freakin' new york freakin' city!

I seem to have somehow found myself in New York City.

I always kinda figured that if I was going to be in the corporate world, I wanted to have one of those jobs where I'd get a call saying "Can you get on a plane tomorrow, we really want you here!" And sure enough, here I am!

One of my clients had their quarterly financials update today, and they wanted someone to help with the monitoring. I think it was also just seen as a good chance for me to meet with some people --- both at the client and within my own company --- that I've worked with for years but never met. I got in late last night, and I leave tomorrow.

A good question is why it's 9 pm on a weeknight in NYC and I'm sitting in my hotel room and blogging to an empty world. I did an okay job of it though --- I had a very nice lunch with my brother in an upscale steak place, and after work I walked 5th avenue all the way from 56th to about 40th. I think I'm going to head out soon and get a bite of pizza.

Highlight of the stroll was probably the Christmas display at Saks. They have along the outside wall about 40 snowflakes of lights of various size, and they had a "light show" to the tune of the Carol of the Bells!

Thought I could get a little holiday shopping done, but I didn't see anything particularly inspiring.

Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder, or Star Trek TOS Episode #60

Marisa Miller

St. Cecilia, by Peter Paul Rubens

This is not going to be your usual diatribe on the superficiality of beauty. Well, okay it basically is, but hopefully it's my usual jaded twist.

It's interesting to think that, during times of the Renaissance, "beautiful" women were women who were huge. I mean the fatter the better. It kinda made sense too --- in a time wrought with plagues and such, when horses were part beast of burden and part menu item --- it was a status symbol (and damned sexy) to clearly have ready access to enough food. Basically, being fat was being rich.

So my question isn't how we got where we are today, or why chickies today are held to the standards they are etc. etc. Though that in and of itself could be an interesting diatribe. My question...

Controlling for, oh, surgery and airbrushing and such, some women today are just born what we would consider pretty. There's only a certain combination of characteristics women can have, especially if you're talking specifically about white women of European heritage.

So, were there Cindy Crawfords and Rachel Hunters wandering around 15th century Europe, regarded far and wide as hideous and ugly, and wallowing in self-pity because they have good metabolisms?

blank died at blank-o'clock....

I had an interesting chat tonight with the longtime political editor for a local broadcast TV affiliate. We were at a Christmas party tonight, and we'd met a couple of times before as we have mutual friends (my mother used to teach with his wife).

The conversation went something like this. I was the one asking...

"I want to ask you about something, and I'm not even sure you'll answer."
"Oh, okay. Well what's that?"
"Do you guys already have a recorded obituary ready for Fidel Castro that you're just gonna pop in whenever he goes?"
"Yeah, we do. We've got a few on file."
"Who else?"
"Well...."
"Gerald Ford?"
"Yeah."
"Bush the elder?"
"Yep. We've got about a dozen in the can... but Castro's is the one that's sitting out on the table and cued up."

The conversation sort of drifted off from there, as we started talking about George W. Bush, aka "Bush 41".

I'd love to know who the dozen are though.

this dyslexic guy walks into a bra...

A woman comes into the doctor's office for examination and he asks her to undress. As she does, he notices she has a giant H across her chest. Curious, he mentions it and she smiles and says "My boyfriend goes to Harvard, and he's such a devoted fan he won't ever take off his Harvard sweater, even when we make love."

The doctor thinks this is a bit odd, but doesn't think much about it until a week later when another woman comes in his office. As she undresses, he notices she has a giant Y across her chest. She smiles and says "My boyfriend goes to Yale, and he's such a devoted fan he won't ever take off his Yale sweater, even when we make love."

Same day a woman walks in his office, begins undressing and has what appears to be a giant M on her chest. The doctor says "Aha! I bet your boyfriend goes to Minnesota?" She looks at him and says "No... my girlfriend goes to Wisconsin."

sagelike wisdom

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in college was in one of my communications classes, but it had (almost) nothing to do with the communication process.

It was in Dr. Brey's argumentation class, and he told us once, apropos of nearly nothing, "If you learn nothing else in college, remember this...don't drink and dial."

Of course, a wet-behind-the-ears freshman girl in the front row raised her hand and said "Don't you mean don't drink and drive?"

He said "No... don't drink and DIAL. Everybody in this room has either experienced this lesson or will soon... but someday this might be one of the most valuable lessons you've ever learned."


It took a while, but I know exactly what he was referring to... because when you're in your mid-20s and have had a few cups of the ol' fire-water, suddenly it seems like a fine idea to call up old girlfriends and profess your love, question why you ever broke up, etc. It always seems like a good idea when you're warm and buzzing, and, well, isn't.

Of course, I suppose nowadays there's a Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which is "don't drink and text", "don't drink and e-mail", etc.

I was fortunate in that I had a pretty good "out". My best friend moved to Hawai'i after college, so even if I was leaving a bar at 3 AM I could still call her because it was a fairly reasonable hour in Honolulu, they're five hours behind. And before that when I was still in college, well... if I was out at 3 am I was probably with her :)

You could often pick out the freshmen. My first semester at Florida State, I printed out a copy of my schedule of classes, and color-coded it so I would know which one was which and when my breaks were (I had a color printer and was playing with it, plus I was my usual paranoid about now knowing where the rooms were)... I had it in the front pocket of my public speaking class folder. First week of class a girl looks over and says "You're a freshman, aren't you?" I said "How did you know!?!" :-P

So, to paraphrase Wag the Dog, "There are two things I know to be true. One is that there is no difference between good flan and bad flan, the other is don't drink and dial."

with apologies to Jimmy Durante....

Good night Ms. Gavin, wherever you are.

the "John Spartan" thing

Been a while since I gave an explanation of this alter ego thing... and some of the millions and millions of people (errrr....) who will read this blog may not have been paying attention through the years....

click here for the story

...you know who you remind me of?

I was walking into a local watering hole, when I saw coming up the other way on the street what looked to be a young woman I used to work with and occasionally chat with but hadn't seen in about a year.

I smiled and waved, and she got the same look on her face everyone on Earth gets when someone's being very friendly and you have no clue who they are.

"Jackie, it's me, Bradley! How's it going"

"Oh! I'm not Jackie... I'm her identical twin sister, Cristy."

My next statement was one of those things that... even AS the words floated past the teeth and the lips and out into general consumption, I wanted to smack myself and go find a hole to crawl into...


"Oh, really? You look just like her!" Doh!


Yeah, umm, that's kinda the idea behind the whole "identical twin" thing, ya see... to her credit she did not say "Ya dumb prick", though she certainly would have been entitled to.

What I meant was that not only was this girl her twin, she had the same exact build, same haircut and length, same wardrobe, many of the same mannerisms, etc... I did not mean "derrr you look like your twin, yuh-hup."

Penalty on...errr... sumthin' and either an 8 or a 3

Something you'll eventually see if you watch enough football... (though I have friends who would argue that there's no such thing as enough football)...

A referee sternly comes out and calls a penalty on number 67 for holding.

The commentator shuffles his notes for a second, then says something like "Well, there IS no 67 on the Cardinals, he probably meant 57." Or "I doubt that call was on Johnson, since he's on the sideline and in dress pants today."

Simple mistake, they're only human, blah blah blah, right?

Here's the question ---

We're supposed to trust these guys to determine whether a player at the bottom of 9 other players crossed an imaginary plane of existence with a ball and if he had control before hitting the ground but not after.... when they can't read a 2 1/2 foot tall number off the back of a guy standing in front of them?

go west, young woman

Most of you who know me may already have heard this story, but it warrants repeating. And if you don't know me, honestly what the hell are you doing here anyway?

This is possibly the only post I'll do in "Gator orange", because it's in honor of a girl that at one time (and, at last report) lived in Gainesville, FL. I dubbed her Sleeping Beauty, for reasons that made sense at the time but aren't really worth the time to explain.

Anyway, freshman year at Florida State, so October 1997. One of my friends (and someone I had a borderline obsessive crush on) decided she was going to drive down from Tallahassee to Orlando for Halloween Horror Nights. For some reason that has been lost to history, I couldn't go along, but I chatted with her pretty soon after her return.

Seems this gal had headed off in the wrong direction. Just a skosh. On her way from Tallahassee to Orlando, she ended up in ALABAMA.



Now, I should provide a visual aid for those of you not intimately familiar with the layout of the Viagra-wantin' dangler that is FL. Suffice it to say, for someone from Gainesville, heading from Tallahassee to Orlando (southeast) and ending up in Alabama (due west) is a neat trick.

courtesy of yahoo maps http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-577612-map_of_florida-i

What makes this story great though, I think, is that it wasn't even that she saw the giant sign that said "Welcome to Alabama" and said 'oh crap I'd better turn around!'... uhh no, this collegian got pulled over by an Alabama State Trooper... she was SPEEDING in the wrong direction!

Offhand I'm guessing that guy had a good story to tell when he got back to the station. Knowing her she probably turned on the waterworks and that got her out of any ticket.

Asbestos I can figure, she meant to get on I-10 East and instead got on I-10 West... and stayed on it for about 200 miles... passed signs for Destin, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Pensacola, over several rivers... into another time zone... passed the Welcome to Alabama sign... my first question to her was "Uhhh, hon... didn't you notice the SUN was on the wrong side?" No, apparently it had already gotten dark while she was driving.

There was something about this girl though... there were things I wanted to do with her, and most of them did NOT involve chatting over capuccino about contrasting the systemic perpetuations the electoral college system makes necessary to maintain a sense of political efficacy permeated on a nationwide scale for sufficient adoption and participation, while still including inherent safeguards to both placate smaller regions and protect against the same mass endorsements the system itself requires. No, when it came to this particular filly, my search was more of Van Halen's 9th album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

And yet, while the tale of going just a weeeeee bit off course will forever live on in infamy (and now for what I believe to tbe the first time is committed to "print")... at the same time, I still check MySpace and Google every few months to see if she's on the grid anywhere. And I haven't seen hide nor hair (both of which were quite nice) in, what, 7 years now.

So, as Obi Wan said to Han, "Who's the more foolish, the fool --- or the fool who follows her?"

first step is admitting you have a problem....

I was watching the other day a clip of Richard Pryor being interviewed by Barbara Walters. This was not a particularly recent conversation, as you might imagine. Richard Pryor was talking about his crack habit --- saying he would try and convince himself to put the crackpipe down... he'd tell himself that he'd just have to make it five minutes... he couldn't put it down for ONE minute. He felt incapable of breaking free.


On a completely unrelated and in no way connected report, the most amount of time I've spent not in front of a computer screen since 8 am this morning was probably the 20 minutes it took me to drive to work --- and if there was a way to play PC games in the car while driving, I'd probably do it.

Hell, I already do cellphone games at some stoplights (yeah, you're welcome.)

Now it's after midnight and I'm sitting with a laptop, having just shut down my desktop that I've been using so much the screen is starting to flicker.

Twitch.

"Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?"

That was Cliff Clavin's response on Final Jeopardy. While technically true, it wasn't the common bond snooty Alex the Canuck was was looking for.

If pressed to come up with what all these posts will have in common, the only answer I can think of would be they're all stuff that I wanted to put on my blog. Honestly that's probably the only common thread I can come up with at present.

I've always toyed in the back of my mind with having one of these... actually up until a couple of years ago I mainly wanted a radio show, and realized I didn't have enough to actually say... I thought that was true for regular blogging too... but now, with any luck, I'll be able to regurgitate enough random rants about life, the universe, and everything (42) to keep this at least a little amusing.

I realized too late I should have started this when I began my trip to DC... more on that over the days, including the story of the day someone broke into my place and cleaned it up, and what I have in common with Stradivarius (who has never been in my kitchen).

I definitely want responses... or at least signs of life.

If you're looking for Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Whatever DVD Easter Eggs, wander the hell off somewhere else. If you're looking for freaky Mexican donkey porn... ummm... we can chat later.

BTW, as far as Cheers goes, the "answer" was Archibald Leach, Bernard Schwartz, and Lucille LeSueur. The correct response is "What were the real names of Cary Grant, Tony Curtis and Joan Crawford?" It's probably a bad sign that I might have known the correct response and deliberately given Cliff's anyway.

I started a blog,
which started the whole world laughing
oh if I'd only see
that the joke was on me