially the families of the 8 people who died) are getting all the help they need. I think we're somewhat spoiled here in the Northeast. We don't often suffer natural disasters of a grand scale here outside of major snowstorms and even those cause more inconvenience than actual loss of property or worse, life. Unless you've experienced that vertiginous sense of being completely at the mercy of nature you lack any idea of how frightening even a "minor" storm can be. While my experience in the Nor'Easter that hit LBI back in May was nerve-wracking, it didn't compare to the pure terror that I remember from living through a tornado that dropped out of Hurricane David when I was 12 years old. Yeah, a tornado. O