Why Are The Police Outside??

The Brady Bill

2011-03-08T15:22:00.004-05:00

The internet often giveth. But sometimes, just to be fair, it also taketh away.

This was making the rounds this afternoon.

In case you did not click through, it takes you to a video of Tom Brady, who is "dancing" at the Carnaval in Rio while sporting a rather unfortunate ponytail.

I stared at this in the same way someone would when he comes upon a once proud oak that was just struck by lightning. And then I checked out for a few minutes while the demons inside my head had themselves a debate.

Jack Daniel: It's a ponytail. On a man.
Tom Collins: I see that.
JD: And it's not just any man. It's the most important man in Boston.
TC: That is true.
JD: A ponytail.
TC: It's not that bad.
JD: Are you kidding? It's terrible. Ponytails are for women and old hippies in Portland.
TC: Some men can pull off a ponytail.
JD: Maybe Willie Nelson. But let's be honest here. Brady kind of looks like Mia Hamm with muscles.
TC: Look. He's Tom Brady. He has won three Super Bowls, two MVPs, and gets to [censored] this every night. If the man wants to go with a rat tail, he's earned it.
JD: (Grumble) I guess.
TC: And give him a break. He's happy. He's dancing. He's trying to soak in a little of his wife's culture. We should be praising him, not making fun of his very unfortunate hair do.
JD: But it's a ponytail! Every instinct in my body is telling me to make fun of it.
TC: Tom Brady could beat the living crap out of you without breaking a sweat.
JD: But he looks like a soccer mom on a 6 am run to the grocery store who is hoping that she doesn't run into someone she knows.
TC: I'm warning you.
JD: He looks like Sally Draper!
TC: Ok, fine. I'm forced to draw the trump card.
JD: Yes?
TC: Again. This.
JD: Touche, sir. Very well played.

TC: And at least it's not pigtails.

JD: Indeed.

At the Mountains of Madness

2011-03-07T16:16:00.004-05:00

In the interest of scientific observation, I spent the weekend at a ski resort somewhere in rural New Hampshire. All involved parties survived.

I took a great deal of cajoling and coercing to get me to go on this trip. Longtime readers of this blog will remember my unrelenting aversion to snow, particularly when found in concentrated amounts in rural areas. When that is coupled with activities that involve hurling yourself headlong into snowbanks and -- if you're unlucky -- trees, we get a very unappealing situation indeed.

However, those concerns were outweighed by two positive factors. One, the opportunity to hang out and drink with friends in a random house in the middle of nowhere. And two, what else was I going to do if all my friends were gone.

So I packed up my snow boots and unearthed my ski jacket and willingly set on the road, escaping the cold spell of Boston for the even colder spell of points north.

It was fun, which I expected, and educational, which I did not. The latter stems from the aforementioned scientific observations of the totally unnatural environment that is a ski lodge. In my eight years in America, I have never found myself feeling out of place, except in ski lodges. For this reason, I find these places fascinating, much in the same way an astronaut would regard a populated Mars.

For instance, you walk into the cafeteria at base camp and everyone is soaked, sore, and wearing suspenders underneath what seems to be more complex than an astronaut suit. Which makes you hope they don't have to go to the bathroom sometime in the next eight hours. And yet they're all happy, despite having to pay thirteen dollars for some chicken tenders and a baked potato the size of an apple. Maybe being thisclose to death turns on the crazy part of their brains.

And then everyone leaves their skis and snowboards outside, on a rack. Are they not afraid someone will steal them? Man, white people really trust each other.

Which they should, because this is isolation in the extreme. I had to drive 20 miles in order to find the nearest store that would sell whiskey. My phone rarely worked. My internet never did. There was no TV.

You know how they don't let anyone on the Jersey Shore use cell phones, watch TV and go on the internet? So all they do is drink and sleep, because there is nothing else to do?

Now I understand. I completely get why they're all insane. It's like they're all trapped in a ski lodge and there's no way out, so they develop the earthbound version of space dementia. The same started to happen to me after two days on a ski trip, so why wouldn't it happen to them after four months?

...

No, I'm not on edhardy.com. I ... uh .. accidentally clicked on a pop-up. ... Ooh, a discount on industrial-strength hair spray.

The Dying Buzz

2011-03-04T16:05:00.004-05:00

I have called this press conference to announce that, as of three o'clock eastern standard time today, I will no longer be using Google Buzz.

(Stares at a room full of blank looks)

Oh, right. You forgot what that is.

Google Buzz was this thing that Google started in an effort to compete with Twitter and Facebook. Their engineers had a dream that, instead of posting status updates, photo albums, and links on those platforms, you would do so on Google Buzz.

Their hook was that, because it integrated your Google Contacts -- otherwise known as the people with whom you communicate the most -- and made them part of your network, you would use Buzz instead. It would be like Facebook, except you'd communicate with friends instead of "friends." They kind of really screwed it up at first, but they got a handle on it eventually and you could actually whittle the list down to the few people who you care to hear from. And who, you would hope, would want to hear from you.

In an ideal world, this would be great. It would basically be like Facebook, except without Farmville and the people you haven't seen since the third grade. Plus, Buzz was on the front page of Gmail, and 90 percent of the people I know are on Gmail 90 percent of the time. So what better way to share articles, let people know what you were up to and keep up with everyone?

Alas, this communist utopia was not to be. People were confused by Buzz in the beginning, then wary, and then it never really took off. Very, very few people use it at all anymore. It's much like a party where the guests quickly became underwhelmed and everyone left. Sure, there are still a couple of people still awkwardly hanging out by the bar, waiting for the fireworks that will never come.

Unfortunately, it is my opinion that they should just close up shop because nobody else is going to show up. Buzz is still there, languishing on your Gmail page, sadly sounding off once or twice a day like an automated whistle at a shuttered factory. Without the community, there's nothing there that you can't get on Facebook, Google Reader, or even Twitter.

And when I found out about Google Profiles (Google "[Your Name] + Google Profile" and prepare to freak out), which link to your Buzz, unless you turn them off. And that was it. The unrealizable potential of Buzz was not compelling enough to outweigh privacy concerns. So that was that.

So if you look for my stuff on Google Buzz, you will no longer find it. Although, since I'm now no longer on Buzz, you probably won't see this message.

Hmm.

Anyone with Buzz want to share this?

An Open Letter to Many Boston-Area Bars

2011-03-03T19:53:00.003-05:00

Dear Bartender,

If you are receiving this letter, it means that two facts co-exist.

Fact Number One: I enjoy frequenting your bar. I find it an agreeable place to pass the time. I am proud to call myself a patron of your bar and do hereby pledge to return to you periodically.

Fact Number Two: A distressing flaw haunts your establishment.

Contrary to what you may think, Fact Number One and Fact Number Two can simultaneously be true. Fact Number Two is not fatal to Fact Number One, but the former adheres to the latter like a barnacle, weighing it down the way that an awful girlfriend sort of makes you want to stop calling what is otherwise a very affable friend.

In short, my enjoyment of all things mentioned in Fact Number One is diminished by the existence of Fact Number Two.

Luckily for us, this is something that can be fixed.

Fact Number Two refers to your bar's inexplicable failure to purchase rocks glasses, also known as low-ball glasses, and doing business as old fashioned glasses.

This is a rather vexing oversight, as it forces Scotch drinkers like myself to consume our beverage of choice out of either shot glasses (bad) or high ball glasses (worse).

As Scotch is a sipping drink, you can see why these instruments are inappropriate for the present task. High ball glasses are inadequate for sipping and also cumbersome. Think of it as wearing a baggy wool sweater on a hot summer day.

And, although less reprehensible, the remaining disjunct is also less than ideal. Yes, it is easier to sip from a shot glass. But then you are left sipping out of a shot glass, which is as undignified and offputting as it sounds. The sight of a 200 pound man sipping daintily out of a shot glass is, I confess, rather pathetic, and avoiding it is in the best interest of all involved parties.

If you look at the bar behind you, you will notice dozens of bottles of Scotch. Forgive me if I sound condescending, but you must know how important an adequate vessel is. Would you pour shots of tequila into a Martini glass? Serve Cosmos in a shot glass? Put Irish Car Bombs in a cereal bowl?

Of course you would not. If you are going to be selling certain drinks, then it is only logical that you would pair them with the appropriate glassware.

And while the potential for breakage certainly exists, that is true of everything in your possession, and such is the cost of doing business.

So please, stock up on rocks glasses. Nobody loses here. Your patrons will thank you. I will thank you. And, most importantly, God Himself will thank you.

Cordially,
A Concerned Customer

Oh my God, It Even has a Watermark

2011-03-02T22:36:00.003-05:00

Contrary to popular belief, the many identities that I have assumed in my travels are not necessitated by my immigration status. Rather, they are the product of the bored mind of an English major who enjoys the craft of fiction and the audience of sophisticated yet gullible women.

And so I find myself at bars, creating different personas for myself. I have been an astronaut, the owner of several Argentinian wineries, a producer looking to cast local unknowns in the TV version of The Town, the Spanish Ambassador's son, the pilot for the Boston Red Sox charter plane, deputy mayor, and an escapist a la Houdini. This last one is quickly becoming my favorite because the path from there to handcuffs is a short and easy one.

Oh, don't look at me that way. Yes, they are lies. Yes, I'm misleading impressionable women. Yes, maybe I'm not a very good person.

But come on. It's fun.

No, but really. Look. When you go to crowded bars, a lot of people are looking to just have fun that night. These are not places to find soulmates. Most people understand this transaction.

So I ask you, is it that bad to spice things up a bit?

What you call "lies" I like to call "short stories." Let's use an example. I'm going to tell you two stories and you tell me which one you'd rather listen to.

Story 1: I am a lawyer. Right now I'm not working, so I spend most days at home. But when I do work, I'll get to look for inconsistencies in 400-page contracts. What? Do we ever go to trial? Oh, you make me laugh.

or

Story 2: Oh, I'm not actually from here. I'm from down in Georgia. Yeah, my family owns a ranch there and I help run it. We breed racehorses there. Yes, to compete in races and everything. We're actually really excited. We just had a new foal and he's magnificent. He was born and he was already 17 hands tall. Stride is seven and a half feet. He's a beast. With the right feeding and training, we really might have a shot at a future Derby contender. And you know the best part? Our ranch's conceit is that we name our horses after literary characters. Like "Moby Dick," or "Othello," or "Boo Radley." But we've been saving one name for our best horse, for the one we think really has a shot at being a champion. And we gave it to this one. We're that sure he's going to be the best. Oh, what name? It's awesome. The best. Are you ready for this? (Pause) "The Great Gatsby."

BOOM.

Isn't Story 2 just a million times better? When you're out at a bar, wouldn't you much rather listen to that than to the sad, boring truth?

So I'm providing a public service here. And, despite what you might think, most women tend to believe me. My theory is that yes, everyone tells one or two lies when they're courting. But those are easy to catch.

The difference here is that these personas are a complete fiction. They are entire backstories -- lives in brief. And since only psychos would create an alternate identity, nobody is on their guard. A little self-assuredness and enough details, and there's no reason for them not to believe you.

And yet you ~~occasionally~~ frequently get the girl who doesn't believe that the douchebag in a suit standing in front of her is actually an astronaut angling to be on the first mission to Mars. So what do we do about them? How do we convince them?

You know how, if it's on paper, it must be true?

Ta-da!

Thank you, AlterEgo. Thank you very, very much.

Habemus Sheen

2011-03-01T18:07:00.003-05:00

The world waits with bated breath for Charlie Sheen's first tweet, much in the way, as a commentator pointed out, that we await that first hint of white smoke that announces the consecration of a new Pope.

I mean, Holy Smokes. We haven't seen this particular brand of willing self-immolation in years. This isn't a Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan meltdown, to which we were privy only because hordes of paparazzi make their living from following them.

No, this is a whole new flavor, mostly because Charlie Sheen, in an effort to show he's not completely insane, has paraded from morning show to talk show to interview show peddling his complete insanity.

Imagine that your friend is drunk. And he wants to drive. He insists he is fit to drive, even though you just saw him fall into the pool, get out, and walk straight into a closed sliding door. And nobody stops him. So of course he hits the back wall when he tries to back up, then drives across the lawn, cuts across the street, and crashes into a lamp post at 10 mph. And he's still trying to put the car into reverse when the cops show up.

That's Charlie Sheen right now. His publicist has quit, no doubt exhausted from the futile proposition of trying to beat some sense into someone whose quotes are easily confused with Ron Burgundy's.

And you can't blame the publicist. When your client starts sounding off about "Tiger Blood," "fire-breathing fists," and "Vatican assassin warlocks," you might as well pack up your balls and leave. What else can you do? If you were a contractor and your client kept burning down the house every two hours, you'd quit too.

If anything good comes of this, it would be that we might near the end of the hammy, unoriginal, lowest-common-denominator, deeply unfunny Two and a Half Men. Normally, I have no problem with awful shows -- I simply don't watch them. Live and let live.

But the fact that this piece of garbage is consistently touted as the most popular sitcom in the land is depressing in about a million different ways. And if we can wipe that awful blight from the American picture, we would all be much better off.

So maybe, just maybe, Charlie Sheen knows this. And he's our man on the inside, working to destroy the beast from within. I wonder how this will go.

Crap.

Get Thee to a Hospital

2011-02-28T23:25:00.004-05:00

So today I was trying to cross the street. And when I cross the street, I do it with the New York flavor. This means I don't stop at the curb, but instead wander three or four paces into the street itself, inching ahead enough so that I'm just short of being clipped in the sprouts by the rear-view mirror of a passing car.

I do this because I am impatient and want to be in the best position to spring forward the instant there is a break in traffic. Green lights, red lights, walk signals -- those are all suggestions, much like those "skillet-ready" frozen meals that claim to serve 2 people. Yeah, right.

So there I am, and I see a break, but I kind of have to hoof it, because I can see all these trucks just raring to go. In fact, I have to jog, which is terribly undignified, but to get hit by a truck would be even more undignified. That and I was wearing a nice suit, and if I get hit by a car, the paramedics are taking their scissors to my suit, and the thought of them cutting up into little shreds of cotton was too much to bear.

So I'm jogging and of course I'm going to make it, and just as I hop onto the opposite curb, I hear the screeching of tires and the honking of horns. And it bugs me. It really, truly does. I am an expert street crosser -- I can say that in 99 percent of occasions, I've always timed my crossing into traffic exactly right. So for some asshole driver to indulge his inner worry wart and honk at me because I got away with just inches to spare is infuriating.

So I turn around, taking my hand out of my coat pocket to flip this driver the bird -- in fact, I'm even considering giving him the two-hand salute on this one -- when I freeze, just stop dead in my tracks.

Because the man was not honking at me. No, he was honking at a gaggle of nuns, about six in total, all frail, all elderly, who had been at the other end of the crossing behind me and impetuously decided to follow me into traffic.

Normally, when a woman follows me across the street, I chalk it up to my rugged handsomeness and overwhelming charisma. But these were nuns, women of the cloth. Even I have my limits.

No, it seems they thought they could cross the street at a pace equal to mine, which seems to me a grievous miscalculation. We only had but a few seconds, and it took every ounce of grace and speed in my 200-pound bulk to make that crossing without incident. What hope do nuns have?

Perhaps I could have been a gentleman and helped them cross, or even merely herded them along. But I was crossing against a green light, and in order to have come to the nuns' aid, I would have had to wait for the walk signal. And I'm afraid I must confess that sacrificing those 30 extra seconds was just something I was not prepared to do.

This is not the first time this has happened. Anyone who has ever been at a crosswalk knows that the herding instinct is strong, and that many people won't cross until one daring, enterprising soul does so first. The "sheep" don't even look at the traffic -- they look at the person and go, if he can make it, I can make it.

Since I am usually that reckless person, I have found myself leading dozens of people into oncoming traffic. There has never been an incident, thank God. But this one with the nuns was too close to call. I mean, can you imagine the hell reserved for the asshole who led nuns to a horrible death by city bus? It must be even more boring and awkward than last night's Oscars.

So I hereby promise to try to wait for the green light. I imagine I will fail at this, so I will make the additional promise that, when I do cross, I will turn around and loudly but politely warn the assembled crowd behind me that what I am about to do should only be done by professionals. And I should probably collect waivers from those who do attempt the crossing, but I feel like my recklessness as a person should extend to recklessness as a lawyer.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go cross the train tracks.

Off With Their Poofs

2011-02-24T17:08:00.000-05:00

The internet really is like a rabbit hole sometimes, mostly because you can dive in and occasionally find something called Snooki in Wonderland. It is exactly what it sounds like.

It appears that someone has taken our favorite fictional characters and transported them to a place that is eve less bizarre than Seaside Heights.

As intriguing as Season 4 in Italy will be, I would personally prefer to see the gang in Wonderland, if only to see what Tweedledee and Tweedledee do when Snooki tries to smush them. Although we would have to find a way to mollify the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, who would certainly be justified in believing that Sitch and Pauly D would try to steal their insanity thunder.

And why stop in Wonderland? Imagine the crew in Springfield. Wouldn't you love to see a conversation between Lisa and Ronnie? Or if they all got accepted into Hogwarts, where they can introduce Grenade Dodging to the Defense Against the Dark Arts syllabus? Or if they got stranded on the Island from Lost? Five words: Snooks vs. The Smoke Monster.

Alas, we must content ourselves with the fact that the crew can only visit places that actually exist.

No word yet on whether Alice has offered Ronnie advice on what to do if you cry so much that you almost drown in your tears.

Random Video of the Day LXXXIV

2011-02-23T10:02:00.002-05:00

I've often said that drunk people are like babies. Which is why I am 10,000 years away from being ready to have children. I mean, can you imagine having to take care of a drunk who will not sober up for 18 years?

I'll have a lot more on this subject at a later date. But for now, please enjoy visual evidence that there really is no difference between babies and drunks.

Say, Can I Get You Drunk

2011-02-22T13:26:00.003-05:00

I'm never one to back off from a good challenge. Statements like "You can't jump that far," and "You cannot possibly finish that" awaken my inner Stinson and induce me to yell out, "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED."

Why, even last week, after I mentioned how [great] Gwyneth looked in her Grammys catsuit, someone told me she was out of my league. So now I must have her. And it'd be going great if she'd only return my calls.

But even with my breathtaking recklessness, I recognize that there are impossible feats in this world. Challenges beyond our powers of achievement. Tests that cannot be bested.

And chief among them is trying to pick up a girl at a bar when you can't drink.

Others have given their two cents on the matter and have come to a similar conclusion. The reasons for this are manifold: it's tougher to break the ice, the gap between drunk people and sober people is at least as wide as the Grand Canyon, etc.

And, honestly, it's this last one that provides the Sisyphean task. For let's say you're not drinking but you're out at a bar and are chatting up this girl and all of a sudden you're at that point where you should offer to buy her a drink. So you do that and you order one drink for her but not one for yourself.

She'll ask you why you're not drinking. And what can you say? You can tell her you're sick and on medicine, but that'll turn her off. You can tell her you're not drinking tonight, but that's lame and will turn her off. Almost any excuse you give her will inevitably turn her off.

(By the way, never tell a girl you're trying to lose weight because this will invariably remind her that she is trying to lose weight, even when she clearly does not need to. Because of this, she will temper her drinking. This, of course, will not only re-raise her standards to their usual, unattainable levels, but it will also clear her mind and lead to prudent decisions and responsible choices. Nobody wants this.)

But I digress. Maybe, just maybe, you're clever enough to come up with some bogus but acceptable reason on the spot. Like, say, "I'd love to have a scotch, but I'm on painkillers because I threw out my back putting up house frames for Habitat for Humanity."

Oh high five? You think that was perfect? You probably think you just turned all of this around, don't you? Now she must want to take care of you, you wonderful, charitable, selfless bastard you.

But but but. There's still that elephant in the room. Because she's drinking and you're not.

So the whole dynamic changes. Maybe one drink is fine, but if you start buying her more, she might think you're trying to get her drunk. Or maybe she does get drunk and then you don't want to take advantage of a drunk girl. Or she becomes self-conscious because she's the only one here drinking and now it's all awkward up in here.

The point is, no matter how cool you try to play it, all these forces conspire against you. Drunks v. sober people is as testy a relationship as the parents v. non-parents, business travelers v. families, and everyone v. teenagers conflicts. It's not insurmountable, but good luck.

And yes, you never turn away from a challenge. But sometimes there's just too much lava coming down the aggro-crag.

Thou Shalt Not Pass

2011-02-21T13:25:00.002-05:00

I will fully admit that, on occasion, I have a rage problem (In my defense, rage is really the best of the seven deadly sins, with apologies to lust and gluttony). Many people make my vision run red, including, but not limited to: hipsters, hippies, nerds, children, teenagers, old people, and basically everyone who is not a man or woman in his or her mid-to-late-twenties who lives in the Northeast.

But you know who really takes the aggravation cake?

Slow-walkers.

Collectively known as "the worst people in the world," slow-walkers are those bastards who seem to have forgotten that the cardinal rule of city living is "Don't be in the way."

So they dilly. They dally. They linger. They weave. They shuffle. They waddle. They hesitate. They stop abruptly. They look around dreamily, as if seeing foot traffic for the first time. Those without the ability to walk and talk at the same time try to walk and text at the same time.

And that's just the individuals.

See, slow-walkers like to travel in packs. They form these impassable clumps of obliviousness that take up the entire width of a sidewalk, walking three or four abreast so that no man shall get by them. They are the unaware bouncers of the road, an awful symphony of slowness.

I am glad to see that I am not alone amongst the rage-aholics in wanting to wring Tim and Trudy Tourist by the neck. Researchers have identified something called "Sidewalk Rage," which is exactly what it sounds like.

Ragers tend to have a strong sense of how other people should behave. Their code: Slower people keep to the right. Step aside to take a picture. And the left side of an escalator should be, of course, kept free for anyone wanting to walk up.

But those make sense, right? If you're in a car and just have to take a picture, you'd pull over, right? While I know that pedestrians are not commanding a 2,000 pound killing machine, it's the same principle, right?

Apparently not.

"A lot of us have 'shoulds' in our head," says Dr. Deffenbacher. Ragers tend to think people should do things their way, and get angry because the slow walkers are breaking the rules of civility. It's unclear exactly why some people harbor such beliefs, Dr. Deffenbacher says. Such ways of thinking are generally learned from family, friends or the media, he adds.

Oh, so we harbor those beliefs because we learned them from family, friends, and the media. And you know what we've also learned from those things? EVERYTHING ELSE.

Ragers' thoughts tend to be overly negative, over-generalized and blown out of proportion, leaving them fuming about how they can't stand the situation, how late they are going to be, and how this always comes up, Dr. Deffenbacher says.

Fine. That's fair. I don't need to start throwing shoulders in order to get past Wally the Waddler. In fact, I could probably use a deep breath. But what's the alternative?

In contrast, someone blissfully free of sidewalk rage may still be frustrated, but thinks more accepting thoughts such as, "this is the way life is sometimes" or, "I wish that slow person wasn't in front of me," he says.

"I wish that slow person wasn't in front of me?" Are you kidding? Do people actually react this way? They go, aw shucks, I wish this aggravating thing wasn't happening? What an Eeyore way to go through life. What is this, Canada?

(Grumbles)

Look. I fully understand that it's unwise to develop rage blackouts because of mundane things like tourists, packs of teenagers, or young families who seem to be schlepping every single one of the baby's possession as if they're looking to make a base camp around the stroller's 3,400 square foot gravitational field.

So next time I'm out there, trying to get from A to B, I'm going to suppress the part of my brain screaming at me to slap the slow-walker upside the head. I'm not going to let their plodding, torpid pace bother me. I'm going to smile and I'm going to give them a friendly clap on the shoulder and I'm going to ask, "Say, pard, can I help you today?"

And I'll swallow my rage and direct it inwards, where it belongs.

Of Nukes and Dates

2011-02-18T15:26:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, I met a girl for drinks. And twenty minutes into the conversation, out of nowhere, she asks me the following question:

"What's your favorite type of cat?"

I was reminded of that awful, mind-boggling moment when I came across this article that has been roaming around the internet for a few days. It's about the best questions to ask on a first date, but the premise is misleading. Instead of telling you which questions would open up your date and make her comfortable, it tells you which questions to ask if you want to find out if your date is up for getting it in that very same night without having to resort to the always awkward and usually futile strategy of flat out asking her.

So yes, if you look at it that way, those are the best questions to ask.

According to this thing, there is a strong correlation between people who like the taste of beer and people who are willing to dance the horizontal mambo on the first date. So what do you do? You ask her if she likes beer. If she says yes, SCORE! If she says no, well, you better change that drink order.

As the article says, "sadly, this is the only meaningful correlation for women." So no other questions we can ask them will imply that she might entertain the thought.

But what about men? Apparently, there are questions you can ask men that have an even stronger correlation with "willing to bone tonight" than "do you like the taste of beer?" And these are:

In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?

Assuming you were in the position to do so, would you launch nuclear weapons under any circumstances?

Could you imagine yourself killing someone?

There you have it, ladies! Nuclear war is the ultimate aphrodisiac, especially when we get to take the football and nuke the world three times over! Michelle Obama, you are one lucky lady.

But that's where this survey lost me. Because it implies that there are men out there who would say no to having sex on a first date. And that's the biggest load of horse manure since the Augean Stables.

OF COURSE we want to have sex on the first date. Why on earth wouldn't we? Yes, dates are good for getting to know someone and having a conversation and seeing if there might be something there and maybe starting that meaningful walk down Relationship Lane.

But let's tell truths here. When you take someone out, a big factor is that maybe, just maybe, she lets you see her naked. It's not the only factor -- we're way past the frat boy stage now. But it is what it is. Which, I guess, is what frat boys says. You know what I mean.

I'll admit there are times when a guy takes a girl out and he doesn't want to sleep with her. Maybe he's not attracted or maybe when he went back to her apartment she lived with five cats. These are perfectly legitimate reasons to pack up your balls and go home.

But if a guy tells you, "You know, not tonight. Maybe we should wait until the third date," there's something going on. Either he's lying or he's setting you up for something -- God knows what. My strategic foresight cannot fathom such a plan. But as your attorney, I would advise you to run.

On the other hand, that sounds like an entertaining long con. You forgo instant gratification for the possibility of better returns in the future. Interesting. And it would drive her crazy.

Hmmm.

(Stares out window and takes a sip of Scotch).

Random Video of the Day LXXXIII

2011-02-17T23:04:00.004-05:00

It's been, what, two weeks since I've mentioned zombies?

Well, that streak is over. Don't act like you did not miss this.

I bring up zombies only as an introduction to this outstanding video game trailer. Yes, it's a trailer for a video game. Yes, I too was unaware these existed. I don't play video games.

But despite the fact that this is for a video game, this is one of the most harrowing, saddest, most awesome clips I've ever seen. Fair warning, there's a lot of blood and, um, dismemberment. And people being set on fire or mauled by other people. BUT. But if that doesn't bother you, then prepare to say, WOW.

Who said video games can't look like friggin' awesome films? Isn't the piano score just outstanding? If this was a movie, I'd totally be jumping up and down in my chair going, ohboyohboyohboy.

Crap. My chair just broke.

Cabs Are Here!

2011-02-16T16:26:00.000-05:00

Congratulations, Boston! You have made the top of a list!

Of course, that list is the one titled, "Most Expensive Cabs in America," but still. Yay for winning!

Oddsmakers had favored New York City -- home of the $7.50 Bud Light bottle -- in the early going. Experience proved invaluable to debunk this, as the unforeseen occasional necessities to take cabs back into Manhattan early on Sunday morning from Whoknowswhere in Brooklyn or Wheretheballsarewe in New Jersey proved surprisingly reasonable indeed.

That said, this should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever had the pleasure of a Boston cab ride. Here, each mile traveled will cost the patron the borderline unconscionable sum of $2.80.

This wouldn't be horrible, considering that metro Boston is one of the smallest cities in America. However, the streets in Boston were designed 400 years ago by a blind drunk who just looooved walking in circles. As a result, city streets are a navigator's nightmare, looping endlessly, going southwest one moment and northeast the next, so there's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going. So the danger must be growing and so forth.

Oh, and all the streets are one way.

The consequence of this is that, what should be a relatively simple trip turns into a months-long odyssey of missed turns, dead ends, and jaunts an astronaut could not weather. Sure, it may only be three miles from Harvard to Kenmore, but the meter says you owe the guy $17.80. Surprise!

And we haven't even gotten to the airport yet. A ten minute ride will somehow cost upwards of $30, owing mostly to the ridiculous per mile charge, but also to the completely unreasonable $8.00 surcharge for picking you up from the airport and paying tribute to its ruling tribes.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that this is not even the cabbies' fault. This report does a very good job of explaining how cabbies are getting even more screwed than we are, thanks to an oppressive medallion system that was instituted and capped back in 1931, when people still rode horses and airports were not really a thing yet.

So the cabbies are getting screwed by both the banks who hold title to the medallions and the municipalities who monopolize the street hailing trade. And we in turn get screwed by the cabbies.

And, as usual, there's no one for us to screw.

Oh. Wait a minute.

Cabs are here!

My Mind Is Going

2011-02-15T15:32:00.004-05:00

Who knew Alex Trebek would be the one to preside over the robot apocalypse?

In case you missed it, last night featured what essentially looked like the prologue of a movie about the end of the world. This is how all dystopian movies start: An innocuous presentation of an exciting and experimental new technology somehow goes awry. Before you know it, things escalate, HAL 9000 is a reality, and Terminators roam our streets unchecked.

In this case, the end begins with Watson, a supercomputer that has the wherewithal to actually "understand" and answer questions that have different layers of meaning, such as the ones presented on Jeopardy. This is an unprecedented level of computer technology, and although Watson can arguably claim the smartest computer in the world title, I have put "understand" in quotation marks because Watson is not an artificially intelligent machine that understands things the way humans do. Instead, it ... well, let's let someone who knows what he's talking about explain it.

When Watson is given the clue via electronic text, it is run through a series of complex algorithms which pick apart keywords, the relation of those keywords to each other, and the structure in which those words were used. From there it begins an association process where it generates and eliminates possible answers based on those keywords. It will also take into consideration previous clues and responses from the same category.

So, as I understand it, Watson is making educated guesses based on the probability that the inferences it makes about the key words is the right one. From my admittedly imperfect understanding, the nerds are completely warranted in being besides themselves at this display of computer "reasoning."

And of course the way to test this was to go on jeopardy, where the questions are, in the words of a 75 year-old English professor, "somewhat glib yet refreshingly playful." Plus, it gets to be condescended to by Alex Trebek.

Watson, as you might imagine, did very well. In fact, the first few minutes of the game were absolutely horrifying, as Watson methodically worked its way down through the board, outbuzzing the game's greatest champions with all the charm and wit of an electronic alarm clock. The calm, monotonous robotic voice was terrifying. Maybe the IBM engineers could have made it not sound like HAL 90000.

And then Watson began to falter, unable to answer those questions where words have more than two meanings. While these failings may be a source of consternation to scientists, I could hear the collective sigh of relief from humans worldwide as they realized that the machine was not invincible.

But not me. In fact, the terror only grew. For these weren't just "wrong" answers in the way a human's answer would be wrong. In other words, the source of these mistakes wasn't an ignorance of the facts or a misapprehension of the premises.

No, these answers were "wrong" in the way crazy answers are wrong, totally divorced from the context of the situation. These are the wrong answers that an insane person would provide, completely divorced from reality and subject only to the misfiring synapses of faulty wiring.

And the fact that this is an intrinsic feature of the world's smartest computer is, quite frankly, the scariest thing I have ever heard.

So forgive me. It seems the little panic monster inside my head has awakened from its slumber. It is now running in circles, screaming at the skies and tearing its hair in handfuls.

If you never hear from this blog again, it will be because the panic monster's manic ravings have finally overwhelmed my mind and compelled me to take my baseball bat destroy this laptop before its gleaming silver screen finally eats me.

May God help us all.

What a Game, Old Sport

2011-02-14T14:33:00.003-05:00

Just when I thought I'd spend Valentine's Day sobbing without the embrace of true love, the internets go and bring us this:

The Great Gatsby: The Video Game.

Yes, really. Someone once made a video game for this for the old NES. And if awesomeness was currency, this game would be Warren Buffet.

My favorite things, in no particular order:

a. In the very first level, you, playing as Nick Carraway, must travel through Gatsby's West Egg mansion and kill ornery caterers and drunk party guests doing the mashed potato on the fountains. You accomplish this by throwing what I believe is your hat at them.

b. It gets better. In the second level, you find yourself on top of a LIRR train, fighting escaped convicts.

c. And it keeps going. The boss of that level is (wait for it) THE EYES OF DR T.J. ECKLEBURG! And they shoot lasers at you! I know!

d. To power-up, you must drink martinis. Also, every once in a while you find a golden hat, and when you grab that, you turn into a Gold Suit wearing pimp who oozes swag.

e. The random pixelated cut scenes where Gatsby stretches out his arm for the green light at the end of the pier and promptly is abducted by what I imagine are aliens. Also, you get to see Daisy weeping over the shirts, if you're into that kind of thing.

f. When you find Gatsby, he tells you, "Good job, Old Sport." And his teeth gleam.

g. At some point you have to fight Meyer Wolfsheim, who does not throw those cufflinks made out of teeth at you. No, instead he -- and this is the best thing ever -- brings out the entire roster of the 1919 Black Sox to kill you with their bats. (!) (!!!!!) (!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

h. Other enemies include sewer alligators, dancing hobos, crabs, and the ghosts of German soldiers. Perhaps shockingly, you never fight Tom Buchanan.

I suppose that, solely for the mob connections, making a video game out of The Great Gatsby is not so far-fetched. If anything, it's a safer play than, say, Lolita, or Waiting for Godot.

It's safe to say, though, that this is the best video game adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald book ever.

Random Video of the Day LXXXI

2011-02-11T10:07:00.000-05:00

In honor of the now incomprehensible Bob Dylan performing at the Grammys, I'd like to share a clip that is funny because it's true.

I'll still take guys playing their instruments and just singing a song over translucent eggs and ninja drumlines any way of the week. Which is why Mumford and Avett: Brothers and Sons was awesome. Also, Arcade Fire winning Album of the Year is f#$%ing outstanding news and more than makes up for the awful Lady Antebellum song winning everything else.

Brownie Points

2011-02-10T18:07:00.002-05:00

I have just returned from an expedition to Commonwealth Avenue and find myself compelled to warn you to stay indoors. My only hope is that this missive reaches you in time. Once you set foot outside, all is lost.

Perhaps you've heard the rumors. If so, I'm afraid I must confirm them.

It's Girl Scout Cookie season.

As we speak, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of girl scouts are roaming the streets of our city, hawing their wares to a captive public. Once they lock upon a victim -- they like to call them "customers" -- there is no escape. You must buy those cookies.

It is one of life's greatest truths -- perhaps only behind "The only three people a man can trust are his barber, his tailor, and his bookie -- that if a girl scout wants to sell you cookies, you are compelled to buy them. They are unrefusable.

They are easily recognizable by their war cry. In a high, melodic tone, the girl scouts will say, "Hi, Mister!" before they approach. As we know, no man alive can resist a child when they call him "Mister." Much like the Smoke Monster's clicking, once you hear it, you're a goner.

And then, of course, you must buy their cookies. For what other alternative is there? You either buy their cookies or you become that heartless crank who stared into the eyes of total innocence only to refuse it. No? What do you mean "no?" Would you also refuse to pet a dog?

So there they sit, two boxes, smiling smugly at me on top of my kitchen counter. These are especially dangerous for someone who lives alone. With no one else to assist me in consuming them, the chore falls entirely to me. Yes, they're delicious. But for those of us straining to stay in their weight class, they're utter danger -- the nuclear option of cookie choices.

So I pray that you receive this in time. It's too late for me, but perhaps you can save yourself.

(Knocking on door)

Now who could that be?

Bless Me, iPhone, For I Have Sinned

2011-02-09T16:19:00.004-05:00

As an occasionally religious person who periodically dabbles in vices that the church frowns upon, I often cast my eyes skyward, scanning the clouds for a glimpse of the thunderbolt for which I'm sure I'm fated.

Not because I think I can outrun it, but because I want my last words to be something awesome like "I regret nothing" or "Avenge me."

And this hubris, of course, is part of the problem. And perhaps I would be a little more repentant about my failings if I got yelled at by a terrified priest.

(Cut to Anthony Hopkins screaming, "I cast you out!" as he chases me with a crucifix).

The problem is, I haven't been to confession in 26 years. Which, if you're keeping count, is almost when I was born. I was a very naughty baby.

But now, thank God, there is finally an app for that.

The Catholic Church has officially sanctioned and endorsed an iPhone app that will walk you through the ten commandments and help you figure out which ones you've broken. Then, presumably, you take the list to shocked priest, who will then refer you to a superior who tells you gravely that for some people, there is just no hope.

Perfect, right? So I was going to download this app, but then I saw that it cost $1.99. Since I am unaware that there is a toll on the road to heaven, I had not been planning for this.

Briefly, I contemplated my options. If I am going to pay for an app, I better get some use out of it. So I decided to kill someone and steal their iPhone in order to use this app for free. That would give me two whole commandments to play with, and they're the big ones. I'll be damned -- quite literally -- if I pay for an app and am stuck on the pretty unexciting "Don't take the Lord's Name in vain" level.

Ultimately, I decided against getting the app at all. Refusing to know which sins I've committed, I figured, would be much like refusing to go to the doctor. Frankly, there are some things I'd rather not know. To be blissfully ignorant is to be truly content.

Plus, I know I'd just start playing Angry Birds somewhere around the second "Hail Mary."

...

Does it smell a little like sulfur or is it just me?

Trolo-lol

2011-02-08T15:23:00.006-05:00

In a dispatch via Twitter today, Jimmy Kimmel implies that people who "LOL" usually are not actually laughing out loud, as they are saying, and instead are lying. To correct this misapprehension, he proposes that we change LOL to LQ, or "Laughing Quietly."

At first blush, it seems a reasonable proposal.

Go back and look at your chat transcripts. Then, if you're a stalker, look at someone else's chat transcripts. Notice anything?

You're right, there's a lot of LOLing going around. And, quite frankly, nobody is that funny. As much as it pains me to say it, not even me.

In fact, if you act out these transcripts and laugh out loud every time you happen across a LOL, the jokes and laughter will start to feel forced, almost like a first date between two thirty-somethings who haven't gotten laid in over a year.

The reason for this phenomenon is simple. People online are simply having a conversation and use LOL as polite shorthand to indicate that what the other person says is amusing. They may not actually be chuckling, but they're being entertained. And when they say LOL, it's almost like a smile and a nod. It signals to the other person that their conversational efforts are appreciated, and that they should, by all means, keep going so that both parties may continue to enjoy themselves.

Why do I know this? Because I, and every other person with whom I've had an online conversation, do occasionally laugh out loud. But when we do that, we don't just write down a meager "LOL." That would be insufficient. Instead, we write something like "I'm actually laughing out loud" or "literally laughing out loud" or some other such construct that tacitly acknowledges that when you merely "Laugh Out Loud," you're not really laughing at all.

So it's imperative that we get on the same page here. Not everybody subscribes to this philosophy and we are left with horrible misunderstandings and occasionally fights.

For example, I remember when I still did work in the library and I was sitting across from this girl. And I was chatting with her and she said something and I wrote down "haha." Which would have been fine, except she could see my face. And I was not laughing. Maybe I was smiling. And she called me out on it. And, in retrospect, she was obviously flirting, but since I'm an idiot, I went and gave her a complete explanation of how people laugh online, not unlike what I just outlined above. And then I wonder why I'm single.

So, in order to help out oblivious idiots like myself, I have devised a fairly simple shorthand for my humorous reactions. I should warn you that I don't LOL, because internet abbreviations are not manly and I have better things to do, like felling trees. Instead, I use variations of "haha" (Or "jaja," when chatting with folks back home) because, essentially, it's the same thing. To wit:

Haha = LOL. Again, not actually laughing, but indicating pleasant amusement and general enjoyment of the conversation.

Hahaha = Chuckling. Actually laughing. Emitting real sounds of mirth. May include shaking of shoulders.

Hahahaha+ = Chortling. Guffaws. Loud laughter, probably necessitating covering mouth with hand. Back in school, this meant hiding your face so the professor wouldn't think you were laughing at the details of testamentary witnesses.

Hahahahahahahaha (enter) hahahahahahah (enter) hahahahahahahaha = What you just said was freaking priceless and deserves to be memorialized forever either as a status update on Facebook or as an away message on this chat program. Maybe even a tweet.

ROFL = Used when something is so not funny that it becomes the opposite of funny. Because nobody actually Rolls On the Floor Laughing, using this would break a sarcasm detector.

I say with no small degree of hyperbole that standardizing our online laughter is of the utmost importance and should take precedence over most legislative goals. So I call on you, Senator and avid Twitterer John McCain, to help me co-sponsor this bill.

What? Not even a LOL?

Super Sunday

2011-02-07T17:10:00.007-05:00

I'd like to extend a belated congratulations to the Green Bay Packers for winning the Super Bowl and finally, perhaps, getting that enormous, insufferable monkey called Brett Favre off their backs.

Most rational Packer fans realized long, long ago how much better off they were with Aaron Rodgers, who yesterday firmly chiseled his face in the Mt. Rushmore of current QBs you would want in a Super Bowl, next to Brees, Brady, and Manning.

But every now and then you find the screaming lunatics who just can't let go of Captain No-Pants. They're like those family members who keep asking you, year after year, about how you should get back with the insane and preening drama queen you finally managed to dump long ago, even though you've been with a solid 9 for the past few years who 28 of your 31 friends would kill to trade up for.

Hopefully, crazy people, you have now quietly returned to your caves. May we never hear from you again.

In other news, last night's event also featured what has charitably been called "The Worst Half Time Show Ever." Prudence would dictate that I refrain from giving an opinion on the matter, since I refused to watch it and instead retired to the kitchen in an effort to preserve my tenuous fate in humanity.

But I could still occasionally listen to snippets of the Black Eyed Peas, and I can say with no trace of hyperbole that listening to mating hyenas on 11 would be more appealing. And I've caught glimpses of the space combat suits they wore for the spectacle and some things just cannnot be unseen.

So normally I'd call out the criminals who green lit this debacle and wish a highly elaborate death involving acid, sharks, and thousands of shards of red-hot bamboo on them. But I imagine that they saw the show, which is a worse fate than the most awful, blood-thirsty, inhuman punishment that Dr. Mengele could come up with if he had ever paired up with the Spanish Inquisition. Even God may not have mercy on their souls.

As for the commercials, I was afraid for a couple of hours there that all American Corporations got into a massive war and only Doritos, Bud Light and Pepsi Max were left standing. But then, eventually, commercials for other commodities made their appearance. And it was worth it. Big props to the outstanding Tiny Darth Vader ad, the effectively stirring Chrysler commercial, and --although I may be biased, the Bridgestone reply all commercial. After all, who hasn't accidentally sent off one of those and then wanted to run screaming from the room to destroy all email-receiving technology in the tri-state area.

Big props for the "Do Not Attempt" disclaimer.

Random Video of the Day LXXIX

2011-02-04T14:04:00.001-05:00

I would totally watch a McBain movie. "Bye, Book."

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Attack of the Deranged Fun Killer Monster Snow Goons

2011-02-03T18:20:00.007-05:00

Chaos on the arts quad yesterday, as Cornell police were summoned to break up a gun fight.

...

I'm sorry, that's not what happened. I'm getting word that it was not a gun fight.

Chaos on the arts quad yesterday, as Cornell police were summoned to break up a knife fight.

...

It was not a knife fight?

Chaos on the arts quad yesterday, as Cornell police were summoned to break up a rock fight.

...

I'm being told that it was also not a rock fight, and being yelled at for not waiting for my producer to finish his sentence before I blurt out speculative misinformation.

...

Wait, say that again?

...

Snowballs?

...

It was a snowball fight?

...

They brought in the police force to break up a goddamned snowball fight?

Chaos on the arts quad yesterday, as Cornell police were summoned to break up a snowball fight.

According to reports, "[t]he Cornell University Police Department shut down the second annual 'Epic Snowball Fight on the Arts Quad' Wednesday, apprehending a student, confiscating tin shields and knocking over a six-foot snow penis."

I, for one, would like to commend the authorities in Ithaca from shifting their focus from arresting those who throw awesome parties to breaking up snowball fights.

Overreaction does not even begin to cover this. These are people throwing frozen precipitation at each other.

But, as expected, the fun police would have none of it. According to the CUPD, they received a complaint (presumably from Mr. Wilson or some other such miserable grouch) and decided to intervene, as the fight was “putting both people and property at the potential for injury and damage,” including maybe breaking the windows at Olin.

We have yet to hear from ballistics experts as to the destructive capacity of the weapons involved in the fracas, but a source close to the investigation tells us that, "it looks like they're pretty much just water."

And look. If a kid had bad enough aim to break a window, he's probably getting clobbered by everyone else. Is that not a sufficient punishment?

No word yet on what preparations the police are undertaking for next May's yearly water balloon fight.

No More Snow, No Mo'

2011-02-02T21:59:00.005-05:00

If you are reading this, congratulations! You have survived Snowpocalypse III: Return of the Snowmaggedon.

While I fully accept that I complain about the snow more than most, I have grown rather tired of seeing the following Facebook message template:

[Expression of surprise at existence of snow in February]. [Lamentation and general whining]. [Insincere promise to migrate to warmer climates]. [Emoticon denoting grief].

But honestly, this last superstorm has too much meat to ignore.

Witness, if you will, the following map of the United States. That's an actual, science-given map. And hey, you know what kind of looks exactly like that? The mock-up used in the awful Day After Tomorrow movie! Half the continent has been canceled using nature's White-Out. Good thing people don't live anywhere near there, right?

Oh.

Yesterday, I was making fun of Caitlin because people in Chicago were permanently misplacing their composure over the threat of a mere two feet of snow, whereas here in Boston we were facing our 3,429th two-foot storm of the season and reacting with a tepid shrug.

Now, I take it all back. While two feet of snow may be a "been there, done that" amount, it sure is amplified when all of it comes down in the span of six or seven hours. Imagine the difference between sipping a 40 or having the whole contents of one dumped into a funnel. While the former is frankly inconvenient and best to be avoided, I guarantee you that the latter will bring the wrath of Uncle Ralph all over your now-ruined snowboots.

I mean, look at Brick Tamland, formerly known as a stead 25-year veteran of meteorology, completely spaz out on camera like a five year old who just saw Barney hug a Teletubby:

Loud Noises, indeed.

Or this other video. I don't know what's worse, the authorities looking for survivors amongst cars abandoned on Chicago's main road, or the random coyotes roaming around looking for carrion.

That's right. Coyotes descending on our nation's third biggest city like it's some abandoned outpost in some forgotten wild west ghost town.

So I apologize to you, Caitlin, and to all other residents of the Chicagoland area for underestimating your snowstorm. In the distant future, when the snow melts and brave explorers come upon all of you frozen in blocks of ice, I promise not to make too many Encino Man jokes.

In the meantime, I would like to be the first to welcome our new snowy overlords. You may have taken the White Stripes, and that is an extremely hard sacrifice to make. But perhaps now you will leave us alone.

(Looks at Saturday forecast)

Son of a bitch.

Hill-J-ell Date

2011-02-01T17:43:00.006-05:00

We've all been to alumni events where the coordinators in charge of asking for gifts try to appeal to our generous spirit. They use many ~~tricks~~ strategies to get at our wallets. And these strategies are on a sliding scale of effectiveness, from its topmost setting of free top shelf drinks down to free beer down to free swag down to everything else.

But why nobody ever thought of handing out free dates is beyond me.

This year, the geniuses at Cornell Hillel have come up with a bold new project. You donate some money, and they'll hook you up.

Quite literally. They'll set you up with a fellow member of Hillel. Or, in their own words, "imagine the possibilities as you wait to be paired on a date." Although the lawyer part of me insists that all they promise you is a waiting period wherein you can fantasize about a potential future date, I'm sure they'll actually find someone to awkwardly introduce to you.

So fear not, affluent Jews from the tri-state area! If you have failed to find a match while you were at Cornell, or when you went to visit your friends at Penn, or even now that you have moved to Murray Hill, Hillel is here to find your better half for you.

It's a bold strategy. On the one hand, getting a date is probably better than getting yet another key chain. Or one of those (sic) "Lynah Fateful" pins. Maybe not better than a beer coozy -- those are useful indeed -- but it is nice to see an organization step up its swag.

On the other hand, putting the horrifying word "blind" together with the terrifying "date" creates a molecular globule of pure and utter petrifying ghastliness to make the blood run as cold as our current Worst Winter Ever.

I'm not saying a Blind Date is the worst thing in the world. But if Open and Bar are the two greatest words in the English language, then Blind and Date are the complete opposite of that.

That said, I have nothing to do this Thursday, an extra ten dollars, and JDate won't have me. Something about not being among The Chosen.

But not everyone knows this.

Hmm.

Master of Karate and Posters for Everyone

2011-01-31T17:27:00.004-05:00

The Department of Awesomeness really came through today. Witness, if you will, the full set of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia minimalists posters.

You'll remember that someone did a similar thing with Lost, where they conjured up a poster with an iconic image from each and every episode.

And if you want iconic, ridiculous images from TV shows, Sunny is the Bluebeard's Treasure Trove of the medium. Couple those images with the stark awesomeness of the episode titles themselves and you get fantastic posters like "Charlie Got Molested." Or "Mac and Dennis: Manhunters." Or "Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire." Or "Mac is a Serial Killer." Or "The Gang Dances Their Asses Off." Or, of course, the epic "Who Pooped the Bed?" I could honestly go on forever.

Sometimes I really wonder what the hell we did before the internet. Oh, and I should warn you. The "Paddy's Pub: Home of the Original Kitten Mittons" involves a certain towel, and it is Absolutely Not Safe For Work.

The Lost Carlton of Z

2011-01-28T22:06:00.002-05:00

The fact that Lost is no longer on television and will never again return to grace our screens makes me sad all day. Often I shake. I become slathered in cold sweats. I get chills. I'll find that I have been quietly weeping for hours without noticing.

Perhaps I exaggerate the symptoms of my withdrawal. But as much as I miss the show, I daresay that Carlton Cuse, one of its producers, misses it more.

It's a nice, droll little piece about how you are completely, totally, up-to-your-neck immersed in a project for a long time, and then suddenly it's gone from your grasp in one fell swoop. And you find yourself either quietly going crazy as you sit in your chair at home or loudly going crazy as you look for something else to do.

I'll follow these guys to whatever their next project ends up being. As the essay mentions, this sadly won't be an adaptation of Under the Dome, Stephen King's latest novel. When I read it, I couldn't help but notice that its characters were basically stand-ins for most of the Lost characters. Which, of course, would have been perfect for Cuse and Damon. Alas, this particular sideways world is not to be.

But like I said, they accumulated enough capital and goodwill with Lost -- there really isn't another show anything like it, not even on DVD -- that whatever their next project is deserves a long, sustained look. Even if it is, as he describes, "a show about a hot dolphin trainer and her dolphins who work at an aquarium by day but perform secret missions for the government by night."

Perhaps fortunately, that is not his next project. But I'd still watch it.

Slim Gym

2011-01-27T16:46:00.004-05:00

Today, the NYT laments the state of today's gym. Specifically, they curse today's slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am culture and pine for the days when people at the gym would work out in groups and hit on each other.

I've never quite understood the idea of gyms as pick-up spots. Sure, I'd love to hit on the certain blonde Red Sox reporter who occasionally frequents my gym. But I firmly believe in the canonic advice of Do's and Dont's of Approaching women. Specifically, Rule #76, otherwise known as the Please Don't Approach Me While I'm Disgusting and Sweaty command.

Look, if you're having a conversation with a woman when she's sweaty and out of breath, you should either a) congratulate yourself on a mission well accomplished or b) stop chasing her. As your attorney, I would advise you to comply with the latter suggestion immediately.

The industrial gymnasium complex connects the decline in sales to a decline in socializing, blaming "the gym’s now-ubiquitous flat-screen TVs and the fact that iPods are de rigueur."

But I ask these people to understand that if I unplug myself from my iPod, I'm forced to listen to Staci from Long Island's telephone conversations about which woman on The Bachelor has degraded herself the most before she seamlessly segues into the details of her application video for the show's next iteration. Somehow, I think my workout experience is much more pleasant and efficient if I listen to MGMT instead.

The article also paints those who just pop into the gym, work out quietly, and then leave as some sort of puppy killers. Somehow, the ones who put their head down, mind their own business and move on are the biggest problem that gyms face. You can almost hear the guy sobbing when he says, “It’s merely four walls to come in, work out and leave.”

Well. Yes. That's exactly what a gym is. That's the service it provides. It's like being angry with a sandwich because it's just ham and cheese between two slices of bread.

Or saying a movie theater is doing it wrong because it's only four walls to come in, watch a movie, and leave.

Look, the bells and whistles are nice, and may keep the ADD Generation coming back. But all I'm trying to at the gym do is temper the beer belly, beat up on my muscular system, and give my upper dorsamus the love and attention it deserves.

Running Down a Dream

2011-01-26T14:00:00.004-05:00

Occasionally, I'll be out for a walk and I'll see some jogger nearly get flattened by a speeding bus. Normally, I don't care. But sometimes, the jogger is a cute girl and then I spend the remainder of my walk cursing myself for not being quick enough to grab her by the ponytail, yank her back, save her life, and have her fall over herself in gratitude for my actions.

And now it seems I'll never have the chance to be a hero.

Lawmakers in NY and other states are conspiring to put an end to people using earphones on the street, claiming that the symphony in their ears distracts them from the symphony of car horns and screeching tires that came so close to meeting them head-first.

Under the new laws, you'd draw fines for attempting to cross the street with your earphones on. The NYT begins succintly:

Many joggers don earbuds and listen to music to distract themselves from the rigors of running. But might the Black Eyed Peas or Rihanna distract them so much that they jog into traffic?

This lede is misleading. If someone gets hit by a car while they're listening to the Black Eyed Peas, my first thought is not that they got hit because they were distracted, but rather that they sadly hurled themselves into oncoming traffic to achieve sweet, silent oblivion.

But I digress. These laws, as Ron Swanson would say, are just another example of legislators attempting to save people from themselves. It belongs in the same category of other ordinances, like forcing bicyclists to wear helmets, drivers to secure their seatbelts, and couples to use condoms.

(Wait ... what? ... it's not actually a law ... really? ... OH SCORE)

Still, if laws like this staunch the flood of idiots into both hospital emergency rooms and the pages of the Darwin Awards, then why not forge ahead. When people won't do the smart thing willingly, threatening them with fines is an effective alternative to get your point across.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to lobby my Congressman to pass a law against stopping abruptly while on the sidewalk.

Crunch-Lies Supreme

2011-01-25T15:24:00.003-05:00

In my ongoing war against Taco Bell, the powers that be have granted me a weapon of untold power.

Taco Bell is reportedly being sued for claiming that its meat is Beef, even though it is only actually 35 percent beef and 65 percent other stuff.

I have never heard a more preposterous argument in my life. One look at this slop should be enough to communicate to any rational being that nowhere in this miasma of barely edible substances is there anything that even remotely resembles beef.

I might be bending the Assumption of Risk doctrine a little bit here, but shouldn't you get what's coming to you if you choose to poison yourself with the abominations served at Taco Bell? People surprised that it is not in fact beef are the same people who hit on a woman with large hands and an adam's apple and feel tricked when they later find the surprise.

So I have to admit the lawsuit will go nowhere (I'd actually sue them for impersonating an outstanding cuisine and attempting to kill it). However -- and here is where the weapon comes in -- the existence of this frivolous lawsuit did force the company to reveal to the mainstream media the ingredients it uses in what it optimistically calls "meat."

Even though Taco Bell had apparently already listed this information on its website before this lawsuit, the current rash of stories about the pending litigation has put this list out there, for which I'm eternally grateful.

Why? Because now every time somebody tried to convince others to go to a Taco Bell, I can be the guy who goes, "Actually, 65 percent of the food there consists of 'water, wheat oats, soy lecithin, maltodrextrin, anti-dusting agent and modified corn starch.'"

Yeah, I know. If I said that to my friends, I'd want to punch myself in the face too.

But at least that's better than eating Taco F$%@ing Bell.

Get Rid Of Slimy republicanS

2011-01-24T14:24:00.003-05:00

Every news outlet and their mother covering tomorrow's State of the Union Address is running with the "OMG Legislators have to pick dates! LOLZ" conceit. While it conveniently touches on some truths (The media has all but called the Prom Queen race for ~~Sen. Holly Flax~~ Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand), I feel like the analogy to a high school prom is lazy and a bit inaccurate.

In my eyes, the pairing off between congresspeople tomorrow is not like a high school prom. Rather, it is like a third grade dance.

Bear with me for a second.

The year was 1994. I was in either second or third grade, a time when fear-mongering about cooties was at an all-time high and meetings of G.R.O.S.S. were held every second Tuesday of the month.

And then, for some reason, the school held a dance. So imagine, if you will, this big hall. And colored lights are flashing. And either Right Said Fred or Will Smith in his Fresh Prince incarnation were blaring from the speakers.

And, as you might expect, in accordance with proper third grade protocol, all the boys were on one side of the room and all the girls were on the other, and never the twain shall meet.

Except the powers that be, damn them, had other ideas in mind. They bided their time. They plied us with fruit punch. They let us get good and hungry. They made us wait forever.

And, then, finally, there it was. Borne by teachers like the spoils of a war fought in distant lands, the most enormous cookie tray you've ever seen in your life.

At the sight of this bounty of food, we all lost our collective mind (it's nice to see some things don't change, even in old age). And when the person nearest the tray notified to the rest of us in a scream that these were not just cookies, but chocolate-chip cookies, the roof blew off the building and we advanced upon the food table like the starving, desperate animals we were.

But wait.

Directly in our path was an impenetrable barrier of teachers. We tried to get around them, but to no avail. This was less a Maginot Line than it was a Berlin Wall.

And then the teachers, damn them all, informed us in calm and clear voices that, in order to foster cooperation between the sexes, we would not be allowed to eat the cookies unless we paired up with a girl.

Gasp.

You would think that this set off a blitzkrieg of angry protests and that howls of revulsion filled the air. Consorting with girls? Those prim, clean, overachieving creatures who used thirteen different color pens to take notes and drooled over the New Kids on the Block? Them?

But no. What we did was simple. We shrugged, turned around, and made a beeline for the girls.

Then, exhibiting a confidence and a self-assuredness that, almost twenty years later, I am yet to replicate, I asked the nearest girl if she would get a cookie with me. She said yes, I grabbed her hand, hauled her off to the cookie tray, and claimed my prize.

And then, after I had piled my plate with roughly three pounds of cookies, I turned to the girl who, in retrospect, was my first date, thanked her for her time, and went back to the boys' side of the room, where I could maul my plate of cookies in the appropriate fashion.

Although I will acknowledge that this whole thing almost sound like a euphemistic fable about my first one-night stand, this actually happened. At that age, boys and girls were sworn enemies. The promise of cookies could bring us together for one fleeting, largely symbolic moment. But after that moment was past, we each retreated to our respective enclaves where we ate and plotted about how to make the rest of the school year as miserable as humanly possible for the opposing sex.

Now. I'm not saying that Congress, after they get their cookie tomorrow at the State of the Union, is going to go back to putting thumbtacks on chairs and throwing rocks at each other and tattling to the teacher and spreading rumors about how Johnny leaves skidmarks on his underwear.

In reality, it will probably will be much worse.

Twenty-Two Short Films About Pawnee

2011-01-21T22:18:00.002-05:00

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the return of Parks and Recreation, the funniest show on television, to our silver screens.

Parks and Rec is easily the most underrated show currently being shown. NBC, who you might remember from past fiascoes such as "Let's put Jay Leno on at 10!" and "We should keep airing Heroes!" bumped it for the first half of the season in favor of the horrid Outsourced, in a move that one commentator likened to the time when Thurgood Marshall was replaced by Clarence Thomas. I would go even farther and ask you to imagine a world where Harriet Miers replaced Earl Warren.

Simply put, Parks and Rec is brilliant. Perhaps the best thing you can say about an ensemble comedy is that you are unable to pick a favorite character. And this show has an embarrassment of wealth. From Andy Dwyer throwing himself into the pit, to Tom "I tell other people to take the high road so there will be more room for me on the low road" Haverford, to the magnificent Ron F%$&ing Swanson (whose Pyramid of Greatness should be in every dorm room in America), no other show has a "family" this consistently hilarious since the Bluths burned down the banana stand.

You know how The Office kind of started to hit the skids somewhere in Season 4? This just happened to coincide with the departure of Michael Schur -- otherwise known as Ken Tremendous, founding partner of the brilliant Fire Joe Morgan troupe -- who left to create Parks and Rec. And ever since then, you can make a line graph of laughter accrued while watching The Office and superimpose that on one of laughter accrued while watching Parks and Rec, and you'd get a perfectly formed X.

In short, if you haven't given Parks and Rec a try, do so at your earliest convenience. I am not exaggerating when I call it the funniest show on television, and that is over more conventional picks like Modern Family or 30 Rock or Community.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to listen to some MouseRat on my DJ Roomba while I carve a whiskey harp.

Random Video of the Day LXXXIII

2011-01-20T18:30:00.000-05:00

The honest grad school ad. As always, it's funny because it's true. Especially the part where the guy says, "I don't even want to be a lawyer! I'm in a bluegrass band!"

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Hangover, New Hampshire

2011-01-19T22:24:00.003-05:00

The greatest minds in the world have finally come to a consensus on what was, until today, the most vexing issue facing humans today:

How to cure a hangover.

According to the scientists, the best cure for one is coffee and aspirin.

But allow me, if you will, to quibble.

When I was a young whippersnapper in college, I enjoyed going out nearly every day. I would take the occasional Sunday off, of course. I'm not an animal. But you could find me on pretty much every night between Monday and Saturday at a bar somewhere, drinking straight from those wonderful $5 pitchers.

Don't look at me like that. It was college.

Anyway, I almost never contracted a hangover. Every once in a while, the Kamikaze things they gave out at Dunbar's during group therapy would engender a mild headache the following morning, but I could handle those. Despite my daily drinking schedule, I always got up early and energized, went to class, worked at the paper, and still made it to the bar so I could apologize for the prior night.

My college incarnation spit in the face of hangovers and laughed at their weakness.

But then I graduated. And I went to law school.

And as I grew older and discovered that my body was changing, I began to notice a distressing set of symptoms. My head would hurt. My stomach would ache. I would fall into murderous rages, even more so than the usual. Hangovers started to assault me, and I was powerless to stop them.

Today, hangovers immobilize me. It feels like devils use my head as a sort of air hockey table. I lie in a fetal position, close my eyes, and pray for a death that won't come. They are murder, of the John Wayne Gacy variety.

My theory is that this is like what happens to athletes after they retire. During college, I was at the peak of my abilities. Because I exercised those abilities every day, I could stand up to their stress and rigors, and reaped no consequences.

But then I graduated, and that was like retiring. I no longer played every day, and it showed. Rust settled in. Muscles that had begun to atrophy screamed when they were called forth into action again. Sure, I could still hit the occasional grand slams and stand-up triples. But my glory days were over, and forcing my body to relive those days was not without its victims.

This despite the "cures." And believe me, I've tried them all.

The following things have not worked:

1. I've chugged full glasses of water before I went to sleep and after I woke up.
2. I've set out a bowl of aspirin, poured milk on them, and ate them with a spoon.
3. I've thrown every greasy thing in my fridge into a pan full of oil and used bread as utensils.
4. I've forced myself to drink the remaining beer in my fridge. (This one got me drunk again, but I still felt like a minor God was going to town on his anvil inside my brain).
5. I've prayed.

No "cure" works. They just don't. The only thing that works for me is time. Given enough of it, the poison finally leaves my system. And then and only then can I get up and go poison it again.

But that's my cure. Others swear by Bloody Marys. Others take Alka-Seltzer. Others call on Uncle Ralph.

That's because each person has a different constitution, and need a cure tailored to their own specificity. The only magic pill that I know that is a fool-proof way to prevent hangovers is to not drink at all. But where's the fun in that?

It takes trial and error to find out what your cure is, and I am happy to help each one of you discover what that is. Especially this one, ladies.

So. Who's first?

This Is How You're Fat

2011-01-18T22:42:00.003-05:00

I'd be remiss if I let the day come to a close without mentioning a terrific new Tumblr entitled This is How You're Fat.

This new site is not to be confused by the nauseating This is Why You're Fat -- which remains to this day the single greatest motivator to get to the gym as fast as your chubby little legs can carry you. In fact, I'd recommend that you not click through to the link, as science has proved that merely looking at the photographs there is enough to kickstart deep vein thrombosis along with early onset diabetes at the same time.

Instead, This is How You're Fat imagines what would happen if celebrities, both living and dead, had themselves a bad day and took but one or two bites from the aforementioned food stuffs.

It is quite effective nightmare fuel, as evinced by Fatgelina, Fat Gaga, and ~~Biggie Smalls~~ Fat Kanye. It's a blog that is not afraid to consider a world where Gandhi found an alternate means of protest. But how can it be afraid, when it has Fat Walken on its side? A Walken that neither drowned in the bucket or cream nor churned it into butter, but that drank that entire bucket until it was all gone.

Sadly, these are not real pictures, but merely confections using some sort of warping technology that finally answers the question, Does the camera really add ten pounds?

In this case, the answer is No. It adds fifty. At least.

Back to the Future IV: The College Years

2011-01-17T22:13:00.008-05:00

So I walk into the supermarket today to replenish my fridge. And it's a war zone. The supermarket, not the fridge ... although I guess you could argue both ways.

The supermarket was a wreck. For a second, I thought that maybe Obama had declared war on Canada or some such similar foe with the ability to execute a ground war on American soil. And that everyone overreacted -- yes, overreacted, because even if Canada did attempt to invade America, how far do you think they could get? I'm putting the over/under at 10.5 feet into Maine and suggest you take the under -- and had raided their local food purveyors in order to hoard supplies, lock and load their shotguns, and wait for the tides of war to wash over them.

But no, it was worse than war.

It was the undergrads, coming back to school after their winter break.

I don't know why I'm so hostile to undergraduates now. I actually feel like a bit of a hypocrite, since I readily acknowledge that I would gladly cut off two toes on one foot and three on the other to get to be a college student again.

In fact -- and this is true -- I have discussed with others whether the powers that be at Cornell would allow me to come back as a student. I would get another BA in some major completely unrelated to mine (this wouldn't be hard because there are tons of useful majors like mathematics or enology), and, in turn, the administration would let me be a freshman again and put me in a dorm on North Campus (Donlon looks like it would be fun) and let me do the whole college thing again.

Of course, there would be problems -- explaining to the other freshmen why I get a five-o'clock shadow at 10 a.m. would be the least of my concerns. In fact, for this to work I would have to pull a Don Draper and and create a whole new identity for myself. But I do this every other week at the bars, so I would just have to keep the long con going for four years. This seems doable to me.

In any case, I am not even half kidding about this yearning to be a student again, and yet when I see large groups of undergraduates, the rage that builds up deep in my heart of darkness is so strong that only cathartic visions of what I could do with a shovel, the element of surprise, and diplomatic immunity can calm me down.

I guess I can explain it this way. To (finally) get back to my initial point about the supermarket: The ravaged supermarket was nearly cleaned out. Chicken, milk, frozen pizzas and individual slices of cheese were all completely absent from the shelves. The only cartons of orange juice left were the ones with calcium, which always taste like they've been strained through a fisherman's net. The place was completely cleaned out of everything except for canned vegetables.

Heck, even the Magnums -- which hilariously always sit alone and unbought in the condom section -- were gone.

And if hell was standing in endless lines listening to South Shore girls yammer on forever about their winter vacations, God would be a concept too cruel to fathom.

I wish that you would forgive Old Man Charlie for shaking his fist at these miscreants who happily take over bars and order alternating shots of SoCo and Jager. Or at the ruffians who pack onto the T like a flock of lost donkeys, yelling at each other about which stop is theirs only to get off at the wrong one. Or, of course, at those goddamned kids with their goddamned skateboards.

So forgive Old Man Charlie because, deep in his heart, he wants nothing more than to go back and be like them.

Signed, Sealed, Beleaguered

2011-01-14T15:51:00.001-05:00

After thousands of years, astronomers and astrologers buried the hatchet and came together to announce that the Earth tends to move in one way and the stars tend to move in another way. The resulting issue is that the stars yesterday are not quite in exactly the same position as they are now. Extrapolate this over hundreds of years and you come to the conclusion that the Zodiac isn't quite what it used to be.

Apparently, almost everyone's astrological sign has now changed. Which makes sense, because my horoscope was always wrong.

As someone who made all decisions based on his horoscope, this is particularly devastating. Every morning I would open my newspaper to consider what astrological scientists had to say regarding whether or not I should leave the house, whether I should go to school, whether I should talk to that girl, whether I should bet against the spread, and a dozen other life-changing questions like that.

You can take your logic and your reason, empiricists. Me, I'm happy with Miss Cleo.

Perhaps worst of all is what this means for compatibility issues. For years I based my love life on the astrological compatibility tables, believing that this was the one and only path to true love.

When I was asking girls whether they were American, this was also a way for me to subtly inquire about when they were born.

Yes, you might look like what happened if Megan Fox's body also included Tina Fey's brain, but if you were a Gemini, then there's nothing we can do together. After all, my critical nature and penchant for self-organization would clash fatally with your desire for introspection and tendency towards flakiness.

And the girl of my dreams is a Libra, but it doesn't matter that she's desperately in love with me because we only rank a 2 out of 5 in the compatibility scales. This love can never be.

Now that I know that I have been living a lie for years, I am lost and angry and confused. How many times have I made the wrong decision or destroyed a healthy relationship because of predictions couched in vague language and generalized abstractions? How many times?

What am I to do? How am I to proceed?

To the horoscope, the one constant in my life!

"Your mood and attitude is conciliatory, and your need for love and approval heightened. Social gatherings and personal relationships are favored."

Oh my God, that makes so much sense.

Friends in Lost Places

2011-01-13T13:22:00.002-05:00

Today I was friended by someone who, from the looks of it, has just become a brand new resident of Facebookistan. As you might imagine, his friend count is a bit meager.

But fear not, gentle citizens! Facebook, that ~~meddling~~ dutiful bastard, has made it its life mission to correct this.

See, this person now appears in the column to the right of my news feed. You know, the one with the ads nobody looks at and the questions nobody answers and the suggested friends that nobody actually friends because maybe they're your friend's girlfriends, or, worse, your friend's ex-girlfriends, or -- God forbid -- your own ex-girlfriends, whose friending will open up a whole new can of worms better left sealed shut in some mausoleum at the center of Earth's deepest, darkest pit.

Anyway. In this column, a photo of my new Facebook friend appears. The photo is under the heading "Help a friend." And then right under that there is a little text box that says, "Help [Milton] find his friends."

"Help [Milton] find his friends?!"

Good Lord, Facebook! Really? That's how you guys chose to put it? Help him find his friends?

Like he's some dog in an interactive pop-up book for children who looks sad and lonely, and then you have to pull the tabs behind bushes and hydrants and fences until you have collected the whole animal kingdom and now Fido is happy and looks at you with big, sloppy eyes full of wonderful gratitude because you helped him find his friends, you generous and magnificent bastard you.

Help him find his friends.

I feel like I'm watching Dora the Explorer, and Dora just walked into this really crowded bar, which is just hopping, and she's getting jostled and bumped into, and, oh no, here come the Butabi brothers! And then there's this really awkward pause where everyone stage freezes and some ghostly voiceover says, "Quick, explorers! Help Dora find her friends!" And then there's the screaming of thousands of children, who all jump up at the same time and rush to the TV an plant one grubby, disgusting finger covered in mud and ice cream on a corner on the screen and scream, "THERETHEYAREYAYAYAYAYYYYY."

Help him find his friends.

Facebook, whoever writes copy for your site, just . . . just . . . I don't know. Take away his Firefox and Chrome privileges and force him to work with Explorer. I don't know how nerds punish each other, but that sounds pretty bad to me.

Help him find his friends.

Jesus the jumping Mexican bean, that's awful.

Snowmaggedon 2: The Return of the Snow

2011-01-12T13:33:00.004-05:00

I woke up this morning to the sound of thunder. That's weird, I thought. Isn't it January?

And then I remembered where I lived. So I got out of bed and walked to my window and opened the blinds and stood there staring at the end of the world.

The northeast now finds itself buried by the most overrated weather feature ever to bury God's green earth. The thunder I heard in the morning was actual thunder -- it is a feature of thundersnow, which is what I would call cocaine if I was marketing it to the NASCAR crowd.

Faithful readers know full well my feelings about snow, which have been chronicled in this blog in excruciating detail.

These feelings have not changed, and will likely stay the same forever. Snow is a menace whose existence only serves to destroy convenience at every possible juncture. Sure, it's pretty now, but we're looking at a week of rescheduling travel plans, slipping on ice, searching for safe routes on the sidewalk, and praying that the next step will be onto something solid and not into muddy slush deep enough to eat your foot and ruin your socks and shoes.

So if you do choose to take advantage of your snow day by wrapping yourself in gore-tex so you can hurl yourself headlong into freezing water, be my guest. I myself will pour three fingers of Scotch into a glass, pull a good book from my shelf, and remain warm, dry, and feeling all sorts of toasty inside.

Can You Hear Me Now?

2011-01-11T13:37:00.002-05:00

As a proud iPhone owner over the last three years, I believe I can give a fair assessment of its qualities. In the end, it's a fantastic device for playing Angry Birds that occasionally makes spotty phone calls.

So the news that the magic phone is soon to be available to what's widely considered the best network in America should be well-received indeed. After all, this means that those of us who love bright and shiny things need no longer be tethered to a carrier that is often undersold as, "The BCS of cell phone companies."

But before we leap into unfounded conclusions, let's weigh the pros and cons of ditching AT&T and hooking up with Verizon.

Cons. The danger that the news will cause everyone to stampede and then overwhelm Verizon, much like opening a new cashier line at the supermarket somehow turns out to be worse for everyone involved.

Cons. I have seen prenups that are less onerous than the AT&T Contract. The Early Termination Clause should be renamed the Heather Mills Memorial Clause.

Cons. There will be a new iPhone in the summer. This is the 21st-century equivalent of buying a horse right before cars arrive on the market.

On the other hand ...

Pros. The phone will have the ability to make phone calls.

You would say that three to one is a no-brainer, but that's the issue with pros and cons lists. They assume that all pros and cons are created equal, and that they should be weighed in the same fashion. This is pure hogwash. Some cons are huge cons and some pros are tiny pros and when you evaluate every single one of them this way, you're right back where you started.

And so it comes to this. Do I stay with the horrible, ugly, useless wife with the iron-clad prenup and remain sad forever, cuckolding her every time I need to make a phone call by using a friend's phone? Or do I jump ship with the hot new girl and hope she won't be overwhelmed by the attention to the point where it's no fun to hang out with her anymore?

So which is it -- the lady or the tiger?

Never Let Me Go

2011-01-10T15:13:00.005-05:00

I was unaware that the New York Times was in the business of publishing scary stories. But then I opened up the paper on Sunday and, much to my horror, discovered how incredibly wrong I had been.

There, in full gore-splattered 3D horror-vision, was a feature-length article detailing just how those of us who chose to take the path down law school way would be slaughtered in the end.

The article casually throws around phrases like, "a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades," "recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated" and "some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished." The article details the awful job market for new attorneys with a sadistic excess for gore not seen since the heady days of the Hostel and Saw movies.

The most interesting thing about the whole thing is how law schools are presented as the monster who enjoys throwing kids into the grinder. To keep with the horror movie metaphor -- if law students are the airheaded camp counselors who make up the film's body count, law school is the crazy psycho who lured us all to its idyllic shores in order to satisfy its own blood lust.

Perhaps my favorite detail about the whole mess is how law schools manipulate the numbers in order to stay afloat in the rankings. They do so by offering low-paying temp jobs to some of their graduates in positions designed to last until the statistics are counted. The deadline for reporting what percentage of the alumni are employed 9 months after graduation passes, the school happily reports its artificially inflated 97% employment rate, and everyone moves on.

For instance, right now I work part-time for what is basically the minimum wage doing research for a professor. My commission, if you will, conveniently expires on February 24th, which the calendar tells me is just about nine months from graduation. After that, I'll be fully unemployed and have to figure something else out.

Am I bitter about this?

No.

I fully subscribe to this fiction. Why? Because the fact that the school participates in this mild charade only helps me and my fellow graduates. I provide the school with labor they don't really need that much (isn't research what 1Ls are for?). In return, I get spending money. And then we both become the beneficiaries of the inflated rankings. The school maintains its high rank and keeps charging money as a top school. Meanwhile, the value of my diploma increases because -- whether we like it or not -- the law school rankings correlate directly with how people in the community asses the quality of our education.

Imagine a world where the school didn't provide these "jobs" for me and dozens of others. Here, the school would have to report real employment rates closer to the hair-raising truth (who knows what they are? 65 percent? 70 percent? Is that too optimistic?). These numbers would make the school's rank go down, which would make our diplomas less valuable when compared to those of other schools. And while I know that a school's ranking is not an accurate representation of the quality of its education, you have to be pretty naive to think that admission and hiring decisions are not influenced by those damned lists. Everything is sacrificed at their altar, and there's not one thing anyone can do about it.

So we all happily participate in the conspiracy. And I do mean all -- quick research indicates that at least a dozen other law schools have similar programs. There's no other choice -- not for the school and not for us -- if anybody wants to stay relevant and employable.

And so we find ourselves here, in a very different kind of scary story. This is no longer the gory slasher film that the opening scenes suggested.

Instead, this mass delusion and happy participation in the lie is what lies at the heart of more dystopian horror narratives, such as Brave New World and 1984. Now we have to deal with a world where the whole damn system is a sham. And that, I think, is way more horrifying than one lone nut.

Shiny Orange People

2011-01-07T11:31:00.004-05:00

I have a rather embarrassing confession to make.

Many months ago, I was coerced by friends into watching an episode of Jersey Shore, whose continued popularity is the leading cause of dead birds flooding God's country and other such signs of the apocalypse.

And, as much as the admission makes me hang my head in shame as I turn the shower to scalding, I kind of enjoyed it.

So last night I happened to stay in and NBC wasn't there with its only worthwhile shows and FX wasn't there with something like Sunny or The League and so it came to be that my remote made an unscheduled stop on Channel 40, home to MTV, which is otherwise known as the worst channel this side of Lifetime.

And there it was -- the Jersey Shore in all its overwhelming orange splendor, haunting me again.

A marathon, I guess, preceded the 3rd season (they're at three already!), whose main narrative seems to be the triumphant return of the crew to their hallowed spawning grounds in New Jersey.

And so I watched it. Maybe three or four hours of it. And as much as it horrifies me to say it, I was wildly, wildly entertained.

And the thing is, the show is not good. In fact, it's heinous. It's awful. The idea that these screeching orange morons can coexist in the same medium that gives us the excellent Mad Men or the magnificent Breaking Bad is beyond my powers of comprehension. If something like The Sopranos is the Moby Dick of TV, Jersey Shore is those awful romance "novels" with an orange Fabio on the cover.

And here's why my narcissistic Northeastern elitism -- which only reads Stephen King books at home, choosing to save Joyce and Bellow for the subway -- gets kicked right in the sprouts, because despite my best efforts to dismiss the show as the contrived exploitation of the lowest common denominator, I have to say that I really enjoyed the spectacle.

I'm not really sure what it is. Pauly D is hilarious. So is the Situation (or is it The Situation?), who plays the greatest sociopath on TV since Dennis Reynolds. And Snooki. Watching Snooki is like trying to watch a drunk baby grabbing at shiny things, if that baby looked like a penguin had sex with an Oompa Loompa and sounded like a version of Alvin and the Chipmunks that grew up on Long Island. Plus, the SNOOKI WANT SMUSH-SMUSH parody on South Park was spot-effing-on.

Perhaps my favorite, for rather obvious reasons, is J-Woww. Or is it Jenni? This question is part of my fascination with her. On the one hand, there is that impulse to call her by her Christian name, as in, "Wow, Jenni, those are terrific breasts." On the other hand, the first and only thing that comes to my head whenever she takes her shirt off is "WOW."

And I'm aware of how much of a dirty old man this makes me. But J-Woww is a prime example of what I call the "Staci Rule." Staci, as you no doubt remember, is the Blake Lively character on The Town. On the one hand, she's a crack ho. On the other hand, she looks like Blake Lively. Do you see the inherent conflict? This "trashy hot girl dilemma" is exactly what J-Woww personifies, and I have no defense for it. The Staci Rule states that of course you would hook up with this girl, but only if you did it in the shower. Or if a shower was nearby.

So I'm afraid I have surrendered to the phenomenon that is the Jersey Shore. Late as always to the party (remember Lost and Mad Men?), I grudgingly concede that I will watch this show, which so often sounds like what happens if you trapped pigs and cats in heat and rabid pigeons in a small coffin together, on a regular basis for the foreseeable future. I'm not proud of it, but there you have it. Cast the first stone at will.

Dear Stranger

2011-01-06T13:32:00.004-05:00

Howdy,

Today, the Wall Street Journal took its eyes off the Congressional Government 101:The Constitution and You class and instead focused its reporting on a far more pressing concern:

How to choose greetings in emails.

Long a vexing problem for anybody who has ever communicated through a computer, the choice of what salutation to use when kicking off an email is almost as important, if not more, than the content of the message itself.

The article makes the case that usage of the word "Dear" as in "Dear Rolf," is antiquated and implies a intimacy that most people would be uncomfortable with. In other words, it is as archaic as standing up when a woman arrives at or leaves the table. Or calling women "Pumpkin" or "Muffin." Or, my personal favorite, "Cupcake."

Apparently, we are not to start letters with "Dear" anymore. So what are we to use?

One option is to open with the text of the email. This, however, can come off as abrupt and curt. As commissioner of a fantasy baseball league (that's right, ladies. Commissioner), I once got an email that just said "I just won the league. Where's my money?" Maybe if the guy had said hello before he demanded his winnings, I would have felt guilty about embezzling the pot.

Or you can use the word "Hey" or "Hi," which are basically what we use for starting conversations anyway. However, these can be a tad too informal. Imagine the following: "Hi Judge! Sorry to bother you, but I need a continuance for tomorrow's trial. You see, a sorority is having its annual reunion at my favorite bar tonight and I desperately need to 'just happen to be there.' Cool? Cool. Thanks!" Although if the judge somehow goes for that, congratulations! You've basically won your case.

The article suggests other words, but they are even worse: "Greetings," for instance, is the two-handed handshake of letter writing, best left to old Italian men who have not yet mastered the language. "Yo" is easy, and should be reserved only for frat brothers, as science has proved that the minute you start greeting a girl with it is the minute that she forever drops you as a potential future sexual partner. And, of course, there's "Salutations," which is the leading cause of email deletion on the internet today.

In fact, I would argue that a more pressing concern for email writers would lie in the valediction. I myself use "cheers," which is nice and vaguely British and connotes both that I wish the recipient happiness and that I am currently drinking, two events which are usually true. If it is the first email in an important or formal message, I use "Best." And, of course, the pronouny ones: "Sincerely," "Cordially," "Warmly," etc.

And those are about the only acceptable ones. "Kind regards," makes you sound like someone who everybody, including his friends, calls "Uncle Milton." Even Prince Charles wouldn't ever use "Toodles." And please, if you're a guy, never, ever, ever use "xoxo." Ever. Please. At the risk of sounding misogynistic, it's honestly just plain weird. If you wouldn't say it, don't use it.

That also applies to winky faces. Good God, what do those even mean?

Cordially,
Charlie

Blotto Lotto

2011-01-05T13:39:00.010-05:00

It is with great sadness that I acknowledge that I did not win the lottery last night.

Like millions of others, the thought of $350,000,000+ made me lose my mind a little bit. It's a staggering sum of money. ~~If you were the sort of person who believed that inflation was a myth, you could give each person in the United States one million dollars.~~

And after you threw away your money like that, you could keep going and give each and every person in, say, Colombia or Sudan their own million dollar check. I would guess that upon which country you choose to bestow your largess depends entirely on your drug of choice.*

I have never before bought a lottery ticket, believing it a waste of money. But when I heard the sum, I stepped away from the casino table and thought to myself, why not?

So I went to my local sketchy gas station and plunked down a ten dollar bill and willed myself to visualize the winning numbers. Unfortunately, I have spent 26 years consuming popular culture and am thus found wanting in the area of imagination.

I briefly considered picking the numbers from Lost that Hurley used to win the lottery. 4,8,15,16,23,42. I thought to myself, "The odds that my numbers get picked are awful. The odds that the Lost numbers get picked are awful. Two awfuls always cancel each other out. Ergo, I win. QED."

But right as I was going to actualize my flawless logic, reality hit me smack in the face. Did I really think I was the only idiot in the world who would choose the Lost numbers? Of course not. All across America, I pictured millions of people picking those numbers and then going to a fried chicken joint. Those people would all win and then we would have to split the pot. And whoever said sharing was caring was full of crap.

So, unless I wanted to end up with pennies, I had to choose new numbers. This I did, and I picked my numbers and went home.

Then, when 11:24 came, I was ready. I had my tickets in my hand. I tuned the TV to the right channel and stood there, making sure to angle myself in such a way that when I won and fainted, I would fall onto my coffee table, destroying it but at the same time creating an awesome anecdote that I could use at the press conference the following morning.

Of course you know what happened next.

I did not win. Two other people did. And yes, tons of people used the Lost numbers, but wouldn't you know it, not that many numbers matched so that each one of those people still won $150. On a $1 ticket.

So I sat down and I wept and I said goodbye to my condos in Boston and NYC and the beach houses in Santa Barbara and Lake Cuomo and the Mayan Rivera and the dozen bespoke suits from Savile Row and the 30 Hermes ties and the collection of Bruno Magli shoes and the 30-year old bottles of Scotch and the sports cars and the 80'' TV and the private jet and the penthouses at the Four Seasons and the American Express Centurion card and the happiness that only hundreds of millions of dollars can buy.

Sigh.

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

*I was told there would be no math.

The New "Fit"

2011-01-04T14:47:00.004-05:00

Someone made a good point yesterday that the first few days after the New Year turn gyms into unbearably crowded prisons of sweat and fat people. Resolutioners who need to meet their four-days-a-year-every-year quota show up in throngs, looking much like the crowds demanding a free Burrito whenever a Chipotle opens. There is, of course, a 90 percent overlap between these two groups.

In the past two days that I've gone to the gym I've accumulated some grievances which I would like to air here in a post that the aggrieving parties will never read.

1. These are weights. They are not menu items. Don't contemplate them the same way you would contemplate which Value Meal you want at McDonald's. This isn't a "Do I feel like a McFish today?" scenario. This is a "How much can I lift?" situation. Go to the weights. Pick up a big one. Can you lift it? No? Move down one. Can you lift that one? Yes? Awesome! Now move.

2. If you insist on using the cardio machines, please take a break from texting your pot dealer and actually use them. And I understand that Troga is a thing now, because of Modern Family, but there is a time and place for it and overcrowded hours are not the time and jamming your hand in my face is not the place.

3. Dude, when you're lifting weights, PUT DOWN YOUR GODDAMNED IPOD VIDEO! Dude! Come on! Are you really trying to lift one weight in one hand and then use the other one to hold your iPod so you watch an old Two and Half Men episode? Really? It really can't wait? Also, you have terrible taste in entertainment.

4. Yes, we shouldn't be judging you, but in our defense, you shouldn't be wearing jeans to the gym.

5. While I admire your ambition, I don't think a treadmill is the best place to both make phone calls and read a broadhseet newspaper. And I just really hope that whatever is in your thermos isn't coffee.

Yes, all of these things happened and they all involved 4 different people. I really can't wait for next week.

The Icebox got Iced

2011-01-03T14:14:00.002-05:00

Just in time for the New Year, my refrigerator decided to up and quit.

I know, right? Imagine my horror at waking up this morning and finding that the beer was warm.

NOBODY DRINK THE BEER! THE BEER HAS GONE WARM.

And then I remembered that it was 7.30 on a Monday morning and that there was nobody else in my house and that I was yelling at nothing but the figments of my imagination.

There is a special irony in having a fridge that does not work when the temperature outside is markedly below the industrial standards necessary for refrigeration.

I had brief flashbacks to the good old days at the Sun office, when we would be too lazy to schlep the beer all the way up the stairs to where the fridge was. So instead we would open the door and nestle the cases of beer outside amongst the snow drifts. Then, of course, we would need to set a timer, for if we left the beer out in the cold wasteland tundra of Ithaca for more than 20 minutes, the beer would freeze. And this would create frozen beer chips, which sounds awesome in theory, but anyone who has attempted to drink a beer with frozen beer chips in it can tell you that they are highly inconvenient, like the fatty parts in a steak.

Anyhow, the fact that technology has failed would not be a big deal if I could just put all my perishables outside in the snow. However, I live on a sixth floor. Dropping my beer on the snow here sounds somewhat dangerous when you consider it's a 50-odd foot drop, hopefully not on the head of some unfortunate pedestrian. While it seems like an easy fix, I have learned the hard way that tossing things out of windows occasionally has consequences.

And going down the elevator and setting them down gently would solve that problem, but then who, I ask you, who would keep vigilance over my unattended food items? I suppose I could, but it's cold outside.

Because people would eat them. Oh, trust me on this one, absolutely people would eat them. If you were walking down the street and chanced upon a nice little stack of beer and black forest ham, wouldn't you stop and have yourself a spontaneous picnic? F$%* and Yes you would.

So here I sit, slowly eating what seems like 4 pounds of ham. Why do I have so much ham? Well, I like my sandwiches to be roughly the width of a hypothetical Double Big Mac. And since I like to buy at least one week's supply of the stuff, necessity requires that I purchase it wholesale, in bulk. If I couldn't fashion a full-sized pig out of the available items in my refrigerator at any point in time, I'm due for a grocery run.

My landlord has informed me that I should be getting a new, working refrigerator sometime today, which should end this sudden and unplanned excursion into our past. I can't say I have learned much in the past few hours of being a hunter and gatherer, except that trying to hunt the ducks in the Boston Common is frowned upon by both children and the authorities.

A Brief Holiday

2010-12-23T18:31:00.001-05:00

By the by, I am in Mexico right now, enjoying doing little but eating, and lying out in the sun reading all day. This blog should resume normal business hours in the New Year, provided, of course, that immigration authorities allow me a safe and speedy returns to the American Land.

Happy Christmas, Merry Hanukkah, or Enjoyable Non-denominational-holiday-festivity-of-your-choosing.

The Phour Horsemen

2010-12-14T18:13:00.004-05:00

Last night, I had a nightmare that Cliff Lee signed with the Phillies. And he and Oswalt and Hamels and Halladay turned into manbearpigs and chased me down and then my shotgun jammed and they stood there laughing and dismembering me and when I woke up I wiped my hand across my forehead and thanked God it was only a dream.

And then I turned on the internets. And my top stopped spinning.

So there you have it. The Philadelphia Phillies have assembled what they like to call the Phantastic Phour, but should more properly be referred to as the Phour Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Next year, the Braves get to face them through the course of 19 head-to-head matchups. Yes, of course on occasion we'll draw whatever piece of flotsam they toss in to complete the rotation, but even the 2 or 3 games we have against this fifth Beatle will not be enough to counteract the absolute maelstrom that will be battling through their pitching staff.

On paper this team looks like it has a chance to win 120 games. Heck, the Phillies could throw out an outfield of Francouer, Melky, and the present-day Canseco and they'd still win the division by at least 15 games.

But let's not anoint them as champs just yet. The '97 Braves fielded a rotation where Denny Neagle had the worst ERA+ that year, which should be expected, but it was 144, which should not. The '98 Braves had 5 members of their rotation with at least 15 wins each. If you're keeping count, that's all of them. That rotation averaged a 144 ERA+. These are absurd, historical numbers. And, sadly, they weren't enough to win the Series.

That was three hall-of-famers in their absolute prime. The Phillies' starters are terrific, yes. But half of them aren't in their prime and the other half are not hall-of-famers.

Also, this is baseball. Sometimes you run into blind men like Eric Gregg, who misread the rules and thought the strike zone covered the plate and both batters' boxes. Or you run into a lightning-in-a-bottle team like the Giants. You just never know.

Don't get me wrong. The Phillies had an outstanding rotation yesterday. And then they went and signed the best free agent pitcher in the game. Without understating the metaphor in the slightest bit, imagine that Hitler had somehow gotten his hands on a nuclear weapon. This is exactly like that. It's really bad news for everybody else in baseball.

But this is baseball. That's why we play the games. And we shall never surrender.

(Storms the beach at Penn's Landing).

Bad News Bears

2010-12-13T18:30:00.004-05:00

Long before Stephen Colbert took up the cause on his show, I have maintained that bears are the biggest threat mankind has ever faced. For years I have been running around America, shaking people and screaming in their face until they listen to my warnings. I hate to be quite so pushy about the whole thing, but unless we stop the bears now, it will be too late.

Make no mistakes, bears are vile, evil creatures who will stop at nothing until they have eaten both you and your family alive. Bears, as a group, would like nothing more than to dine on each and every single one of us. Black bears, grizzly bears, brown bears, care bears, it doesn't matter what kind of bear. They want to see us burn. On a spit. And then served with a delicate but tasty garnish.

Sure, they may seem cute and cuddly. To that end, they have co-opted our popular culture and masquerade as children's guardians. Smokey the Bear, the Berenstain Bears, Winnie the Pooh and that asshole Teddy Ruxpin will smile and pretend to be cute and cuddly and then in the sark of night would generously season those children with salt and pepper and then toss them in the oven.

Their plan is the utter destruction of the human race, and for that they should all be destroyed.

If we are lucky and quick of mind, however, we may be able to trick them into destroying themselves. Witness the following clip, which I affectionally call "The Assassination of Yogi Bear by the Coward Booboo Bear."

I cannot wait for this movie to come out. Maybe then the endless commercials will stop. But if nothing else, it was all worth it for the cut scene right before the credits roll in the above clip. That's just priceless.

Meanwhile, stay safe, keep vigilant, and remember, Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you.

Now, if you'll excuse, I must return to my screenplay for the Snakes on a Plane sequel. It's called Bears on a Boat, and it will scare the living crap out of you.

Random Video of the Day LXXXII

2010-12-12T23:36:00.006-05:00

For those of you who go around singing "Let it Snow" and "White Christmas" and otherwise subscribe to the notion that snow is an essential part of any winter wonderland and upon seeing that first snowflake of the season immediately run outside and jump up and down and start making snow angles, I present Exhibit A in the case of Charlie v. Snow.

SNOW KILLED THE METRODOME.

To see that video and continue to deny that snow is an evil substance that should be shunned, reviled, and abhorred is irrational. It flies in the face of logic, reason, and the powers of human observation. Snow is bad. It is more that bad. Snow is the worst.

Somehow, it hasn't snowed in Boston yet. But rest assured, dear reader, that upon the first snowfall of the season, I will be out there, with a hair dryer and a portable generator, doing my best to destroy the snow before the snow destroys us.

Awesome like Ron Swanson

2010-12-09T11:18:00.004-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness.

It's refreshing to know that Ron F---ing Swanson and I share many of the same values. "Body Grooming: Only women shave below the neck." "Stillness: Don't waste energy moving unless it's absolutely necessary." And, of course, "Rage: One rage every three months is permitted. Try not to hurt anyone who doesn't deserve it."

Out to Lunch

2010-12-08T13:51:00.005-05:00

You know what we haven't seen lately? Law students wildly overreacting. Let's try and find one; it shouldn't be difficult.

Bingo!

A note appeared at a BU Law bulletin board setting forth the following terms (sic):

"To the asshole who stole my food this Friday ... Go to hell! ... You will die soon! ... When you eating food you will get choked and die immediately! When you sleeping, you will get burned and die immediately!"

Because it is law school, it seems that stealing someone's food is grounds for homicide. This is, of course, an excellent example of an overreaction.

Perhaps it is fitting that this occurred at the school that gave us the textbook definition of overreaction, where a student government election led to the bloodiest comment war Facebook has ever seen, the defriending of dozens, and a self-imposed exile.

So it should be no surprise that this has happened here.

The note shows a marginal command of the English language, a poor grasp of syntax, and an inexplicable aversion to complete sentences. This, of course, means the author is an LLM. So we shouldn't be surprised that he doesn't realize that the fridges get cleaned out on Fridays. On the other hand, we should really commend him for assimilating that part of U.S. Culture that thinks that all problems should be solved via the leaving of anonymous notes.

But to be fair, I can understand this guy's pain. His lunch got taken. This means he now has to go to the abominable GSU, fight his way through the hordes of freshman who just stay in one place and spin around in slow circles, and wait twenty minutes so the only place that's open will give him the wrong sandwich. If I'm already stuck in the law tower, which is awful, and have to go to the GSU, which is worse, because of a thief, I'd be pretty upset too.

And look, I shouldn't really be the one to talk. If you try to steal one of my fries, I will pin your hand to the table using my fork. I'm trying to picture what I would do if you tried to steal my whole lunch, but all I can see is a red haze.

So I understand. Unless it is funny, violence is not cool. But you mess with a man's food, you deal with the consequences. To paraphrase the immortal words of Chris Rock, I'm not saying he should have left the note, but I understand.

Bonfire of the Legalties

2010-12-06T16:54:00.004-05:00

Today I returned my Barbri books to the hell from whence they came.

If you'll remember, I had a brief existential crisis about whether I should return the books to regain a significant deposit or if I should instead burn them all in one wonderful moment of catharsis.

Sadly, the part of me that enjoys going "let's throw this hatchet into that tree" lost out to the part of me that went to law school and is now blind to every consideration that isn't money.

So the books went back and, for once, I have more money in my wallet now than I had before the weekend. Because my hoard of Scotch is dwindling (I'm down to only two bottles) I'm confident that this was the right choice.

And I am also heartened by the following. Check this out:

Those are my notes from the summer. An entire goddamned box of notecards and outlines and sadness.

Those I can't return.

But they sure look flammable to me.

So if you, like me, have procrastinated and find yourself with a collection of those fun, fun papers we spent all summer poring over, maybe you'd like to join me. I'll get the lighter fluid. You bring the beer. We bring the noise. And we laugh and laugh and laugh.

and laugh.

And yes, I am entirely serious.

Sunday Links

2010-12-05T19:37:00.004-05:00

Just a bit of light, Sunday night reading.

First off, the Boston Globe today had a terrific piece on the pending lawsuits between The Upper Crust and the illegal immigrants who claim to have been exploited by the chain. It is an excellent piece of investigative reporting, detailed and thorough. I wish it also gave us a clearer picture of the pizzeria's side of the story -- but that task is impossible, given a defendant's understandable desire to keep the record quiet in face of impending litigation. Regardless, this piece raises many significant questions, if only for the detail that an entire Brazilian town was conscripted to work at a single restaurant chain.

I know I make a lot of fun of the New York Times on this blog, particularly for their "lifestyle" pieces where they try to create a trend where there isn't one. But every once in a while, they come through with something like the following piece on Laptopistan, exposing the subculture of people who spend all day in a coffee shop working alone. These people always struck me as a bit of a paradox, and the article does a great job explaining how they are wired. It's very nicely written ("Throughout the week I will see only a handful of PCs, each looking sadly out of place, like they have arrived at a black-tie affair in a corduroy blazer."), and certainly worth a read.

Lastly, the excellent Chuck Klosterman piece from the NYT on zombies. I love it when an author I enjoy writes about stuff I enjoy. That in itself is a decent enough hook, but the piece is also great. The premise? "A lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies." His point, largely, is that in our everyday lives we encounter dozens of "wars of attrition," where, no matter what we do, the hits just keep on coming. Think of the never-ending battle to keep a clean inbox. Zombies, he argues, are just like that. "As long we keep deleting whatever’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid. Battling zombies is like battling anything ... or everything."

Random Video of the Day LXXXI

2010-12-03T14:50:00.004-05:00

Watch this. Trust me. And then we'll discuss.

Have you watched it? Good.

In modern times, it seems the sixth circle of Hell is populated by the likes of Carlton, Costanza, and the Hulk. Along with a vaguely recognizable cast of thousands of members of the F-list, they lip synch (poorly) to "Let it Be." And why? To appear on a Norweigan television show.

I wish I was making it up. But there you have it. Heck, they even convinced the surviving member of Milli Vanilli to lip synch. Milli Vanilli! Remember how that ended up? Yeesh.

God bless the internets.

Joga Corropto

2010-12-02T14:18:00.005-05:00

For those of you keeping track, the next few World Cups will be held in a rainforest, the tundra, and a desert.

In fact, a friend of mine came up with a fairly accurate visual representation of this phenomenon.

I was unaware that FIFA was tasked with assisting NASA in the search of places that can plausibly support life. Since we now know that there are organic entities that can subsist on arsenic, it's worth exploring whether exposure to high heat will allow for the survival of creatures subsisting of petro-dollar kickbacks and benzene.

For the record, the temperature in Qatar in July averages 115 degrees.

Also for the record, if you picked up the bustling hamlet of Elmira, New York thousands of miles east (or west, because at that distance it doesn't really matter) and set it down outside Doha, it would immediately become the third largest city in Qatar.

Look, I'm all for FIFA spreading the love and trying to jam its product into every unoccupied cranny of the world. I get it. Diversify and expand and whatnot.

But that's like saying, Hey, we've been drinking in the East Village way too long. Let's have our next bar crawl up in Spanish Harlem. It's dangerous, inconvenient, far away, and God knows if there are bars up there, but what the hell! Wild Card, bitches! Yee-hawwww!

That would never happen. Except here, Qatar -- playing above by Spanish Harlem -- has billions of dollars and enough know-how to misdirect the Corruption Police. Or, as he otherwise does business, the notary public of Zurich.

The good news is, in 2022, we'll all probably be dead. And if we're not, then I'll be pushing 40 and married with children, so I'll only be dead inside.

Lots of stuff to look forward to!

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

2010-12-01T11:33:00.005-05:00

In light of the most recent editorial by The Cornell Daily Sun, it seems like this push to establish a pub on Cornell's campus is actually a legitimate movement, and not just some crazy person's delusions at an assembly meeting.

For years, I have been that crazy person. Seeing others take up the cause is ~~enabling~~ encouraging indeed.

My idea for a campus pub was born on an icy, snowy day in late April of 2006. For reasons unknown, campus maintenance constantly declined to salt Ho Plaza, otherwise known as the busiest pedestrian area on campus. Thus, every trip from the libraries to points South -- which included the food in Willard Straight and the drinks in Collegetown -- became an exercise in becoming involuntarily airborne en route to eating it.

As I was sitting on the ice that day, rubbing my bruised ass, I thought to myself, "Boy, I need a drink." And then, as it happened every time, I heard the siren call of Rulloff's, beckoning with its $2.50 XX and $5 pitchers of Rock specials.

So I would look South, to Collegetown, and resolve to get up and go get a drink forthwith. Unfortunately, this meant walking in Ithaca. And between me and the sweet release of alcohol lay hundreds of feet of treacherous icy tundra.

For a moment, I contemplated the idea of a flask. I quickly dismissed that notion, as having constant access to whiskey would be act of final submission to alcoholism.

And then it hit me, like a ton of pumpkins dropped from the clocktower.

A campus pub!

Why on Earth did I have to walk to Collegetown to get a drink? I should be able to get a drink right here! After all, this is America, where I can always get what I want!

Campus options were meager. Sure, there was the Statler Hotel, but that was expensive. And the two cheaper options -- Helen Newman and the Big Red Barn -- were fraught with the two creatures upperclassmen dread the most: freshmen and graduate students.

And so was born this vision. A pub, on campus, entirely for us, the greeks and near-greeks that frequented Olin and Uris libraries. Something of a cross between Rulloff's and Olin cafe, located within easy shouting distance of the Buffalo Chicken Sandwiches at the Ivy Room.

(Don Draper voice)

Picture this, if you will.

Two students are sitting at a library, studying, poring over dozens of notecards and page after page of handwritten notes. The boy sighs. He has had it. That's enough. He slams his book shut, and looks up at the girl. She returns his gaze and nods. They get up and throw on their coats and walk towards the door. When they walk outside, they walk slowly, savoring the crisp air. But then you see them, ever so subtly, speed up. And they start walking faster. And then they reach Willard Straight and walk down a hall and then down a flight of stairs and they throw the door open. And that's where we stop following them. We see them walk into a pub. The two advance towards the bar, stopping every few feet to greet a friend and shake their hand. And then, just before the door closes on us, leaving us in darkness, someone shouts something indistinct, general laughter fills the room, and the last thing we hear is the clinking of glass on glass.

It's perfect. It's simple. It's timeless. And it's on campus.

On that day, I swore to myself that I would not rest until my dream of an actual campus pub became a reality. I told myself that, when I finally win the lottery and become a millionaire, my first substantial bequest to Cornell will not be earmarked towards financial aid or cancer research or any such other useful endeavor.

No, my gift will go towards a more noble effort. A pub on campus, open every day, ladies free from 7-9. A pub where, when you order 6 shots, you get 1 free, so you can make a new friend. A pub where the kitchen staff occasionally surprises a table with a tray of appetizers, because why not. A pub where the 100th person to walk in every night after 9 gets a bracelet, and they get to drink on the house all night.

A place where any person can find libation in their break from study.

A wonderful place.

A magical place.

A campus pub.

Are You Smarter Than an Eighth Grader?

2010-11-30T10:39:00.005-05:00

Before law school beat the living snot out of me, I considered myself a pretty excellent student. My report cards throughout K-12 were almost exclusively populated by A's. The random B occasionally made an appearance. And once, during a sunny February in the 9th grade, I got a once-in-a-lifetime C. This was because -- and, yes, really, I am not kidding -- I made the worst pinata in the class.

Somehow, I always grasped enough arithmetic, spelling, history, biology, and whathaveyou to sail through tests. I remembered the facts, wrote them down on a piece of paper, and happily reaped an avalanche of A's and a reputation as a know-it-all.

Of course, 90 percent of that knowledge now lies forgotten somewhere deep in the caverns of my memory. I once knew what ribosomes were supposed to do in a cell. Or how alkanes and alkenes were different from each other. Or how to solve a equations both quadratic and with three or more variables. But now, those facts only ring the faintest of bells -- those reserved for things you used to know but now you don't.

But then my world came crashing down.

I recently saw this reprint of an exam given to eighth graders in 1895. It is one of the most difficult things I have ever seen. If I got this exam today I would just stare at it, turn in an mostly blank page, and then go out and sit on the stairs and cry.

Two mitigating factors exist. Kind of.

1. While I am aware that I have mostly forgotten a lot of this information, I can't help but feel that I have never even heard of half the things they ask. It is never good when a word makes its debut in your vocabulary during a test. And it is especially bad when the question is something like, define a Trigraph.

2. Back in 1895, only the best and brightest made it to the 8th grade. Making it there was like receiving a Rhodes Scholarship today. Every other kid in America was either prepping the fields for harvest or functioning as a canary in a coal mine.

So those make me feel a little bit better. Not a lot. But enough that I don't want to cry and run to the teacher for an extra credit assignment. Still, look at this. Let me show you some of the questions in case you didn't click through to the full test. The questions are in bold letters, my answers in italics, and my thinking in non-bold, non-italic font.

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

Proper Nouns. That's one. Beginning of a sentence. Two. Acronyms. That's three, right there. Names of Movies. Four. Initials. That's five! I might make it! If you're German, to begin every Noun. Six. EMPHASIS. Seven! Pretending you're YELLING at someone in an email. Eight! Letter Grades. And nine! That last one was an easy one, all I had to do was picture the F I'm going to get.

2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

Wait. What? A bushel of wheat is a standard unit of measurement? Surely not. This must be a trick question.

One bushel of wheat that is the size of that box.

(Smiles Proudly).

4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

I understood about half the words in that sentence. It was also my understanding that there would be no math. If you, however, would like me to tell you how many years passed between the end of Chevy Chase's run on Saturday Night Live and the beginning of Tracy Morgan's, I can do that kind of arithmetic. Maybe.

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

This is a bar exam question. As such, I refuse to answer it until such time when I actually want to become a barrister. Thank you for understanding.

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

All I know about Kansas is that, when I play that game where I'm supposed to name all 50 states, I only get to 49, and Kansas doesn't come to me until the middle of the night three days after that.

Dorothy wants to go to there.

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.

(Stares in horror. Considers faking a seizure. Considers writing a desperate apology. Consider making an excuse like, "I was home sick with the plague," in order to explain away why I've never even seen these words before. Considers running away and joining the circus. Slowly lowers head to arms and weeps.)

9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

OK. Here's my shot. If I use all of those words in just one super-mega-awesome sentence, maybe I can get extra credit. Here goes:

As the rays of the west sped out of sight behind me, in a sunset dash of color that bled out like an emptying vein, it was in vain that I considered whether to feign razing the weather vane, right after Jebediah, citing the old prophesy, had raised it on the site where the old fane used to be, asking us all, "What in tarnation does 'fain' mean?"

WHODAMAN! Maybe I can pull this off! If I can get the next one, I'm golden!

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.

Crap!

Good Lord. What a spectacular failure. Thank God the Bar Exam was easier than this. Otherwise, I'd be stuck making pinatas.

Wiki Leakage

2010-11-29T17:43:00.003-05:00

Now that everybody in the U.S. State Department is screaming and turning cartwheels over the Wikileaks, I'd like to come in with my 26-years of wisdom and knowledge to offer some perspective.

(Adjusts tie)

Look. We all understand why you're upset. Nobody likes to have their skidmarked underwear flapping proudly in the breeze. And while the unmasking of sources and diplomats in a way that endangers them is a legitimate concern, let's remember the following: If there's anyone in the world who loves to listen to others who think they're speaking privately, it's the U.S. government.

Also, the feds would do well to heed its own aphorism, which I believe was that, "If you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about." And then they put on the plastic gloves, but we'll ignore that.

Here's the thing. I've gone through a lot of these leaked documents (yay, underemployment) and there's nothing blindingly awful in them. If they unearthed a memo about how to bomb Canada (and we know that there's a memo like that somewhere), we might have legitimate cause for concern.

But most of these are badly kept secrets. Trading Guantanamo prisoners for Obama visits? Saying that Israel and Iran have considered bombing the crap out of each other? That those super advanced bombs aren't actually from Yemen? That things in North Korea are really, really odd and we have no idea who's head rooster up there? That Sarkozy is thin-skinned? That Berlusconi is vain? That the two are, obviously, boys?

All old news. If these leaks did anything is that they exposed the undiplomatic side of diplomats. They showed how things get done in the international arena. They confirmed what we all already knew -- that international politics functions in much the same way as a high school cafeteria.

And this is a cafeteria where the slam book just got distributed to all the slamees. If you read the leaked memos, they're mostly gossip. It's what US Weekly would look like if they suddenly refocused their efforts on scoping out obscure African dignitaries. (And I know others came up with this analogy first, but I swear I came up with this incredibly obvious analogy independently).

Reading these is almost like what it would be like if you became privy to all the gchats and emails that were sent during 1L year, where everybody is talking about who is hot and who is crazy and who is hot and crazy and who they would and would not sleep with and who slept with who and who would never sleep with who and who should sleep with who and who should never sleep with who because, honestly, that would be an absolute disaster.

And to the extent where the wikileaks discuss policy and strategy, it is also mentioned on such a broad and general level as to defeat any concerns.

To go back to the 1L classroom gchat analogy, it's basically like reading the following IM:

yo, im going to go to the bathroom and when i do im going to walk past Regina and when i do im going to pretend to trip and on my way down im going to grab her boobs to catch myself lolz

Bad? Yes. The opposite of classy? Of course. Absolutely transparent? No doubt.

Like the bouncer said, it is what it is. This is what happens and everyone who pretends otherwise is living in a fantasy world of unicorns and rainbow cake. It's embarrassing to have everything out there, to be sure. But, please, everybody, drop the self-righteous outrage and stop calling the leaked gossip "worse than a military attack" by "a foreign terrorist organization."

Sooner or later, Medvedev will get over the fact that someone called him the Robin to Putin's Batman and will go back to drafting nuclear treaties that our Congress will conveniently ignore. And everyone will follow suit.

Like the wise man who will be missed said:

"The truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with a seat missing, but it hurts."

Elbows Off the President

2010-11-29T10:47:00.003-05:00

I don't know about you, but if I made the President of the United States bleed his own blood, I'd be absolutely terrified.

Obama took an elbow to the face this weekend during a "friendly" basketball game. This provoked massive bleeding, and required no less than a dozen stitches to fix.

While I am a firm advocate of the "No blood, no foul," rule, I have to admit it has its limits. And one of those limits should absolutely be when you're playing the leader of the free world.

For one, now our enemies know that Obama can bleed. Ergo, he is human. While the sight of his blood must no doubt disappoint those in the religious right who were sure he was the Antichrist --from whose wounds only a dark ichor can flow -- what this means for national security is a disaster. If Brobama can bleed, then we can fall. A massive vulnerability has been exposed.

Second, I'd be terrified because I'd be forever marked as the man who made the president bleed. Remember in elementary school, when the guy who took down the bully instantly became the top dog? And then others would circle the wagons, eager to take him down and assume the position of King Kong of Badass Mountain?

Well, this guy took down a president. Because of the unassailable logic of the transitive property, taking down the man who took down the president has become the most coveted act of the holiday season. Now everywhere he goes, anyone with a working elbow and delusions of grandeur will stalk him, eager for the opportunity to strike hard to the face and watch him fall.

And we all know what will happen next. That person will become marked, and the tango will begin again. And someone will take him down, and then someone else will take that person down, and so on and so on ad infinitum until every alpha male in America has enjoyed their fleeting reign as the Deadliest Elbow this side of the Potomac.

So now we face dual threats, both from outside and within our borders. It is the beginning of the end, and all because someone refused to be the Washington Generals to the Executive Globetrotters.

Random Video of the Day LXXX

2010-11-24T10:15:00.002-05:00

My brother made this commercial, coming soon to a television near you. The best part of it is the kid, who looks like Jonathan Lipnicki on crack.

Your Test is Wrong

2010-11-23T10:26:00.002-05:00

A buddy of mine will be taking the GREs in the near future. As part of his training, he has to endure practice questions during his study. While doing so, he came across the following gem, which he kindly passed on:

4. LAWYER : COURTROOM ::

a. participant : team
b. commuter : train
c. gladiator : arena
d. senator : caucus
e. patient : ward

Of course, my first instinct was to go with E. Remember that ward is just a nice way of saying loony bin. If there is anything in the world that accurately describes our legal system, it is the image of crazy people flapping their arms and squawking endlessly inside a nuthouse.

Unfortunately, I would have been wrong. The correct answer, I was informed, is actually C. This means that the makers of the GRE, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that there is a more sound logical leap from lawyer to gladiator than there is from lawyer to schizo.

To even group someone like me in the same category as someone who killed tigers with a spiked mace is to spit in the face of reason, logic, and the power of human observation. My analogizing of the end of college to a dead girlfriend was infinitely less tortured than what the testmakers are asking you to do here.

If I came across this question in the GRE and was told that Lionel Hutz has more in common with Maximus than he does with Charlie Kelly, I would immediately leap from my chair and raise hell until someone at the GRE Board was relieved of their duties.

Some would say that I picked the right profession. I would say that I have just proved my point.

The Oprahcalypse

2010-11-22T17:32:00.004-05:00

At the gym, we have a limited selection of channels -- basically the networks and PBS.

So I was at the gym this afternoon and Family Feud ended, which is fine, because that show lost all its dignity and gravitas upon the departure of J. Peterman.

And then another show came on. And I swear that, when I saw what was happening on the screen (there is no sound, just closed captioning), I thought that it was a news report about how a joint convention of spastics and epileptics was crashed by a supervillain who forced them to watch Japanese anime until they all collapsed in a twitching, screaming heap.

Of course that couldn't be it. And then I saw her and it all made sense.

Oprah's favorite things show.

Dear Sweet Lord in Heaven. All these women were crying and shrieking and fainting and waving their hands and jumping up and down and generally carrying on like ... well ... nothing I've ever seen before.

In fact, let me present a list that I like to call "Groups of people who can handle their shit better than the Oprah audience." Presented in descending order of keeping it together-ness.

1. Nerds when they see George Lucas

2. Followers of Steve Jobs.

3. Twi-hards and Gleeks and whatever the followers of Bieber call themselves.

4. Children when Barney walks into a party.

5. Children whose $250M-net worth dad dies on a non-estate tax year.

6. Baseball bloggers when a 13-12 pitcher deservedly wins the Cy Young.

7. Beatle-mania.

8. Drunks when the pizza guy shows up.

9. People at a bachelor party when the stripper shows up.

10. Drunks at a bachelor party when the stripper shows up with pizza.

And yes, I know Oprah's favorite things overreaction spectacular has been spoofed before, but it's difficult to make a parody when you're underselling the original.

Update: Holy crap, someone made a tumblr. This is going to replace the whale in my nightmares.

Furious Birds

2010-11-22T11:28:00.005-05:00

It is kind of disconcerting that what is, by far, the most popular and addicting game for the iPhone involves shooting what are, in essence, suicide bombers at buildings in order to make them collapse so that everyone in them is killed.

I'm talking, of course, about Angry Birds, a simple game where you launch birds from slingshots in order to defeat the evil pigs who have stolen the birds' eggs.

It is that stupid and frighteningly addicting -- I have recently "unlocked" the Angry Birds Addict "achievement," on account of having played this game for more than 15 hours. The fact that I have played this game for that amount of time is more than a little sad. I mean, even watching TV is more productive. Unless, of course, you're watching Glee.

But, in that time, I have managed to get three stars in every level, which requires a modicum of dexterity and dedication to a single cause. I am strangely proud of this achievement even though I recognize that my bragging rights are commensurate with those of someone who is pretty good at tic-tac-toe.

Of course, I am most bewildered by the random feelings that crop up when I'm playing the game. I can spend hours (yes, hours) trying to get that damned third star in a particularly frustrating level. And when I finally get it, I pump my fist and yell and would absolutely chest bump someone if I didn't live alone. And, frankly, this reaction kind of makes sense. Now that there's no one to play beer pong with, Angry Birds has become the only outlet for competitive achievement in the field of "sports."

That might be the saddest thing ever written on this blog.

Except it might be topped by this one -- when I fail to kill all the pigs, and they break into their hideous, smirking, leering smiles, I feel a level of rage and revulsion that used to be reserved only for the Urkels and Napoleon Dynamites of the world. I find myself wishing to visit an inordinate and irrational amount of violence on what are, at heart, nothing more than pixels in a video game made for cellular phones. I feel angrier than the actual angry birds. The fact that I can feel this much hate concerns me. Maybe I need to go for a run or something.

Now that I've managed to make you all concerned for my mental well-being, I finally get to the point of this post, which is to post this video. It's called "Angry Birds Peace Treaty," and it is terrific.

Say what?

Random Video of the Day LXXIX

2010-11-17T10:15:00.002-05:00

I often want to set Jimmy Fallon on fire. However, on his show yesterday, "Neil Young" and 70's Bruce Springsteen covered "Whip my Hair." And that's all kinds of awesome.

Steve Jobs Truffle

2010-11-16T13:55:00.004-05:00

I'll never forget where I was the day I could finally, finally, listen to The Beatles on my computer.

Perhaps the best part of this is I can finally stop using my Discman, which was, until today, the only way to have "A Day in the Life" be a portable song that goes where I go. And it's about time too -- those spongy black things around the earbuds on the headphones were really starting to chafe.

Best of all, now that I don't have to use my old cassette tapes, I can easily skip "Revolution #9" without wearing myself out on the Fast Forward button.

And it's a real nice "screw you" to lawyers and their 30-year lawsuits. Lawyers, as always, ruin everything.

So thank you, thank you, thank you, Steve Jobs, for making it possible for me to finally hear "Hey Jude," the way it was meant to be heard -- coming out of my computer speakers.

Na na nara na naaaa.

Yawn of a New Age

2010-11-15T11:54:00.004-05:00

Ten years ago, I was in high school. Being in high school often involves sitting for long periods of time and pretending to listen to somebody tell you things that you really don't care about. Remember the Golgi Apparatus? Or Cosines? Alkenes? No? Exactly.

Couple this with 7 a.m. start times, and it is no wonder half of us spent half our time trying to not fall asleep. The other half was spent asleep. Or at least, trying to stay asleep.

See, there was one kid in the class who enjoyed to mess with other people. He'd sit there and not bother anyone. But then he'd see someone start to fall asleep. As soon as he saw someone start nodding off, he'd mark them. They'd have his undivided attention. And he'd wait, like a velociraptor stalking his prey. And the person would keep nodding off, until, finally, he actually went to sleep. As soon as that happened -- and I mean, immediately -- the kid would be up in a flash and quietly walk up to the sleeper. And then he would grab the guy by the shoulders, shake him violently, and scream in his face, "WATCH OUT, YOU'RE FALLING ASLEEP!"

It was very entertaining.

The teachers, of course, condoned and even encouraged his behavior. It's understandable. Have you ever put someone to sleep? It's a sad realization when you think, Boy, I love what I'm talking about but I just bored the ever-sleeping crap out of him.

On the other hand, these are teachers. I feel like the first thing they teach you in Teacher School is that, no matter how fascinating you find mitochondria, students will be bored and yawn and fall asleep. It's science.

Of course, some professors handle this science better than others. Witness this epic meltdown in Cornell's Hotel School:

"YAWN OUTSIDE!"

Yeah, it's a little rude, but come on. Lock it up, brother. You're a grown man. Comport yourself accordingly.

Of course, if this had been Dr. Maas's class, he would have used the student as an example and centered his lecture around him. And then he would have propositioned his T.A.'s. But that's a story for another day.

Captain Jetes and the Unholy Uproar

2010-11-10T15:35:00.004-05:00

I have been asked to comment on the Derek Jeter winning a Gold Glove fiasco of yesterday. Of course, it is an atrocious choice. I have not been this fake outraged about something since Shakespeare in Love somehow beat out Saving Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar in 1998.

Look, the Gold Gloves are as legitimate as the Grammy Awards. If Homer Simpson can win a Grammy, then so can you. Anyone who follows baseball knows that Jeter is not an adequate shortstop -- he only had six errors because he could only get to about six ground balls -- and our minds won't change no matter how many Gold Gloves they throw at him.

The choice of Derek Jeter is indefensible. When I heard about it, I thought people were messing with me. Enough so that I had to check Baseball Reference, which published the full list with no additional comment except for an addendum right after Jeter's name stating (we can't believe it either). As someone else mentioned, there'd be less of an uproar if Jeter had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I think Ken Tremendous, as usual, nailed it when he tweeted, "Oh, he shouldn’t be paid $25 million a year to play shortstop? Tell that to the GOLD GLOVE HE JUST WON!” Of course he's just being facetious, but that's how some people argue. Fortunately, those people have just gotten fired from ESPN. Eventually, they'll all be extinct, and we can all stop angrily tweeting about them.

The final word should, as usual, go to Joe Posnanski, who wrote his usual thoughtful and original comment about The Jeter Question. If you were a Yankee, would you trade Jeter for Hanley Ramirez? Read through the whole article. The end will blow your mind, guaranteed. It won't blow your mind as much as Jeter winning the Gold Glove, but close.

Fired Joe Morgan

2010-11-09T14:22:00.004-05:00

Ring them bells!

Yesterday, the powers that be finally fired Joe Morgan and by doing so finally stopped his constant assault on progress and reason. This was tremendous news for baseball fans who like to watch baseball on Sunday nights without being subject to statements like, "I'd rather him have hit a double there, rather than a home run, because home runs kill rallies." Or this absolute abortion of an argument:

People are saying (Felix) Hernandez should win (the Cy Young award). I'm not saying he shouldn't. But how are you going to judge what he would have done if he was on the Yankees. It's tougher to pitch for the Yankees and win or the Twins than it is Seattle. All individual awards are team awards. My MVP awards were won because my team helped me. … I think the problem I have, though, with some statistics is we start to individualize the players. I don't want that. It's still a team game. ... When you start to individualize things like that, it takes away the team concept from the game.

Mr. Morgan, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. (Emphasis mine).

Now, with Morgan gone and Dibble -- Oh my God, Rob Dibble -- banished, I hope the fine folks over at FJM reconvene to rid the world of the third Cerberus head, in a new incarnation of their blog named "Fire TimMcCarver."

Although, I have to say, I will miss Jon Miller and this, the greatest call of the worst play ever.

It was a Pleasure to Burn

2010-11-08T14:13:00.002-05:00

I had a grand vision. Imagine, if you will, a newly harvested wheatfield. Only a handful of scattered grains remain, tossed about by the November wind. In the middle of this field, like an altar in the heart of the world, there is a circle of stones. All around it, dozens of people drink and dance, occasionally spitting mouthfuls of alcohol in the circle. At some predetermined point, everyone stops what they're doing. They reach into their pocket and each produces a matchbook. They light one match the conventional way. Then they take the match and use it to set the rest of the matchbook on fire. And then, at the same time, everyone softly tosses the incandescent torch into the circle. All of them land on the alcohol-soaked pile of papers, which instantly erupts into flames. And everyone, young and old alike, cheers and applauds and thrusts their fist in the air, as the "BarBri" logo on the green covers of those papers slowly disappears into the onslaught.

For months I had this vision. It sustained me on sunny June days, when the world was at play, ignoring me and my classmates as we sank under notecards and waited for the guy on the video screen to finish his awful joke so we could fill in the damn blanks.

In a way, my study arrangement was rather poetic. I kept my BarBri books on my windowsill, where they did a rather admirable job of serving as sandbags and pillories, shielding me from the world outside. When I sighed and looked out my window, there they were, thousands of pages strong, dozens of books deep, blocking my view, reminding me that I had to get through them if I ever wanted to join the people frolicking on the part outside.

So these books became the symbol of impotence and frustration. They represented the worst of that bleakest of summers. And what got me through the day was that initial vision. The image of that world to come when, after receiving our results and confirmation that we would indeed never have cause to use those books again, we would all congregate on a field and set them all on the fire that would return them to the hell from whence they came.

Given these ~~unrestrained and borderline crazy~~ romantic notions, by now you imagine that I would be back, missing hair on my knuckles and smelling like a bonfire, towing along happiness and a citation from the city of Boston for setting things on fire without a permit.

However, someone informed me that, in this summer's itemized list of the thousands of dollars of expenses that are required in order to turn children into lawyers, one of them is actually a deposit. Although the money we spent on classes and filing fees is gone forever, we can actually get some of it back. Provided, of course, that we return to BarBri the only tangible objects from that summer -- the books.

And it is here that we find ourselves. On the one hand, the soothing balm of catharsis via fire. On the other, money. Only one can remain.

But which one?

Sometimes You Eat the Bar

2010-11-05T18:10:00.005-04:00

Chaos on the East Coast today, as the New York Board of Bar Examiners first released, then retracted, then re-released with a retraction, the results for the New York Bar exam of July 2010.

The internet first erupted sometime in the early afternoon, as anxiety-riddled, recent law graduates first caught the hint of something in the wind. That something was the work of a presumably now discharged person in charge of the NY Bar Exam website, who accidentally published to a live internet the results of the July examination.

Since the internet is where things go to become immortal, this was all it took. Despite unpublishing the list within the hour, people took screenshots of the lists and posted them to legal blogs, which promptly crashed under the weight of the collective neuroses of over 3,000 people.

Of course, no one would certify that this was the list. GChat exploded as thousands of confused and frightened neurotics asked each other the pertinent question: Is this the pass list? Is this the list of all the people who took the test? Or, worst of all, IS THIS THE FAIL LIST?

Analysis of the list quickly proved fruitless. Although it had been drilled to law students that virtually everyone passed the bar exam (with 2 or 3 exceptions in a class of 300), lawyers lead the league in worrying about shit they don't need to worry about, and most everybody was still worried sick. Seeing everyone they knew on the list should have confirmed what everyone, deep down, knew but could not grow to accept: Of course we all passed the goddamned bar exam.

And how would we know if someone was not on the list? Asking that question would be like stepping into a school bus and saying, raise your hand if you're not here. And then saying, alright, everybody is here. Let's go.

And then, of course, like a screener that is leaked to the internet before the movie is scheduled to premiere, the Bar Examiners decided to hell with it and released the official list. And a mighty sigh trembled across the land, as newly-minted lawyers raced to update their Facebook statuses in order to hoard well wishes and congratulations.

I myself was part of the chaos, and was glad to be able to break the happy news to a couple of people. I almost felt like I was calling them to inform them that they had just won the Nobel Prize, except instead of a million dollars and applause from the King of Sweden, you get condemned to a lifetime of ulcers and agita.

All cynicism aside, I, like many of you, was a ghost for the entire summer and am more than happy to see the fruit of my efforts rewarded. Although my elbow still occasionally clicks from writing all those notecards, I have finally arrived at the culmination of 20 years of formal education. We are now, and will always be, attorneys-at-law.

. . .

"Blessing or Curse" for $300, Alex.

Random Video of the Day LXXVIII

2010-11-03T23:45:00.003-04:00

Say 'what' again. Say 'what' again, I dare you, I double dare you, motherfucker, say 'what' one more goddamn time!

Someone please do a mashup of these.

The Little Giants

2010-11-02T19:51:00.003-04:00

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the San Francisco Giants the least objectionable team in three years to win the World Series. I would also like to express my gratitude to both the Giants and the Rangers for knocking out both the Phillies and the Yankees, thus freeing me from the burden of praying for a meteor.

The Giants are a likable team, and I feel happy for their fans. If I have any regrets, it's that the Red Sox didn't make the Series to play against them. This would have undoubtedly fed the machine that is Red Sox Nation more hubris than anyone ever thought possible, let alone advisable. However, this would have been worth it, if only for the image of Tim Lincecum leaving a Fenway Park start and being ambushed by Ben Affleck and his town buddies on his way to the clubhouse. Then this would have happened.

Missed opportunities.

The Zombie Menace

2010-11-01T20:12:00.002-04:00

On occasion, I have the following imaginary conversation with God:

Me: Hey, God. What up?
God: Hey, I have a proposition for you.
Me: Yeah?
God: Yeah. Here's the deal. 99.6% of the world's population -- including your friends and family -- will be dead.
Me: Oh. That kind of sucks.
God: Well, maybe dead is the wrong word. Dead-ish. In short, it'll be a zombie apocalypse.
Me: Oh, AWESOME.
God: I knew you'd like that. Here's your Ruger.
Me: Cooooool.

I have to admit that I wouldn't be too bummed out if the unthinkable happened and some Arrowhead Project created a virus that caused a zombie apocalypse. To escape the drudgery of cardio workouts, I usually picture myself on a motorcycle with a shotgun strung across my back, weaving in and out of ruined American roads on my way to the North Carolina coast, where I hear some of their islands have become safe havens for survivors.

I then ignore the voice (which some call reason) that says, "Bro, you don't know how to ride a motorcycle, you'd probably shoot yourself in the foot, and if zombies can swim -- because, let's face it, why couldn't they? -- you and all your friends on those islands are effed."

So I ignore that voice, as is my wont, and continue to imagine myself scavenging for food in an abandoned roadside diner. As I find pancake mix that my sense of smell tells me is still OK, I try to remember how the heck you make pancakes. Then I hear a noise. I think it's a zombie, but when I try to shoot, I find that the safety is on. Cursing, I switch it off, but then I see that it is not a zombie, but a hot chick who kind of looks like Blake Lively. She was here scavenging first, but hid because she heard me coming and doesn't have a gun. I say something to the effect of, I'm glad I didn't shoot you because I don't know how to make pancakes. And then she laughs and says something like, good, because I do. And then she holds up a bag of chocolate chips. Score.

Hey, laugh at the huge nerd all you want, but if given the choice between that and 40 years of reviewing purchase and sales agreements, everyone would choose the zombies. And Blake Lively. And the chocolate chip pancakes.

Sigh.

But that, as they say, is why we have fiction. There's the excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, Shaun of the Dead, and Danny Boyle's gorgeous 28 Days Later, where the zombies can actually sprint. Max Brooks' World War Z remains the best zombie novel ever. It is also the only good zombie novel ever, but it is incredibly enjoyable, and what happens to North Korea still haunts me to this day. Heck, even Community did an awesome zombie episode, with the great line by Troy: "OK, I been bit, I been bit y'all. Stop. Congratulations, you did what zombies do." And, of course, Zombieland, with what is perhaps the best cameo of all time.

Even with all of that, I cannot understate how good last night's outstanding premiere episode of AMC's The Walking Dead was. Sure, there's all sorts of awesome zombie action, but nearly every scene in the episode was spot on (mild spoilers), from the very opening scene in the gas station to Lennie James going upstairs to try and take care of something to that lush, beautiful scene in the park to the part where Rick Grimes rides into Atlanta on a deserted inbound lane next to abandoned cars leaving the city and all you can hear is the clip-clopping of the horse's hooves. The production values are incredible, and it gets extra double excellent points for incorporating Frank "I made The Shawshank Redemption" Darabont as the show-runner. I know zombies ain't for everybody, but there's so much more going on here. Trust me and give it a try.

The Sun Office

2010-10-31T21:27:00.004-04:00

On last week's episode of The Office, we learned that Andy Bernard was an opinion columnist at The Cornell Daily Sun. This was at Cornell.

I was also an opinion columnist for The Sun when I was in college. Additionally, for a few short months I was put in charge of the opinion section, even though I could barely read and write. Part of my job as an editor was to occasionally stop drinking so that I could hire columnists and assign them to a schedule.

I must admit that a column titled "Bernard's Regards" would earn strong consideration based solely on its outstanding command of the virtually compulsory "Use Your Name as a Pun" rule for choosing your college newspaper column's moniker.

However, assigning a daily column to anyone -- especially a freshman -- would be out of the question. This would be a colossal mistake, on par with past mistakes such as hammer fights near the new computers and installing a basketball hoop that overlooked the parking lot where cars with windshields were supposed to park.

As to the Nard Dog's decision to squander an opportunity at a Sun editorship in favor of a spot on an all-male a capella group, I can only say the following: Yes, a capella singers probably got laid more. But they are a direct cause of the inexplicable popularity of the awful show Glee, and that is an unmitigated evil that cannot be overlooked, much less forgiven. May God have mercy on your soul.

Charlie from Ohio, Esq.

2010-10-29T13:34:00.003-04:00

I'd like to inform all concerned parties that I can now officially represent myself in court.

If you need a lawyer, feel free to give me a call. Chances are I'll refer you to a more adequate and competent lawyer. But if you could tell that lawyer to hire me, I would be very grateful.

Now that I have passed the Massachusetts bar exam, I can now append "Esquire" to my name. Reports that this was the only reason that I became a lawyer are exaggerated. I also get to begin sentences with the words, "As your attorney," which is all kinds of awesome. Turn-ons also include being called "counselor." As in, "You better take off those pants, counselor."

This is decidedly good news, but they also come with a bit of trepidation. I feel like I was just told, "Congrats! Come in!" And I'm walking into the party, and I'm adjusting my cuffs as I take a look around. And what I see sends me straight to the bar, where I order a double. No. A triple. You know what? How much for the bottle? OK, give me two.

Terrific news. I'm going to go have a scotch, right after I put on a shirt.

When a Man Loves a Wingwoman

2010-10-28T13:21:00.004-04:00

As I stumbled through the internets today, I came across this:

http://www.hireabostonwingwoman.com/

Yes, that's a thing.

On the surface, it seems like a good idea. I have long advocated for the use of women as wingmen, notably in this post, which I excerpt now:

Once the presence of a woman who -- in the target's eyes -- finds the male attractive has validated the target's own notions of whether the male is attractive or not, the target's natural competitive instinct will kick in. The target will then proceed to actively (and, God willing, literally) fight the female wingman for the male. The male, would of course prefer to remind everyone that Sharing is Caring. Unfortunately, this is not Cinemax.

Anyone who doesn't believe women are ultracompetitive about men would do well by watching the ceremonial tossing of the bouquet at any wedding where the ratio of single women to women in a serious relationships exceeds 1:1. This is adjusted depending on the bride's age -- you subtract the single women's side of the equation by 0.1 for every year the bride is over 25. This is what is known as the "Always a Bridesmaid Rule." It is science.

So it seems that some entrepreneur has decided to take the wingwoman idea and monetize it. How does it work? Exactly as you would expect:

Our WingWomen are attractive, confident, relaxed, and sociable. When you are out in a public area with one of these women, you convey the message that this is the company you keep. Through your interaction with the WingWoman and her interaction with a lady of your interest, the social boundaries break down and this makes a smooth transition to meeting someone.

Exactly. Exactly right. You know, this isn't a terrible idea. And how much does this cost?

Our services are offered on an hourly basis at $65/hour, with a 2 hour minimum, and $30 every 1/2 hour thereafter. After providing the following information, you will be lead to a payment section, where you can specify the intended length of time you would like.

Holy crap! The more I look at this, the more this looks like your regular, run-of-the-mill "rent-a-friend" service. At this point in our culture, about the only acceptable services with hourly rates are Zipcars and dog-walkers. Maybe spas. Probably not spas.

And why would they say "length of time" in the payment section, as opposed to "amount of time?" My this-is-a-euphemism-for-something-but-I'm-not-sure-what meter is buzzing off the charts on this one.

I wonder what would happen if the night turned out to be bust. Would they offer your money back, or would they guarantee your satisfaction? And what happens if you try to pull an Al Gore with the masseuse play?

At that point, prudence might dictate that you're better off with the company of a hooker, who would naturally give you more bang for your buck.

What's my Age Again?

2010-10-25T08:34:00.003-04:00

I walked into the Sun office last night. Besides dating myself with comments like, "We didn't have Twitter or iPhones when I was in college," nothing made me feel older than the following conversation.

Me: Do you guys still get like, a thousand CDs to review that no one wants?
Them: What?
Me: For the Arts section, don't you get free CDs sent here to review and they suck and no one wants any of them?
Them: . . . No . . .
Me: Oh.
Them: What's a CD?

Hammer Time

2010-10-22T19:40:00.002-04:00

Usually, I enjoy procrastinating, and Halloween is no exception. Come the 31t of October, you can usually find me standing in my closet after dinner, scanning my clothes and figuring out which combination thereof would serve as an adequate costume.

Of course, I could go out and be creative and buy things and make things and fashion a good costume. But that involves a lot of work. And I don't mean to be lazy, but it's too much work to not be lazy.

And then I learned that the first Halloween would be this weekend. As in tonight, a full 9 days before the actual date. This cut my procrastinating time significantly. It was quite the pickle.

So I sat down, rubbed my chin pensively, and commenced to think. What would be a good costume?

The first idea was to go as Don Draper. This would be a terrific costume, except the materials involved in its making are already ones that I use on an everyday basis. I'm already the guy in the suit with a glass of Scotch in his hand when I go out to bars. This would only be a costume if hanging out around other people in costumes were considered a costume. I suppose I could take up smoking, except people would say, "you didn't dress up for my Halloween party and now you're smoking in my house?" Also, I'd rather not get cancer.

Similar concerns nixed Barney Stinson, costume idea number two.

Other costumes seemed played out. Everyone and their mother will dress up as Chilean miners. This is the first Halloween where the Jersey Shore has existed, so expect a lot of that. What about Lady Gaga, or someone from Glee? Please. I'd rather stay sober during Halloween.

And then it struck me. I had a difficult time thinking of someone who is awesome but does not wear a suit. A main character in an old but awesome, Emmy-award winning, terrifying musical blog.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Captain Hammer, of the excellent Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Superficial, in love with himself, and boasting a self-esteem that outkicks its coverage? I'm not even going to have to act. In fact, I'm going to have trouble refraining from speaking in a superhero voice for a couple of weeks, so fair warning.

It's perfect, it's easy, and I have assembled a costume that looks like it was stolen from the show. I've already recruited a Dr. Horrible, and, with a little luck, a Moist.

So fear no more, America. Captain Hammer is here.

Random Video of the Day LXXVII

2010-10-21T13:19:00.003-04:00

I don't know if Tracy Morgan singing Scarborough Fair is the stuff of nightmares. Ask me tomorrow morning.

Hulu Confidential

2010-10-20T10:50:00.000-04:00

Incidentally, Hulu just made available, for our pleasure, the entire run of Kitchen Confidential on its website.

This is a show that premiered five years ago and made only thirteen episodes. Of those thirteen, only four were ever broadcast.

Yet it is excellent, and remains a charter member of the great-but-canceled club. It is loosely based on Anthony Bourdain's book of the same name and stars Bradley Cooper in his pre-Hangover days, but already in full asshole-at-the-party mode. You also need to overlook the fact that the show is set in a NYC kitchen that is staffed with maybe 10 percent Mexicans. Anyone who has ever eaten in a NYC restaurant will know that the number needs to be at least 99 percent.

Regardless, I heartily recommend it.

Visitation Rights

2010-10-19T14:27:00.006-04:00

I live roughly 3,500 miles away from my parents.

While I of course miss them, the vast distance is largely accidental. I am a big fan of the Northeast, and if you want to blame anyone for how far away that is from Central Mexico, I would point the finger at tectonic plates.

That said, the amount of time it takes to travel between Boston and Queretaro is not without its strategic advantages.

Take, as an example, my little brother. He is a resident of the state of Texas, which sits a mere 1,200 miles from our hometown. Occasionally, he will receive a phone call from my Dad's cell phone, who would him that they were out for a Sunday drive, decided why not, and now found themselves at the border, on their way to visit him, and would be arriving in a couple of hours.

Panic would naturally ensue.

Because I live so far away, I believed myself exempt from these surprise visits from the parental regime. Such a long trip would require time and planning. My parents would have no choice but to give me plenty of notice -- I imagined this would, at the very least, be a week.

Conveniently, Operation: Obliterate All Signs of Being a Twenty-Something Living in a 21st Century American City has a timetable of one week, carefully calculated by the best engineers and scientists America has to offer. It is fool-proof. A week is just enough time to mop, vacuum, dust, scrub, clean, and get rid of the bodies. Just enough.

Except when my parents call me and tell me they'll be here in a couple of days.

I received their call on Sunday. They should be here juuuuuust about any minute now.

I did what I could under the new time frame. I believe the Operation, although hastily executed, has been largely successful. Now I know that I really should have gotten rid of the bodies first, because I had to do all the other things again. I would love to double-check but I don't have time.

Unfortunately, nothing could be done about what's in the closet, behind the suits. I pray they never go in there.

If they do, avenge me.

Blogging Duty

2010-10-18T14:47:00.005-04:00

It's no secret that computers make everything better. This is especially true if that thing is boring, like law school.

Another truism is that bloggers love to blog about boring things. In fact, the more boring the thing, the more bloggers love to blog about it in their blog. As evidence, I present every post that has preceded this one.

And what happens when you put both of the above premises together?

You got it!

Bloggers blogging about jury duty!

Can you feel the electricity in the air?

At first blush, it seems like a terrific idea. After all, the juror is more likely to pay attention in order to harvest blog fodder. If he doesn't remember a detail, looking at his blog might refresh his memory. And by not using names, specifics, or any other identifying characteristics, everyone's privacy is preserved, nobody talks about the case, and the integrity of the system is preserved, correct? All that and not being bored to tears while the state psychologist goes on and on about her post-graduate degrees and record of publications? Why, that's as terrific as sliced bread!

What could possibly go wrong?

To Professor Clark, Mr. Slutsky’s blog posts clearly “crossed the line.” Jurors are not allowed to talk to one another about the case, “much less go on the World Wide Web and discuss it with everybody,” he said.

OK. That's a fair point. We don't want to open up a message board where people fight about who goes first and whether or not the assault victim got "Pwned!" But if you actually think that jurors don't talk to one another about the case, you are only lying to yourself, you liar.

(Also, yes, that's actually the guy's name. Let's just get this over with. (Giggles for ten minutes))

However, if you actually read the posts involved in this story, you'll find that they only barely touch on the case at hand, mention no specifics, and refer almost exclusively to how boring being on a jury is. Which is absolutely true, despite what John Grisham would have you believe. So what irked off the professor?

Professor Clark pointed to one entry in particular that he said went too far. On Oct. 6, his ninth day of jury duty, Mr. Slutsky wrote about the plaintiff’s taking the stand for the second day. “It was really annoying when the witness got the same question over and over,” he wrote. “This is very annoying.” He added that much of the evidence “is not relevant to the jury’s ultimate decision of liability.”

This entry could have been especially problematic had the lawyers discovered the blog and tracked it, Professor Clark said. “If you’re an attorney and you’re reading this, you may go try to recover from that,” he said. “You may try to go back the next day to try to clear up something.”

Of course the lawyer would read a post about how annoying repetitive questioning was to everyone who hears it and would immediately make a motion to recall the witness, wait for him to come back, put him on the stand again, and ask him more questions. Because if they teach you anything in trial advocacy, it's that the more you ask the witness the same questions, the clearer his answers will be.

In judging the evidence, Mr. Slutsky may have been breaking the judge’s instructions to keep an open mind, Professor Clark said. “He’s actually kind of telling what he’s thinking, and the jury hasn’t even begun deliberating yet,” he said.

Oh, come on. Really? What do you think jurors are? Blank slates who only absorb information during the actual trial, collecting it in their subconscious, and hold off on flipping the mental switch to "Analyze" after the judge sequesters them for deliberation? You don't think they are prejudiced from the start based mostly on first impressions the instant the plaintiff and defendant show up with their body language and choice of clothes? You really think jurors don't judge every single thing during every moment of the trial where they actually pay attention? Are you actually a law professor?

“Maybe the law needs to be amended to accommodate blogs,” Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor, wrote in an e-mail. “No doubt this sort of thing happened and happens a lot on a smaller scale (juror to friend, relative over dinner), and no one learns of it.” The instructions say not to discuss the case, but do not mention writing about the case.

Of course it happens on a smaller scale. Jurors talk about the case they're on all the time. Always have, always will. Everybody knows about it, but nobody cares because 99 percent of those conversations are exactly like this:

Mike: Yeah, so I had jury duty today.
Ike: Ugh.
Mike: I know.
Ike: That sucks
Mike: I know.
Ike: At least you got to skip work.
Mike: Yeah, that was nice.
Ike: Yup.
Mike: Yup.

And of course we end on the oldest lawyer trick in the book. "The instructions only said discuss. They never said anything about writing. Duh." Hey, I know copying on the test is forbidden, but I was just making sure we both had the same answers, Ms. Krabapple! What am I, on trial here?

Transcending Transition

2010-10-15T16:09:00.004-04:00

As I sat in my cave today, contemplating how I'm going to take over the world, I happened to glance at my Google Reader and noticed that my name was on someone else's blog post.

I stared at it for a little bit. Then I rubbed my eyes, not believing them. Then I stared at it again for a bit. Then I took out my English-Spanish dictionary and consulted it.

Yep, there it was. My name and story on someone else's blog post.

Somewhere in the distance, I could almost hear a clock start ticking on my 15 minutes of fame.

This is the aforementioned piece. Metaezra, a Cornell alumni blog, has developed this feature wherein they interview recent graduates about how they transitioned from college to the real world. And they asked me a few questions about my own transition experience.

Why me? I don't really know. While I am, in my own mind if nowhere else, devastatingly handsome, charming, and witty, they are really stretching the definitions of "recent" graduate and "real world" by picking a guy who graduated over three years ago to do something as far removed from reality as law school.

I suppose that my transition experience -- a phrase which, in a rather hideously apt way, recalls the final church scene from Lost -- is fairly interesting. You'll recall that three friends and I took a jaunt across America following college. This is, of course, the celebrated Three Jews and a Mexican Road Trip of '07, which has been extensively chronicled here.

The trip has since begot a sequel, Three Jews and a Mexican II: Three Jews and One Hundred Million Mexicans. A final chapter in the trilogy is in the works, although I am still discussing with the other producers about whether renaming it Three Lawyers and an Engineer would take the franchise in an exciting an litigious new direction.

And now, our humble little trip is the subject of an interview about cool things kids can do after completing college forces them to leave it. I could not be prouder.

Now that I'm more famous than a Chilean miner, I should warn you: Expect erratic behavior, a dalliance with Lindsay Lohan, a reality show, and a brief stay at the Betty Ford Center, not necessarily in that order. It's a Hollywood thing.

And if you need to get in touch with me, have your people call my people. Oh, and paparazzi, I'll be at Spago. I'll make sure to get a table on the patio with minimal sight line obstructions.

...

What do you mean I'm not on the list?

The Calls of the Century

2010-10-14T15:07:00.005-04:00

Today, Joe Posnanski, ~~perhaps~~ the best baseball writer working today, unveiled a list of the 32 Greatest Broadcast Calls in Sports History.

It's a terrific list, extremely fun to go through, and hard to quibble with.

If you'll allow me one indulgence, however, I'm going to say that Skip Caray's call of the 7th game of the NLCS is missing. While I won't contend that it deserves to make the list over any of the other inclusions, I will say that it is hands down my favorite call.

Of course I'm biased. Even Fox News isn't this shameless.

But look at the situation. 7th and deciding game of the NLCS. Bottom of the ninth. Braves are down 2-1, but they have runners on 2nd and 3rd. However, they also have two outs and the man they're sending to the plate is Francisco Cabrera, who totaled 12 plate appearances that season on his way to a career batting average of .254. And then this happened.

For you non-Braves fans, you can also see a pre-steroids Barry Bonds fail to throw out Sid "Wheels" Bream and his fantastic mustache. There's just something for everyone there.

Statler State of Mind

2010-10-13T13:35:00.005-04:00

Of the 161 Things to do at Cornell, I'd say that "making fun of hotelies" is a rather large oversight on the list. I'd venture a guess that people are more likely to make fun of hotelies than, say, "milk a cow."

But nothing could be more removed from reality.

With the benefit of hindsight and maturity, I'd say that hotelies had the best go of it at Cornell, bar none.

This is true especially if you subscribe to the notion that the most important part of college are the academics.

Sure, architecture is pretty essential and engineering is something nice to know if you're going to rescue 33 trapped miners. But let's leave the actually practical and useful majors and schools out of this, since they are inconvenient to my analysis.

I'd be lying if those classes at the hotel school don't sound awesome. In order to be able to take the spirits class, you had to take the beers class. And in order to take beers, you had to go through wines.

Then they have the new viticulture and enology major. Or "Introduction to Casino Operations." Or the meat class, where the final exam is in the slaughterhouse and involves butchering a newly dead cow, followed by a cook-out where you can grill the Prime Rib that you just harvested with your own, bloody hands.

These are useful classes. And they're fun. And they're complemented by less fun but probably more useful classes like Corporate Finance and Business Law.

Meanwhile, I was an English major, sitting in a dark classroom listening to Victor drone on about how Lady Mary Wroth's poems are more representative of the Elizabethan tropes of phallocentrism and temporal displacement than John Donne's sonnets. Then we'd adjourn and go to Stella's, where the women would wear turtlenecks and the men would cross their legs at the knees and everybody would make fun of Hemingway. Later, we'd go home and work on our 20-page papers about how gendering and post-capitalistic hegemony neuterized the Bronte sisters.

And I had the gall to mock hotelies.

Look, I love the liberal arts. I'm not going to sit here and say that my college education wasn't useful.

But I will sit here and say that classes like "Super Smash Brothers Melee Theory and Practice" are really, really, really useless. That's an actual class at Oberlin. If you click through to that link, you'll find equally useless classes at similar liberal arts colleges. "Philosophy and Star Trek," anyone?

The trick is blending practical education with a liberal arts education in a balanced way. Spectacular insight, right? You think it would be easy. Why can't we combine the two in a way that gives you a basic humanistic foundation upon which you can build a practical, tangible skill set?

Cornell, show me what you got.

"How about HADM 5590: Derrida and the Philosophy of Hospitality?"

Sigh.

The End of an Era

2010-10-12T10:29:00.006-04:00

I guess it wasn't meant to be.

Much has been made of how this was Bobby Cox's last season, and with good reason. He managed the Braves for 25 years, 15 of which were the most storied in the history of the franchise. During that, he compiled the fourth most wins in baseball history. It's a tremendous career and it is very difficult to see him go. If nothing else, at least the Braves' early playoff exit will spare us all the countless Tim McCarver and Joe Buck hagiographies in which they beat the legendary man into the ground.

In the middle of the summer, the Atlanta Braves looked like a genuine World Series contender, boasting the best record in the National League. This was before Oswalt became the third head of Cerberus in Philadelphia, before Cliff Lee joined Texas, and before the Rays and the Yankees started winning every game except the ones where they played each other.

But then baseball happened. Within weeks, the Braves lost Chipper, Martin Prado, Jair Jurrjens, and Kris Medlen. All of a sudden one of the deepest benches in baseball became one of the weakest lineups in playoff history. I'll admit to crippling bouts of homerism on more occasions that is appropriate. But even I had to recognize that a team that is pinch-hitting with Diory Hernandez -- proud owner of a .424 OPS in the major leagues -- with their season on the line is a team that is going home.

The lineup was not overwhelming even with Chipper and Prado, but it was solid. Their loss, however, was devastating. Filled with hitters who are, to put it politely, not-quite-ready-for-primetime, it was only a matter of time. At least bowing out to the Giants saved the Braves from the privilege of being the first team ever to be on the wrong end of three back-to-back-to-back perfect games in the NLCS. Over the last month of the season, I can think of no better analogue for the Braves than this:

If there is one silver lining to the Braves' elimination last night, and if you will permit me a bit of a rant, it is that we will never have to endure the presence of Melky Cabrera in a Braves uniform again. At this point, I am not sure who is a more awful ballplayer, Melky or Jeff Francouer. By every statistical measure, Melky was the worst outfielder in baseball this season. He had a -1.2 WAR. You could plug in Ryan Klesko's 40-year old legs in left field and he'd do better. Melky can't run, he can't hit, he can't field, he can't throw. He's the quintessential no-tools baseball player. To those who haven't had the opportunity to watch him play baseball, I say: Picture a turd who grew legs but doesn't quite know what to do with them. Nothing could switch my mood from mild to enraged faster than a one-pitch Melky at-bat, or a routine ground ball to left field that suddenly turned into a triple. The man is an abomination, and I am actually turning cartwheels at the realization that I never have to see him befoul Turner Field again. Good riddance, and may we see you in hell before we see you in Atlanta again.

(Deep breath)

Sorry. I needed that.

There were great things about the year, don't get me wrong. Tim Hudson's comeback player of the year season. Tommy Hanson's ascendancy. Derek Lowe's late season re-birth. A bullpen that is beyond outstanding -- even with the lost of Billy Wagner, who had a final season for the ages, the emergence of Jonny Venters and Craig Kimbrel is a tremendous boon for Atlanta. Brian McCann continues to put up numbers as good as Joe Mauer's, with a fraction of the press. And, of course, Jason Heyward, who posted an OBP of over .390 at age 20, who runs the bases better than anybody I've ever seen, who will have a great season next year and a beast of a season the year afterward, the first of many in what will be a historic career. Believe the hype. It's real.

And so ends another baseball season. It's a shame that the Braves couldn't see their manager to a championship on his last tour. Still, it was a better season than anyone expected, particularly when you take the injuries into account. Nothing beats fighting for the playoff spot on the last day of the season, unless you are suffering through a division series where all the games were decided by one run. This was a memorable, unforgettable season, fielding perhaps the most exciting team since that lone World Series 15 years ago.

And now it is over. The idea of anyone but Bobby Cox in the Braves dugout is sad and bewildering. It wasn't a World Series, but at least there was playoff baseball in Atlanta once again. It was the very least that the man deserved. Thanks, Bobby.

Random Video of the Day LXXVI

2010-10-11T18:41:00.001-04:00

Last night's Simpsons intro was one of the bleakest, most awesome things the show has done in ten years. Wait 'til you see how they seal the boxes.

The Essential Mario Vargas Llosa

2010-10-08T11:42:00.003-04:00

Many people were complaining yesterday that Philip Roth, once again, was passed over for the Nobel Prize in Literature. And I sympathize. Believe me, I do. I'm a huge fan of Roth. I have even read The Breast -- an awful, awful, awful take on Kafka's metamorphosis where the main character finds himself turned into not a cockroach, but a giant female breast.

But The Plot Against America is excellent, as is I Married a Communist, and Roth should really win the Nobel even if the only book he ever wrote was the extraordinary American Pastoral. His Nobel is long overdue.

That said, you really ought to read Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat. The follow that up with The Time of the Hero and then with The War at the End of the World. These are all epic, valuable novels. I can't think of another author who, when I finish the last page, leaves me both simultaneously stunned and wanting to set things on fire. Maybe Cormac McCarthy.

Anyway, I know Garcia Marquez and Borges usually get most of the platitudes when Latin American writers are brought into the mix. But Vargas Llosa really is an astonishing writer. Sometime soon, Roth will have his day. In the meantime, try Vargas Llosa. He won't disappoint.

Losing My Shirt

2010-10-06T22:16:00.004-04:00

So I have this t-shirt that I really only wear to the gym. It's a Cornell Baseball t-shirt and I've had it for something like seven years now. And I really like this t-shirt. Mostly it's that it's so comfortable after seven years of use that it feels like it's made from angel feathers. I would gladly hunt angels if it meant I could wear shirts that were this comfortable. But also, there's the fit. I don't know how whoever made it cut it, but it somehow fits me snugly and makes it look like my torso is a V-shape. In reality, my torso is more of a capital I-shape, if the serifs at the top and bottom of the capital I were on some sort of steroid. But that's why I like this shirt, because it produces the illusion that I am cut.

And I know I only wear it to the gym, but sometimes there are females in the gym. And since I'm impressing nobody with my weight routine, I need the shirt to tell whichever woman looks at me some sort of story to cover up the inadequacy of the weights I use. For instance, maybe I am someone who was once, like, really in shape, but then got really sick, but it's OK, because now I'm OK and I'm back and I'm slowly getting back into it, which is why I'm using these weights instead of those huge ones. It's a story I can live with, and I feel that the shirt communicates that to people. If I wear any other kind of shirt, well, then, the truth is out there, and some people just can't handle the truth. No pun intended.

Anyway, the issue is that the shirt I am so fond of is, like I said, seven years old. And that is old for a shirt, especially when it's a shirt you take to the gym and drench with sweat. See, sweat is to shirts as asbestos is to humans. You can only be exposed to so much of it before you start decomposing. So the shirt is constantly drenched in sweat and I have to wash it all the time. But imagine that you took a person with asbestosis and then soaked him in boiling hot water and then spun him around at 1,000 RPMs. Yes, you might knock the asbestosis out of him for a little while, but that person, just like the shirt, can only take so much of that before it starts to fall apart.

So my shirt, having been beat up by sweat and the washing machine for seven years, is disintegrating. Small holes started appearing in random places, and then those holes became bigger holes, and now my shirt is kind of ripped. And most of those rips are concentrated in the chest area. Personally, I blame the chest hair. It must not be easy to be in constant friction with what is essentially my body's tropical rainforest. You know how some people who run the marathon, their nipples start to chafe? I think my chest hair has chafed my shirt.

In any case, there are holes all over my shirt and they used to be small and insignificant, so I didn't care. But now they're slightly less small and considerably less insignificant and some chest hair is starting to poke through, kind of like when you see old Mayan ruins being slowly reclaimed by vegetation. And it has quickly become a shirt that I really ought not to wear in public and I guess I really should throw it out and get myself another one. And I know it's cliche that guys hang on to their t-shirts far beyond the point of rationality, hygiene, and acceptable personal appearance, but goddamnit. I really like this shirt. It's comfortable. It fits. I refuse to throw it out.

And it's been like that for three weeks. And then today, when I put it on, I noticed something awful. One of the holes had embiggened itself to the point where -- you guessed it -- certain angles gave you a view of my right nipple. And that's just not going to cut it. While I occasionally take off my shirt in public, I only do that by request. People aren't going to get a free show just because the quantity of my shirt has declined to the point where its effectiveness is compromised. That and it's all or nothing. You don't get a sneak peek, or a teaser preview, or an excerpt of the first three chapters of the novel. With me, you get the Full Monty.

So that's where we stand now. I hate to say goodbye to this shirt, but its time has come. If I could put it on a boat and set the boat on fire, I would do that for this shirt. If I could find a small piece of iceberg, I'd gently place the shirt on it and then push the little piece of ice out to sea. If I could shoot it out of a cannon, I would. The shirt has served me well and I feel like it deserves some sort of rousing send-off.

In the end, I guess, I'm just going to take off the shirt -- of course I'm wearing the shirt now -- and throw it in the trashcan and never see it again. And then I really should put on another shirt, but the trashcan is over here and the dresser is over there and between them I have a couch.

So farewell, good shirt. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Whatever heaven there is for shirts, I'm sure you'll be there soon.

Random Video of the Day LXXV

2010-10-05T17:24:00.003-04:00

Kermit is often used in music videos because he is perfect for lip-synching. For example, we have the LCD Soundsystem video, as well as his cover of of NIN's "Hurt," which Johnny Cash later would awesomely cover himself. (Warning: don't click on the Kermit cover unless you want to see Kermit do unspeakable things to Rowlf).

Anyway, both of those Kermit videos pale in comparison to this, where Kermit covers both David Bowie and Freddy Mercury's "Under Pressure." It is almost too awesome for words.

Don't Bring Your Guns to Town

2010-10-04T23:36:00.002-04:00

I don't know about you, but I feel like we haven't had any stupid ideas in a while. America, hit me with your best shot.

NASHVILLE —Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous bar just off this city’s strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops when Adam Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of his gray slacks.

Honky-tonks? Guns? Gray slacks? I like where this is going, America. Bring it.

Also, beers are $5 now in Nashville? Yeesh. Nobody tell New York, or we'll have a new home for the $10 Bud Light.

Mr. Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state’s nearly 300,000 handgun permit holders who have recently seen their rights greatly expanded by a new law — one of the nation’s first — that allows them to carry loaded firearms into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

I knew you could do it, America! Of all the stupid ideas, "We should allow guns in bars" has to be in the Top 5, right between "Sure, we'll take the group discount for the champagne room" and "Let's poke that bear with this stick."

“If someone’s sticking a gun in my face, I’m not relying on their charity to keep me alive,” said Mr. Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for personal protection when he is not at work.

OH SNAP. How long do you think Mr. Ringebenberg, technology consultant by day, gunslinger by night, has been waiting to unleash that line? It sounds like he's auditioning to write the next Vin Diesel movie. I'll bet you $100 that the Lone Ranger there immediately turned to the only woman in that bar and flashed her a grin.

Gun rights advocates like Mr. Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but many customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision.

“That’s not cool in my book,” Art Andersen, 44, said as he nursed a Coors Light at Sam’s Sports Bar and Grill near Vanderbilt University. “It opens the door to trouble. It’s giving you the right to be Wyatt Earp.”

The right to be Wyatt Earp, as most constitutional law scholars know, is derived from an amalgam of the First, Second, Ninth, and Twenty-First Amendments, and is located somewhere between the penumbra of the right to bear arms and the emanations of the right to get drunk.

Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.

Before they opened season on brown people, I would have said that one of these states was not like the others. What happened, Arizona? How did we go from Luis Gonzalez beating Rivera and ASU co'eds to Derek Anderson and whatever the heck has happened to John McCain?

Experts say these laws represent the latest wave in the country’s gun debate, as the gun lobby seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday life.

Experts also characterized the immigration laws as the latest wave in the country's immigration debate, as the obviousness lobby seeks, statement by statement, to expand the role of Duh in everyday life.

The rulings, which overturned handgun bans in Washington and Chicago, have strengthened the stance of gun rights advocates nationwide. More than 250 lawsuits now challenge various gun laws, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican, called for guns to be made legal on campuses after a shooting last week at the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that armed bystanders might have stopped the gunman.

Armed bystanders might have also shot each other in the ensuing panic. Do we actually need to argue about this? It's like saying that we could have stopped that kid from throwing a ball inside the classroom by giving balls to every other kid there.

The new laws have also brought to light the status of 20 other states — New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts among them — that do not address the question, appearing by default to allow those with permits to carry guns into establishments that serve alcohol, according to the Legal Community Against Violence, a nonprofit group that promotes gun control and tracks state gun laws.

Default is just a fancy word for "unintended consequences." Are we really going to let guns be regulated under the same principle that sent Homer Simpson to space?

“A lot of states for a long time have not felt the need to say you could or couldn’t do it,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “There weren’t as many conceal-carry permits out there, so it wasn’t really an issue.” Now, he said, “the attitude from the gun lobby is that they should be able to take their guns wherever they want. In the last year, they’re starting to move toward needing no permit at all.”

Look. I don't mind guns for the most part. I think that, on occasion, they are a terrific idea, just because you never know. For example:

Imagine, if you will, that a zombie apocalypse breaks out. Now, you could either be that zombie's brunch, or you can retrieve your snub-nosed .45 from your conveniently stashed hiding place, tear through this country on a motorcycle, and hook up with Emma Stone at an amusement park in California where the electricity, somehow, is still on.

Within two minutes of the zombie apocalypse, that gun will be your best friend.

You just never know.

State Representative Curry Todd, a Republican who first introduced the guns-in-bars bill here, said that carrying a gun inside a tavern was never the law’s primary intention. Rather, he said, the law lets people defend themselves while walking to and from restaurants.

If the primary intention is to let people defend themselves as they walk to the restaurant, then why don't we just make them check their guns at the saloon door? That way, nobody brings a gun into a place where the primary intentions of the patrons are to get drunk, get the girl, and get into a fight. And gunfights are kept out on the streets, where they belong.

“Folks were being robbed, assaulted — it was becoming an issue of personal safety,” said Mr. Todd, who added that the National Rifle Association had aided his legislative efforts. “The police aren’t going to be able to protect you. They’re going to be checking out the crime scene after you and your family’s been shot or injured or assaulted or raped.”

Of course the NRA is giving money to this asshole, who really ought to be the keynote speaker at the Rally to Keep Fear Alive. I have a pretty vivid imagination, but I have a really difficult time picturing the circumstances under which your family was about to get raped at the local sports bar.

Also, way to undermine the police and turn them from crimestoppers to crime scene investigators. I bet you, Mr. Todd, that if you asked any policeman, they would tell you that guns make injuring, assaulting, raping, and, especially, shooting people a lot easier.

Under Tennessee’s new law, gun permit holders are not supposed to drink alcohol while carrying their weapons. Mr. Ringenberg washed down his steak sandwich with a Coke.

The good news? You can bring your gun to the bar! The bad news? You can't drink at the bar.

Have you ever been to a bar when you can't have a drink? Why would you even do that? I know. I know! But, imagine you're on antibiotics or whatever and can't have a drink and still go out to a bar. It's super boring and awkward. You never know what to do with your hands when that happens. So you'll get bored and fidgety and, when you finally reach that point where it's obvious to everyone that you are just pretending to text someone, you'll bring out your gun, because, again, there's nothing to do with your hands. And then Romeo behind you, who is trying to grind up on some girl who's really not into it, will get pushed back when his hand strays just a bit too far to the south. And he'll stumble backwards and his elbow will bump your elbow and . . . Yo, Nick, there's something on your shirt . . . Yo, Nick . . . Yo, Nick, you ok? . . . OHMYGOD SOMEONE JUST SHOT NICK. There is a shooter in this bar. Thank God all the people in this bar have guns.

EVERYONE START SHOOTING UNTIL WHOEVER WAS SHOOTING STOPS.

Back in October

2010-10-03T21:45:00.005-04:00

Somehow, despite a rash of late-season injuries that gave us a lineup today that included only two opening day starters, despite nearly collapsing in the last weekend of the season, despite almost giving up a 6-run lead with 4 outs to go, giving me a near embolism in the process, and, most importantly, despite trotting out Melky "I might actually be worse than Jeff Francouer" Cabrera on an everyday basis, the Braves did this today:

BACK IN THE PLAYOFFS WHODAMAN.

In Bobby Cox's last season, the Braves are once again in the playoffs, after way too many years where my only rooting interest was whoever played the Yankees or Phillies.

Yes, we made it as the wild card, but there is no shame in that. Right, Charlie?

I will now be a complete and total nervous wreck for anywhere from a week to (do I dare dream?) a month. God hope it's the latter, but whatever it is, approach with caution.

Boston T Party

2010-10-01T18:33:00.003-04:00

It seems modernity has finally arrived in Beantown!

Boston, long known for its aversion to common sense and practicality, boasts the nation's ~~crappiest~~ oldest subway system. The subway has been running in Boston since 1897. It was reluctantly updated in 1898, and remains the only functioning museum/essential-means-of-transportation in the country.

But today is a new day! Today, the fine folks over at the MBTA unveiled the latest in new technology -- a way for people to know where the trains are on the tracks!

The MBTA is to release real-time data today telling riders where subway trains are located and how long it will take for the next train to arrive.

This replaces the old TTHS (Tracking Through Hobos System), where hobos would be left to ramble inside the tunnels. Their cut-off scream of pain would be evaluated by people waiting at the stations, who would then guesstimate how far away the train was when it flattened the unfortunate vagabond.

We can put a man on the moon. We can put a human brain inside a mouse's head. We can literally infect an entire country with syphilis.

But we have no way of knowing where the trains are on a closed, six-mile track?

I, for one, am happy at this new advent in technology, and look forward to knowing whether I have time to go get a donut or if have to run down the stairs tossing old women and small children out of my way.

Because you know how the T is. If you miss the D train, you have to wait through a B, C, C, C, B, B, E, C, B, and E before you get another D. The tracking system won't change that, of course, but it'll be neat to see four Cs in a row stopped somewhere between Boylston and Arlington.

Wait. What?

For the subway data, the T had to find a way to convert underground train positions, as determined by electric signals on the tracks, into a similar data format that software developers could harness. Because the Green Line lacks the same tracking system, it was not included.

It's going to be another few years before the green line gets this technology? Isn't this the same line which, for over half its route, is outside and visible to the naked eye? You're telling me you can't track that one?

Screw this. Where can I buy a car?

Random Video of the Day LXXIV

2010-10-01T11:16:00.005-04:00

Barney Stinson singing soul music? Barney Stinson singing soul music.

What, Me Worry?

2010-09-27T17:31:00.004-04:00

When I graduated from law school this summer, I was filled with happiness.

This was not because I got a law degree -- the feeling that accompanied that rather terrifying thought was not unlike the feeling you get when, after fiddling with the old lawnmower for hours, you finally get it to work and start to celebrate, only you then look up to see acres and acres of untamed lawns pockmarked with random sinkholes, dead trees, and live moles. And it's going to take you 40 years before you're done with it and can go back inside and have some lemonade and a nap.

No, the happiness came from the fact that leaving law school also meant never having to deal with all the awful things that came with the package: classholes, jammed elevators, the VPN, Quasimodo of the Tower's smell, and a perpetually rising urge to kill.

Perhaps chief among those horrible, awful things were the B.U. emergency texts.

Much like the aunt who keeps giving you Christmas sweaters every year, the powers that be at B.U. feet it is necessary to assault us with emails, texts, and phone calls every time something happens.

And when I say "something," I really mean "anything." I remember once getting the following 4 texts, which I present to you now in the order of their arrival:

B.U. Emergency Notification Alert System Message Alert 3 of 4: building.

B.U. Emergency Notification Alert System Message Alert 2 of 4: Ave is out. For the time being, no electric devices will work in the

B.U. Emergency Notification Alert System Message Alert 4 of 4: We will notify you of any change of status and post you with continuous updates as they become available.

B.U. Emergency Notification Alert System Message Alert 1 of 4: Please be advised that the electric power at 876 Commonwealth

And post us they did. For every actual emergency, such as someone on campus with a knife (this turned out to be the pub cook), we had ten "emergencies" which involved anything from a malfunctioning elevator in a freshman dorm to a 10-minute power outage at the business school.

And don't worry about missing anything. Within anywhere from one minute after the event began to five hours after the event was over, we would be bombarded with dozens of text messages, countless emails, and a handful of phone calls. If B.U. was a girlfriend, they would be a Stage 5 Clinger.

Look, I know they were trying to make sure we all knew about the emergency to promote safety and awareness so we would take the necessary precautions in the event something awful happened.

But goddamnit all to hell, it got to the point where I would have chosen not knowing about the fire at the law tower until the flames were licking my back as I jumped out the window than having to get yet another text from the university.

When I graduated, I thought I would never have to get these texts again. I thought they were in the past, never to be heard from again, like emails about potential Animal Law courses and LLMs asking what the Simpsons are.

But today my phone beeps. And I look at the text. And it's from a five-digit number.

Urge to kill . . . rising.

Hold on to Your Hats

2010-09-22T00:21:00.002-04:00

Once upon a time, Fire Joe Morgan was one of the best websites on the internet. Its purpose was simple: to take a piece of atrocious sportswriting or broadcasting and rip it to pieces. In essence, they took an article or column and provided hilarious running commentary. It was part Mystery Science Theater 3000, part Daily Show, part complete genius.

Tragically, their site is no more. The creators went on to bigger and better things, such as writing for The Office, occasionally cameo-ing as Mose Schrute, and creating what was the best comedy on television last year, Parks & Recreation.

All these wonderful things have helped heal the hole in my heart. But yet, on cold, dark nights, when the wind is high and Joe Morgan's voice comes from my TV, I weep a little and curse Dunder-Mifflin.

Today, Deadspin will be once again taken over by the creative minds behind Fire Joe Morgan. In the world of internet sports, that makes today Christmas.

They took over the site last year and all of their posts are worth reading 30 times, but if you really want to experience the essence of FJM, "Jesus is the Derek Jeter of Christianity" is utter brilliance, and the funniest thing I might have in the past 12 months.

So I'm, as they say, stoked.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know I occasionally attempt to do something similar. My FJM's are nowhere near as good, and just a little too long, but they're fun to do and, hey, maybe you're really bored at work.

Thus, in honor of FJM's one-day returnation spectacular, I humbly present my own FJM'ing of the absurd NYT's expose about how New York criminals often ... wait, I won't spoil it. Try to see if you can crack the mystery, CSI'ers!

Two men and a woman broke into a locker at a Manhattan gym in February and stole credit cards, the first in a series of similar thefts.

Three months later, in May, a young man tried to rob a Chase bank in the Bronx armed with only a note, which he slipped to a teller. She read it and stepped away, and he fled empty-handed. Weeks later, in June, a gunman robbed a Family Dollar store in Queens.

Ooh, nice lede. Really grabs you, doesn't it? Without explicitly saying it, if you read between the lines, the writer tells you that THERE IS CRIME IN NEW YORK! People will do bad things to other people! And if you are a clerk in a bank, all you need to do is step away and the thief will just leave!

Also, dude, you're robbing a dollar store? Is this before or after you took a look at the name of the target and called off the Payless Shoe Source job?

Gym-locker heists, bank robberies, daylight holdups — these New York City crimes have only one thing in common, and it is not the culprits.

You mean there is more than one criminal in New York? Crikey! I knew we should have never released Steve Sax. Where is Chief Wiggum when you need him? Anyhow, I like this tease; it's very suspenseful. NCIS should absolutely hire this reporter as a writer.

So what do all these New York City crimes have in common?

It is the Yankees caps they wore.

Excuse me?

It is the Yankees caps they wore.

No, asshole, I heard you the first time. Your big point was that criminals in New York have a tendency to wear New York Yankee hats? That's what a paper bleeding money like a hemophiliac gave you funding to investigate? They're closing bureaus all over the world and prioritized your story over zillions of other things and all you could come up with is "New York criminals wear New York Yankees gear?" That's your point? That?

Damn it all.

What do you have to say for yourself?

A curious phenomenon has emerged at the intersection of fashion, sports and crime: dozens of men and women who have robbed, beaten, stabbed and shot at their fellow New Yorkers have done so while wearing Yankees caps or clothing.

Oh, don't try to disguise it with pretty words and and a sentence that sounds important. There is nothing curious about this. This has about as much to do with sports as noticing that a lot of people in the NYC subway also wear Yankee hats. And to say that fashion has anything to do with this would be like writing about what using ties instead of belts as tourniquets means for the men's clothing industry.

DON'T WRITE THAT DOWN, THAT WAS NOT AN IDEA.

One of the three suspects in the gym break-ins wore a blue Yankees cap. A security camera photographed the man who tried to rob the Bronx bank, and though his face was largely obscured, his Yankees hat was clearly visible. The Queens robbery suspect was last seen with a Yankees cap on his head.

When I was at Criminal University, I took this course called Getting Away With It 207: Hats and You. Professor Snake taught me that wearing a hat was important so that security cameras, which are often overhead, cannot film your face. That way, you remain a suspect, like the "largely obscured face" guy above, and stay away from Sing Sing.

In some ways, it is not surprising that Yankees attire is worn by both those who abide by the law and those who break it. The Yankees are one of the most famous franchises in sports, and their merchandise is widely available and hugely popular.

Professor Snake also gave us a quiz. The question was "What kind of hat should you wear?" The answers were a) beret, b) Top Hat, c) Trucker hat, or d) The most "widely available and hugely popular" hat in your particular city.

I went with C, but that was during my douchebag phase.

But Yankees caps and clothing have dominated the crime blotter for so long, in so many parts of the city and in so many types of offenses, that it defies an easy explanation. Criminologists, sports marketing analysts, consumer psychologists and Yankees fans have developed their own theories, with some attributing the trend to the popularity of the caps among gangsta rappers and others wondering whether criminals are identifying with the team’s aura of money, power and success.

Yes, the trend defied the easy "petty criminals wear the most popular piece of attire in NYC so that they will blend in with crowds" explanation. We must assemble a super team of super scientists to find a more complicated explanation for this trend. And don't forget to throw in Yankee fans into the brain trust here, if only to provide some balance, like when news program have to give equal time to this guy.

Also, don't immediately assume that the mystique of gangsta rappers is incompatible with the Yankee aura of money, power, and success. What would Bernie Williams think?

Since 2000, more than 100 people who have been suspects or persons of interest in connection with serious crimes in New York City wore Yankees apparel at the time of the crimes or at the time of their arrest or arraignment. The tally is based on a review of New York Police Department news releases, surveillance video and images of robberies and other crimes, as well as police sketches and newspaper articles that described suspects’ clothing. No other sports team comes close.

If you do the math, that's fewer than one Yankee-garbed criminal per month. But let's not allow facts to get in the way of our trends!

The Mets, forever in the shadow of their Bronx rivals, are perhaps grateful to be losing this one: only about a dozen people in the same review were found to be wearing Mets gear.

Yes, most Mets fans don't wear hats, preferring instead to don paper bags.

“It’s a shame,” said Chuck Frans, 57, the president of the 430-member Lehigh Valley Yankee Fan Club in Pennsylvania. “It makes us Yankees fans look like criminals, because of a few unfortunate people who probably don’t know the first thing about the Yankees.”

"It's a shame," said Paul Harrington, 48, the CEO of the $430 million Reebok Apparel Co., "It makes us Reebok executives look like criminals because of a few unfortunate people who probably don't know the first thing about Reebok shoes except that they're good for running away from the police."

The Yankees organization declined to comment for this article.

A-Rod would have said something but he was tackled by Jeter and Joba, then bound and gagged and carried away before he could open his mouth.

Antisocial behavior has no dress code; people wear what they please when they please, whether they are going to see a movie or going to rob a bank. And in New York City, that often means Yankees attire, regardless of the hour or the season.

What the hell does this even mean? Can Yankee hats not be worn after 6 p.m.? Are they verboten between Halloween and April Fool's day? And why in the blue hell is going to see a movie "antisocial behavior?" Seriously, man, don't you have an editor?

In April 2008, on the day after the Boston Red Sox defeated the Yankees in the Bronx, a man in a Yankees cap robbed a bank about a mile from Yankee Stadium. The woman who robbed a Manhattan bank on July 7 was diplomatic in her clothing choices: she wore an orange Mets cap and a gray Yankees T-shirt.

Didn't Hillary Clinton (New York Senate Edition) once say she rooted for both the Yankees and the Mets?

. . .

OHMYGOD.

Three gunmen burst into an apartment in Washington Heights on July 23, bound the hands and feet of the tenants and left with cash. A surveillance video released by the police and broadcast on television showed one of the suspects in a Yankees cap — one of the most iconic brands in sports represented, however briefly, by someone accused of helping tie up a 9-year-old girl.

Hey, thanks! I hadn't gotten my daily dose of unearned sanctimony of the day. Thanks, New York Post!

Oh, wait. This is the New York Times.

Look, man. I hate the Yankees as much as the next guy. But you're implying that a despicable bastard somehow represents the Yankees just because he chose to wear their hat on that particular day. You might as well say that all Ohio State fans are mouthbreathing, porn'stached weirdos who live with their parents just because they were caught doing unspeakable things at a library while wearing an OSU hoodie. Oh wait. You did.

One criminologist said the trend might be a result of what could be called the Jay-Z effect.

Oooh? Is this like the "50 Cent effect," which, of course, is a direct effect of the "Eminem effect," which is also the direct effect of the "Vanilla Ice effect?" Or is it more like the notorious "B.I.G. effect?"

As you can see, I clearly know nothing about rap. Maybe Dr. Criminologist can educate me.

The rapper Jay-Z has worn a Yankees cap for years — on his album covers and in his videos — and has helped turn the cap into a ubiquitous fashion accessory for urban youths (“I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can,” he boasts in one song).

I KNOW THIS SONG! I TOTALLY KNOW THIS SONG! Cooooooooncrete juuuuuuungle where dreeeeeams are maaaaaaaade, oh! I'm sorry, I got distracted. You were saying?

Criminals might be wearing Yankees merchandise not because they are fans of the team, but because they are fans of the cocked-hat look popularized by Jay-Z and other rappers, said the criminologist, Frankie Y. Bailey, an associate professor at the University at Albany, who is writing a book about the role of clothing and style in criminal cases.

“He wears it and makes it look cool,” Ms. Bailey said of Jay-Z and the cap. “It’s almost like the Yankees have acquired a kind of street rep, a coolness.”

The Yankees are about as cool as a 58-year old accountant named Mort who gives out fruitcakes to his friends at Christmas and occasionally enjoys a nip of Schnapps. That's like saying the Indianapolis Colts are cool. I've seen cooler people on the business class car of the Acela between D.C. and Wilmington.

It is but one of several theories. Sports marketing analysts say it is a matter of numbers: the Yankees sell more merchandise than any other baseball team. As of August, they hold a 25.13 percent market share of nationwide sales of merchandise licensed by Major League Baseball, with the Red Sox second at 7.96 percent and the Mets seventh at 5.32 percent, according to SportsOneSource, a firm that tracks the sporting goods industry.

Hey, you know how some people hear hooves and immediately think of zebras? This paragraph is the horses. And they just ran away and nobody even noticed.

For criminals outside New York, the team’s caps and clothing are nearly as popular.

The man who robbed a Chase branch in a Chicago suburb in May wore a Yankees cap. In July, a young man in a Yankees cap assaulted an 81-year-old woman in her home, about 2,800 miles from Yankee Stadium, in Seattle.

You mean to tell me that, in a concerted effort to turn a profit, apparel manufacturers ship their wares to other cities in the country to be purchased? What a novel idea! Get me J. Pierpont Morgan on the telephone device immediately and make it snappy, Mildred!

“Why people pick the Yankees over the Mariners, I don’t know,” said Detective Mark Jamieson, a Seattle police spokesman. “It just happened to be an article of clothing he was wearing on that particular day.”

Ooh, horses again!

And Yankees caps hold a distinguished place in the annals of crime: the man who robbed more banks than anyone else in American history wore one. Edwin Chambers Dodson, known as the Yankee Bandit because he wore a Yankees cap and sunglasses during most of his holdups, robbed 72 banks in Southern California in the early 1980s and the late 1990s.

Mr. Dodson, who died in 2003, was a fan of the team. “We did everything we could to get this guy,” said William J. Rehder, 69, a retired special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was the longtime coordinator of bank robbery investigations in the Los Angeles area.

Mr. Rehder not only named the Yankee Bandit, but helped put him behind bars twice. “I couldn’t figure out why he was so lucky,” he said. “I didn’t attribute anything to the cap, but I’m sure he did.”

When reached in heaven, Mr. Dodson said, "That was the cap I owned, so that was the cap I wore. Now quit bugging me, I have a date with Marilyn Monroe."

Mr. Rehder, now a security consultant in Los Angeles, is a Dodgers fan. Nevertheless, he keeps an old, worn Yankees cap on a shelf in his office at home. Mr. Rehder never wears it. It belonged to the Yankee Bandit.

And that, children, is because Mr. Rehder is not a criminal, like all those other Yankees suspected of assault, obstruction of justice, possession of a controlled substance, trespassing, lewd behavior, and cruelty against animals.

Random Video of the Day LXXIII

2010-09-21T11:35:00.000-04:00

I normally want to set all children on fire, but this baby is awesome.

Such Great Heights

2010-09-20T16:53:00.007-04:00

When I go out, I sometimes tell girls that I am currently training to be an astronaut, and part of that lie is that I have just completed sub-orbital flight training in Arizona.

This particular part is, of course, the biggest part of the lie, mostly because heights are my worst fear. After bears, of course.

And then a couple of days ago, a video surfaced on the internet explaining the commute that radio tower repairmen face. This is that video:

Good Lord almighty. I cannot watch that video without cringing and putting my head down every few minutes because everything starts spinning. That's 1,700-odd feet, which looks like just about high enough to go high five God.

Of course, as terrifying as climbing one of those ladders was, that pales in comparison to this guy, who will jump from the actual stratosphere, where the sky is no longer blue but black. He will fall 23 miles and reach the speed of sound within a minute. If he overbalances, he will commence to spin in circles at such velocity that his brain stem might separate from his column.

But what if he doesn't spin out? What if a faint crack appears on his visor? Take it away, Nightmare Fuel:

If he does let the air escape through his mouth and nose, he will soon experience the novel sensation of the saliva on his tongue beginning to boil. He will be nearly sixty thousand feet above "Armstrong's Line," where water's boiling point drops to 98.6 degrees. Within moments, the water in his subcutaneous tissues will begin vaporizing as well. This, in combination with the expansion of any interior gases — unfarted methane in his guts, for example — will, in a process called ebullism, quickly cause Felix's own body to inflate, becoming as tumescent as a bodybuilder's. Useful consciousness, mercifully, will be gone within fifteen seconds, probably sooner, though he might remain alive, swelling, distorting, for five to eight minutes.

Catch that last part? It will actually take him more than 15 minutes to land. Remember, it's 23 miles. That's four times the height of Everest.

Oh God, here come the dry heaves. I need to go lie in bed, face-down.

I hereby solemnly swear never again to lie about the fact that I'm doing sub-orbital flight training, unless I am far enough in my cups to not think about the terrifying scope of such an act, and, unless, of course, the girl is very attractive and seems reasonably gullible.

The Bicentenario

2010-09-19T22:01:00.005-04:00

There was a rather sizable celebration in Mexico last week, as the country celebrated the 200th year of its existence. At the same time, it also celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution.

The fact that one occurred in 1810 and the other in 1910 always struck me as pleasantly convenient. This brought great comfort to me and thousands of other children forced to memorize dates.

On the other hand, the precise hundred year gap also brought about a feeling of slight discomfort, not unlike that feeling you get when you are afraid that you have mistaken coincidence for fate. This is a feeling you laugh at in the daytime, but come night you lie awake in bed counting the days until the calendar turns the page on 2010. You know, just in case things come in hundreds.

It is no secret that the current situation in Mexico is precarious. I am not the first to note this symmetry. The media, as is its wont, has done its best to overblow the situation. Despite the fact that the Drug Wars are mostly localized in a very small section of the country, and that the victims of the violence are almost exclusively its perpetrators, Mexico is considered by many to be a country aflame, collapsing slowly under the weight of kilos and tons.

That said, the situation is bad, to understate the fact. The sad truth is that deaths in Mexico due to the drug war far outnumber the deaths in Iraq due to an actual war. Couple that with the medieval methods -- beheadings, mutilations, and intimidation of the "we kill you because we can" variety -- used by the cartels and it is plain to see why more and more Americans are reluctant to remain in or even visit Mexico. Add to that number the multitudes fleeing for the safety of American shores -- unconstitutional Arizona laws be damned -- and it is hard to deny that the current state of affairs in my home country is that of crisis.

Mexicans have never had an easy go of it. Over the past 200 years, Mexico has somehow made it through countless wars, the loss of half our country (how's Texas working out for you guys?), massive earthquakes, dictatorships, political instability (at one point, we managed to have 40 presidents in 30 years), and even a French (French!) takeover.

And yet, somehow we endure. Mexico has weathered all of that and more. It is sustained, as a country must, by its people. Good, hardworking people who toil in the sun all day for the privilege of sending their earnings back. In turn, they are sustained by their country, which beats in their chest and suffuses their every act and their every thought with the culture and the tradition and the patrimony that was forged in independence and galvanized in revolution. One holds up the other, which responds in kind.

Today, Mexico has emerged through the dust of 200 years bent but not broken, battered but not beaten, ready to defeat this drug war and stand at the hilltop to claim 200 more.