Never Forget 1-31-07

Boston Sucks!

Happy Hour at the John Street

Due to circumstances under my control, I neglected to start adding my tales of silliness until now.

When I started working in lower Manhattan, I was fresh out of college. I had a tolerance for beer & liquor that has yet to be revisited. I was commuting on a daily basis from New Jersey and loving the lack of sleep. The building I worked in was about a couple of blocks from John Street. One of the guys I worked with, we'll call him "Michelob", had been a courier in the financial district and had an intimate knowledge of the New York bars. He told me and some of our other coworkers of a Happy Hour special at the John St. Tavern: $10 all you can drink pints from 5-8 p.m. This was right up my alley. The benefit of ending the work day at 4:30 for us was being able to take full advantage of such a special. We went down to the Tavern, a bar downstairs from an OTB location, and started ordering pints of Saranac. As luck would have it, there was a Saranac sales rep at the Tavern that evening and he had a bag full of T-shirts. He kindly offered to give me a shirt if I would continue to order Saranac throughout the evening. I was more than happy to comply. I had at least 6 or 7 pints during the happy hour and managed to finally collect my shirt only after harassing the sales rep to hold up his end of the bargain. In the meantime, Michelob's friends from Bay Ridge met up with us and we were having a grand old time. I had originally planned on finishing the happy hour and hopping on PATH train to Newark and then riding back to Jersey on the train. Michelob's friends convinced me to stick around and head over to Brooklyn to round out the night. We picked up a cab just outside of the World Trade Center and headed toward Bay Ridge. At one point near the end of the ride, one of Michelob's friends looked at me and said, "yo, we're going to beat this cab, as soon as the car stops, follow Wayne." Keeping in mind that I'm still wearing my work clothes, I ran like hell behind Wayne, a guy who could probably be a blocking back on most football teams, ducking down alleys and between rowhouses. We got to the next destination and got another drink before moving on. At some point in the evening all of the saranac hit me and I lost the ability to speak coherent english. When we finally got to the Salty Dog in Bay Ridge, I looked at Michelob and said, "If I could speak english, I'd try to hit on one of these girls." At the end of the night, Michelob brought me over to his buddy's house so I could pass out.

The next morning, I woke up to a cordless phone being pushed in my face, "Yo, are you up? You should get rolling soon to get here on time." Karlo and I got moving while he convinced me to drink a V8 Splash. Not a good idea. We got on the R train from Brooklyn into Manhattan and settled in for the 25 minute ride. Karlo got out about 10 minutes into the ride and told me where to get off. As the ride continued, I started to feel the swaying of the Subway car, and the previous night was catching up to me quickly. I started to gag, and the guy on the other end of our row of seats knew what was coming, and he moved to the other end of car. At this point, the V8 Splash came back to me as I tried to hold it in. Unfortunately, a little bit of puke got on my shirt. Not good. The rest of the puke ended up on the subway car floor and I got away from it quickly. Luckily, I only had 2 more stops. Even more luckily, I had my Saranac T-Shirt! I walked in to work and explained the situation. My boss gave me the okay to wear the T-shirt, he figured my foolish attire would be entertaining for everyone. Everybody wins. With the exception of the fact that I left my housekeys and money clip at Karlo's house, everything turned out pretty well.

NY Stories

Since I don't pay much attention to this stupid thing I came to a decision today. Once a week I'm going to start posting stories to shock and amaze you. I don't think either of those things will occur, actually. I will, however, post stories of humor and debauchery from my time in New York City. I may even add my story from 9/11. It's not that special, it's just that I can remember every step I took that day. But let's focus on the hilarity. A few months ago, I began to compile stories from my 5 years of silliness and found that there are at least 52 stories. The first of these stories will appear in the next week or so. Stay tuned or else...

Still lazy after all these years

Wow, my last post was in July of 2006. I don't know why I started this, probably had to do with boredom and unemployment. Lately nothing gets me worked up enough to write. Politics is boring, same shit different congress. I have other things on my mind. I worry about this little girl. I decided to branch out beyond drinking weak flavorless beer, now I drink a whole bunch of this. I'm very happy to see this happen. I'm also very delighted not to be part of this. I can neither confirm nor deny being employed by a cabinet maker. But let's just say that I am. Don't worry people, there are bigger things on the horizon, and I'll laugh all the way home. But who really cares? Not me. Well I can't promise any of the usual anger, but you never know.

LaTourette fails

As a citizen of the 14th district of Ohio, the Northeast section that includes: Lake, Geauga, Ashtabula and parts of Cuyahoga, Trumbull and Portage counties, we are served by Steven C. LaTourette. In the last half year or so, the Club for Growth, as well as The Truth Laid Bear, has zeroed in on Congress members who are more interested in Pork barrell spending than using our tax money wisely. Recently they have focused on the 19 anti-pork amendments proposed by Jeff Flake, a congressman from Arizona's sixth district. The Club for Growth has produced a delightful chart that outlines the way congressmen from every district in America voted. Mr. LaTourette voted "no" on every amendment. Loosely translated, this means that LaTourette is more concerned with spending our hard earned tax dollars than he is with spending it wisely, or not spending it at all. One would think that with this much transparency, Mr. LaTourette would have made a better effort. He had 19 chances, and not one of them was worth voting for?
I have previously written posts on LaTourette's spending problem here and tried to contact him, but merely received a form letter in return. I was far more encouraged by the response from Senator DeWine, which actually seemed to be written rather than copied and pasted from campaign literature and then auto-stamped. At any rate, it's difficult to imagine a scenario that would cause me to vote for LaTourette when his next election cycle comes around.

J-E-W-S

One of the things I hate most about politics is the endless finger pointing used to avoid accountability. The gentleman at Powerline have hit the nail on the head with this post. They basically ask the question that a lot of sensible people from any political persuasion should be asking, Why is it okay to point out anti-semitism or racism when it benefits you? They recall a number of "incidents" from recent memory, such as Jesse Jackson calling New York "Hymietown" or Cynthia McKinney's father blaming the Jews for her loss in 2002. I'm sure Powerline is aware that there is a minute opening left for some variety of counterattack from somebody. The examples they use largely involve black politicians who have denigrated Jewish people for political gain. Surely some asshole with a desire to attack Powerline will call them racist and connect them with some grand Zionist neo-con conspiracy. The point is that it shouldn't be okay for a political organization to call somebody an anti-semite without first taking to task its own members, who are also anti-semites.

Duke Redux

This is a compelling post about the inner struggle at Duke between common sense and certain members of its faculty. It seems to me that quite a few of the faculty members have come to their own conclusions about the case based on the notion that the accused are athletes and serve no purpose among the academic side of the school. It's a shame that this sort of bias will blind anyone, much less a professor. From what I gather, quite a few of these so called academics aren't interested in evidence, just what they "know." At any school you'll find professors who find a certain joy in tormenting athletes in any number of ways. What seperates average colleges from outstanding ones is the ratio of professors who treat each student equally to those who have bias or an agenda of some sort. In this case it looks like Duke needs some help.