Another brilliant idea. I’m full of them!

Imagine swimming in one of these?

I’ve been saying for years now that I’m an idea guy…big on ideas, poor on execution. 

I first read a few years ago that some uber-hipsters took a 30 yard trash dumpster, put in a pool liner, and created a night club/country club/oasis on the banks of the Gowanas Canal.  I’ve only dreampt of being cool enough to think of going to such a place.  The cynical New Yorker in me thought dumpster, Gowanas, toxic waste…you do the math. 

So now they’re going to put one on Park Avenue.  Not Park Avenue around the corner from where I grew up…I mean THE Park Avenue.  In Manhattan.  And who are they appealing to?  The industry mogul that’s too lazy to head out to the Hamptons?  What, the pool at the Waldorf Astoria is closed for renovations? 

While a 30 yard dumpster is essentially a rectangular above-ground pool, I figured why not improve it?  Go bigger.  And again, use something that’s relatively available.  Ocean containers.  40′ open tops, to be exact.  OK, open tops are much rarer than standard boxes, but there is no roof…there is no need cut the roof off a standard container.

Now the benefit is not only can you dive in (not from a board, but you can do laps!  Most of these dumpster pools are for cooling off, not serious swimming.  Sure, it’s not Olympic sized, but you get the drift.  Fill one side with sand to raise the floor to create a “shallow end”.  You can bring them into the neighborhoods and teach the kids to swim. 

Ahh…the 40′ open top container pool…I’ll leave it to the engineers and bean counters to hash out the details.

Triskadekaphobia?

Run!  Get cover!  The sky is falling! It’s FRIDAY THE 13th!!!

Many people are afraid of the number 13, as it supposedly brings them bad luck.  Sure, there’s that whole movie franchise.  Others, on the other hand, embrace it, as to stick it to the bad karma.  Me? I’m somewhere in the middle.

Now while I have borderline OCD when it comes to the superstitious rituals I did during the Yankees World Series run, I also know that what hat I wear, what mug I drink my coffee from, what color underwear I choose has absolutely no bearing on the outcome of a game, especially since I’m not the one on the field.  But correlations get made especially when over 60% of the time I’m getting favorable results, and while it can be fun, I know it’s completely ridiculous.

So is the fear of the number 13.  Actually, I had no choice but to drop the whole thing, or I’d never be able to leave the house.  When I first moved to Delaware, the apartment complex’s mailing address was actually on US 13, a road I take every day.  I work on the 13th floor, even though this building has two half-floors in between, so I’m really 15 floors above the street, but I’m still pressing a button next to the number 13.  Again, I’m not about to move or quit my job over this.  I can’t be bothered to have a fear of the number 13.

But when I was a kid, on the first soccer team I played for, I wore 13.  We finished in last place.  We were winless.  So maybe there’s truth in all of this?  What was A-Rod thinking picking 13?  Well, two years later, I was on a first place team, and it took A-Rod a few more years to get his World Series ring.

But I’ve been home sick today.  And the doctor’s diagnosis?  Bronchitis.  Probably would have been a cold if I went yesterday.

Blog Psychic, Episode 3

There’s a lot of chatter regarding the predictions for the World Series, especially down here in enemy territory.  Rare is it when the Post and the Daily News have the same back cover…SHUT ROLLINS UP!!! 

My evil plan would be that the New York Football Giants would play the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, and win.  And the twin-bill nightcap of Philly/New York, the Yanks would win Game 4 of the World Series for a sweep.  Now while I’m pretty confident the G-men will beat the Iggles convincingly, especially coming off a loss to the Cardinals, I wouldn’t expect the Yanks to sweep.  I say they do it at home in Game 6, which means they’ll do it in five.

But don’t count out the sweep just yet.  Go Girardi wouldn’t pitch CC Sabathia on Games 1 and 4 if he didn’t think he’d have a very good chance of winning them.  So let’s assume he does win both.  Game 2 is AJ Burnett vs. Pedro “Who’s your Daddy?” Martinez.  Pedro is older, and will have to work very hard against a Yankee lineup that will look at a lot of pitches.  I say he’s doesn’t make four innings.  The Yanks pounce on the underbelly of the the Phillies bullpen and win Game 2.  Game 3, Andy “Mr. Most Wins in Postseason History” Pettitte vs. a shaky Cole Hamels.  Get in Cole’s head, he’ll cough up runs, throw a hissy fit, and the game.  And look at that…a four-game sweep.

Game 2, 2004 ALCS

So you heard it here…book a flight to Vegas, and you can thank me later.  Hell, if the NFL didn’t dick over Delaware, you could have driven here instead.  Well, you could bet on the Giants, but you need two more games for the parlay (sucker) bet.

There's always room on the shelf for one more.

Nobody would be saying anything if it wasn’t the Yankees playing…

Oh my God!  The world’s coming to an end!  The sky is falling!  A major-league umpire made a bad call.

Game 4 of the 2009 ALCS had more “bad calls” than a usual game.  I’m not going into detail about Swisher and the pick-off attempt, Swisher and the tag-up, or Cano/Posada on third.  Or at least I don’t want to.

Let me first squash the conspiracy theorists.  The Yankees have not paid off the umpire squad.  They have not bought the World Series (yet, but they’re no different than the Red Sox…again another argument for another time). 

So-called “bad calls” are bad because we, in the confines of our living rooms, enjoy a view the umpires do not have.  There’s all kinds of cameras covering a typical baseball game.  I believe the YES Network employs no less than 17 at a typical Yankees game.  Hence, we, the viewing public, can enjoy MULTIPLE camera angles showing the action from different points of view, in super-slow-motion, and if you have it, in high definition. 

Umpires, on the other hand have a very different point of view of the action.  They’re at field-level, not tens of feet above the action like the cameras up on the middle deck or the outfield, up on the backstop, or even on top of the stadium.  Sometimes where they be may not be the best angle to see what really happened.  Take Nick Swisher tagging up on third.  The instant replay showed Tim McClelland looking down the line into left field.  He’s looking for the catch, not if Swisher left the bag early or not.  It’s impossible to be looking at two things at once.  Now I know some of you will say that umpires have “blue” eyes…one blew this way, one blew that way.  But seriously…

Or here’s an every-game example.  The batter hits a ground ball to short, he fields, and fires to first.  Where’s the umpire?  He’d behind the first baseman in foul territory.  He doesn’t have the best point of view to see when the ball hits the glove.  That would be somewhere inbetween the pitcher and the first baseman.  So the umpire looks at the bag to see when the batter hits it, and listens for the snap of the ball hitting the glove, and makes the call from there.  Bottom line, he doesn’t have a clear view of the ball.  But one of the TV cameras sure does.

I challenge anybody to come off the street and do what the umpires do.  They’re pretty much on the road for the entire season, unlike the players who are home for 81 games.  The umpires are standing the entire game in the heat or the cold.  And they’re expected to be the pope.

But for the most part, we wouldn’t even know if the umpires were even making bad calls if it weren’t for all the instant replays on TV.  Now I’m not saying all these camera angles are bad for watching the game at home.  But if Major League Baseball wants to expand the instant replay beyond the current home run call, there needs to be some serious structure in place, and it needs to be used sparingly.  While the guys in the TV control trucks do an excellent job getting the replays up, many times they’re being shown while the next guy is up to bat.  While I hate limiting the number of challenges the NFL has (so the coach can’t be right a third time?), games in the playoffs are long enough as it is.  Adding an extra two or three minutes here and there can really drag things out.  It’s bad enough when they add an extra 30 second commercial after every half inning for the national games as it is.

But what we really need, not right now in the playoffs, but say next year on some random game, is the umpire cam.  Fos has buried cameras in the pitchers mound, and we’ve even had “catcher cam”.  Why not make the umpire wear that mask, so we, the great unwashed, can see exactly what the umpire sees as he’s hunching OVER the catcher so he can see the plate to call balls and strikes. 

And to further the point, how many times do you see grainy black-and-white footage from decades back, and see umpires making “bad calls”?  They had, what no more than three cameras back then?  And none of them were in the outfield.

Sure umpires have a job that people love to hate, but it’s all part of the game we all know and love, that is baseball.

Got this on twitter last night...

Hey Kellogs, do you not think we graduated third grade?

I may not be as bad as Seinfeld, but there’s typically a half-dozen boxes of cereal on top of my refrigerator.  More often than not, I’ll reach for the grown-up healthy stuff, but every now and then I’ll reach for the box of Froot Loops. 

I know I’ll sound like a girl here, but one of my favorites is Special K with Red Berries.  Since I eat my cereal dry (keeping the tradition alive for over 30 years now), I love the dehydrated strawberries.  It kind of reminds me of the astronaut food that was all the rage in the 1980’s. 

It’s delicious.  Nutritious.  So sacred it won’t dirty your dishes.  Wait, that’s Imus’ One Sacred Chicken to Go.

The thing I take issue with is the name.  Granted I appreciate it’s not called Estrogen in a Box.  But the term “Red Berries”?  How much do you have to dumb it down for the mouth-breathers?  You can’t use the exotic term “Strawberries”?  Even Cletus the slack-jawed yokel knows what the fuck a strawberry is.

Or is it that there’s a mixture of different berries in the red family.  Perhaps red raspberries?  Cherries?  Those little red berries on my evergreen bush?  Nope.  I checked the ingredients, and there are definitely no evergreen bush berries.

So Kellogs, if you’re paying attention here, why not change the name to Strawberry K?  Send me an e-mail and I’ll give you my bank account number so you can wire me the royalties. 

I get mine from Costco.

Hey, Steve Buckley! This is why Yankee fans hate Sox fans…

I spent many a painful year going to school and working in Boston, starting back when the Sox couldn’t suck enough, and they couldn’t even sell out Fenway, even against the Yanks…long before all these bandwagon fans came out of the woodwork.  But through my astute observation (basically it was as plain as the nose on my face), Sox fans had a huge inferiority complex when it came to the Yanks.  And they blamed everything on the Curse of the Bambino.  Sox aren’t winning?  Curse of the Bambino.  Train broke down?  Curse of the Bambino.  Girlfriend dumped me?  Must be that damn curse.  But what it came down to was that the average Sox fan was one-dimensional, only knew one thing, and clung on to the past, reluctant to change, and only spit out the company line when confronted by out-of-towners.

And it’s this one-dimensional character flaw where they lead that battle cry, “Yankees suck!”  So the Yanks are playing the Sox?  Sure thing, yell your face off.  But Cleveland’s in town and you’re still chanting “Yankees suck!” and Cleveland is going to the playoffs and the Sox aren’t?  Sad.  10-year-old kids getting into my face in Fenway?  Pathetic. 

Now that doesn’t mean that there aren’t intelligent baseball fans in and around New England.  They’re just few and far between.  I used to hang out and drink at bars with a bunch  of old townies, but once they saw that even though I’m a die-hard, I can have an intelligent baseball discussion, they took me in. 

Now while living/working up there, I used to take the T all the time.  And since this was before the days that any jackass with a computer could come up with a blog/news source, I’d read this thing called a newspaper.  Now like most large cities in this country, there were two big dailies…the Globe and the Herald.  The Globe was a broadsheet format, and catered to the upper crust.  I’d get the Herald, because I’m a sucker for a tabloid format.  It’s just easier to read on the train.  And I didn’t mind the Herald.  Three pages of comics, and decent (albeit slanted) sports coverage.  Remember this was the paper the still dedicated two full pages to each of Clemens’ starts in Toronto, as if he still played in Boston…kind of how Green Bay still loved Favre when he went to the Jets. 

Now what I liked to do was read it cover-to-cover and scream in my head back at the columnists, sports or otherwise.  The only one that called a straight shot was Michael Gee, but he has other unrelated issues.  Now I know journalism is supposed to be impartial to an extent, but these guys were delusional borderline insane.  Oh, wait…it’s just the inferiority complex coming through again. 

Fast forward a couple of years.  The so-called curse has been broken, they won two World Series, and the Sox fans are as miserable as ever.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This past September, Boston came to the Bronx to play one last three-game series against the Yanks.  What started as a lop-sided 0-8 season series, the Yanks were on the precipice of tying it up at 9-9 with a three game sweep.  On the Friday night pregame (September 25), Yankee announcer Suzy Waldbaums interviews Boston Herald sports columnist Steve Buckley.  (Go onto itunes and download it yourself.)He give her the usual fluff, that the Sox don’t care that the Yanks are in first and the wild card is just fine (I don’t buy it one bit).  He does make the point that it’s not like the Yanks get a first round bye like they would in football, but like he said out of one side of his mouth, and then out of his other, if you don’t have home-field advantage, you have to play that fifth game on the road. 

So things go swimmingly for the better part of the three-plus minute interview, and she wraps things up by saying, “It’s my guess that we’ll be doing this back again in a couple of weeks,” referring to the fact that the way things were lining up, there was a very good chance that the two teams would meet up in the ALCS.  The Yanks were going to face the Tigers (or the Twins if they were to face a monumental collapse) whom they only lost once to this season, and the Sox always do well against the Angels.  It was a hey, who knows kind of moment.  And those writers and announcers all run into each other before and after games, so even if he doesn’t go on the pregame again, she was sure to run into him in the hallways at some point. 

But then he pulls the ultimate dick move if there ever was one.  He thanks her, and then says, “Oh, by the way, I’m going with the Tigers in the first round over the Yankees.”  This throws her off for a second, because she’d expect this from some guy in the Fenway grandstands named Sully, not a supposed professional journalist.   But she then throws it back at him, saying that if the Angels beat the Sox, then they won’t be having this discussion in a couple of weeks, which of course he didn’t like, so he tried to reiterate his original point, by saying “I love the Yankees but I love Verlander more.” 

BULLSHIT.  You hate the Yankees, Steve. 

And then Suzyn Waldman makes the asute point, that “Verlander has to pitch all three games according to Steve Buckley.”  Nice.  Call him an asshole right there on the carpet, but in a subtle way, so that his pea brain doesn’t realize you’ve just shown everybody listening that his logic is not only flawed, but on the same level as a 10-year-old.  You, know, the ones that think they’re cool heckling a guy wearing Yankee cap in Fenway. 

I get it.  I know you’re a homer.  I know you’re rooting for the Yankees to lose each and every solitary game for some unknown reason.  What happened?  Were the nuns mean to you in school?  Somebody run over your dog?  Did you get touched as a kid?  So WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?  GROW THE FUCK UP AND ACT LIKE A FUCKING ADULT, DOUCHEBAG!!!

You see kids, they typical Sox fan is so insecure, that he trysto play dirty, and thinks he’s all cool in doing so.  And what’s worse, they’re all over the place now like cockroaches ever since they won a World Series or two.  But we all know they’re  nothing but a bunch of babies.  Today’s they’re all backpedaling.  They’ll try to say that the Yanks have done nothing the past couple of years, going out in the first round of the playoffs.  But when they it happens to them, oh, no, they were robbed.  It was this excuse or that excuse.  Blah, blah, blah.

As we all know, Steve Buckley’s predictions were wrong on so many levels.  First, the Twins beat the Tigers for the division.  Second, the Yankees took care of the Twins in the LDS.  Besides, the Yanks could have beaten the Tigers if they had played them.  Third, the Sox got their asses handed to them, and couldn’t keep up their end of the bargain.  So Friday night, poor Suzyn Waldman will have to talk to somebody from the Angels media corps.  Oh well…

This is perhaps one of my favorite t-shirts I own:

I’d like to coin a term…

BOWM – Bitter Old White Man

I’m a Bitter Old White Man.  Well, I’m not really old, but I’m bitter, white, and last time I checked, I’m still a man.  I’m in my mid-30s, and may actually be part of the last generation that had it “tough”.  I think I missed the boat by about 10 years.  Today’s “kids” don’t know how great they have it.  Let’s compare how things were back in the not quite dark ages when I was in college, and what the happy-go-lucky student has today. 

I'm the younger one...

Back when I was in college, the only people that had cell phones were rich foreigners.  Laptops were prohibitively expensive.  And if you had one, you were just trying to show off.  The internet was in its infancy, and all we had was dial-up e-mail and news groups.  I was cool in my dorm, or so I thought, because I had a cordless phone, which meant you could walk down the hall and have a conversation.  Today, you not only have high speed internet, but it’s literally everywhere, even on your cell phone.

10 years ago, you had your home phone, and you got a long distance plan.  10 cents a minute was considered good.  Now, it’s all included in your cell phone plan.  With e-mail, how many different addresses have I had between different internet providers and jobs?  Now, with social networking, the e-mail address isn’t the defining category, but the person is the defining category.

Back then, the chicks were into grunge, and wore flannel.  Loose, oversized flannel.  And overalls.  And combat boots.  Today, it’s all tight-fitting, low cut shirts, short shorts, high heels.  And they’re easy to find, since they have the internet on their cell phones.

I currently drive a station car.  Not a station wagon, a station car.  A junker you drive to and from the train station, and nowhere else.  Why pay hundreds of dollars in car payments when it’s going to sit in a parking lot minutes from home every day?  The radio died, so I replaced it…with one with a cassette deck.  Most of my music (as bad as it is), is on tape.  But since the drive is so short, I don’t even bother to pop the detachable faceplate in.  What’s the point?  I adopted CD’s late.  I LOVED my walkman.  I went through many, because I wore the motors out.  I even wore some tapes out.  Today, I have two large BOXES of cassettes, and two more of CD’s.  Now, you can walk around with an ipod with every song you’ve even owned on it.  Do today’s kids even know what an album is, in the day of 99 cent downloads?

I don’t even want to go off about black-and-white televisions, TV’s without remote controls, and rotary dial telephones.

Blog Psychic Episode Two

How long do we have to wait until Kanye West admits his interruption of Taylor Swift’s VMA acceptance was 100% and completely staged? 

And why do people make a big deal over this, as if we didn’t know this whole thing was staged in the first place? 

And how am I so sure it was staged?  Simple.  If I bum-rushed the stage, security would have tossed me out onto 6th Avenue quicker than the D train running underneath it.  You’re telling me that because Kanye was a celebrity security would just let him slide?  What if it was some creep like Woody Allen?  They’d put him on the next bus to Bellevue. 

Game, set, match.

Rack me!

Three Strikes, and Yer Out!

Today is a day that all New Yorkers (including displaced ones like myself) take to heart.  One of the most despecible things to happen not only in this country, but in the history of this planet.  No need to give a replay to history here.  But here’s what pisses me off. 

First of all, it’s been eight years, and the Trade Center site is still a hole in the ground.  The red tape, bickering among interest groups/designers/planners, etc., and we still have nothing to replace the Twin Towers yet.  NYC built two baseball stadiums since 2001.  The Empire State building took 406 days to build.  Clearly the terrorists have won.

But nothing worse is people that profit from 9/11 merchandise.  I’m not talking about all the American flags that were made in Taiwan.  Or the hack CD’s of bad parody songs that not even a two-bit morning zoo show would play.  What pisses me off is what I saw on TV earlier this evening.  The Yanks/O’s were in a rain delay, so we shifted over to the Phils/Mets, and since they’re playing down here, and the rain has already passed, they were actually playing.  Mets batted in the top of the first, and then the Phils came to bat.  But I got confused for a minute because the Mets were wearing red caps.  You know, the ones MLB forced ALL teams to wear (with their own logos in stars and stripes) which were red, even if your team doesn’t wear red anywhere on their uniform.  That means the Yankees, a team that hasn’t changed their uniform since the early part of last century, has to wear a dopey red cap.  It looks horrendous.  And it’s sole purpose is that dopey fans will buy one with their team’s logo.  It is purely for profit.  And that, among other reasons for another rant, is why I’m calling for Bud Selig’s head on a platter.

As quick and current as a news magazine…

Summer came and went.  Time flies when you’re having fun.  Or doing nothing.  I’ve had a lot of ideas to write about, and they’re all bouncing around in my head.  Time to put fingers to keyboard.  In the mean time, let me leave you with this little tidbit.

What ever happened to seeded watermelons?  I’ve found them for sale exactly once this year.  They’ve all been replaced by those new fancy “seedless” ones.  I’ll use quotes here, because they’re not like navel oranges or limes, which truly have no seeds, but are rather filled with those white seeds.  Like cucumbers, you can swallow them.   But my big gripe with the seedless watermelons is that they’re completely devoid of any flavor.  They don’t have that real sweet flavor of a really ripe good old-fashioned watermelon.  Yes, I can chunk them up, and throw them into a fruit salad, or give it to the baby without fear of choking or cracked teeth, but what’s being sacrificed in convenience is flavor. 

Now where can I get me one of these???

From wikipedia