You know who I admire. People that want to screw around with the olympic torch.

#13 and I once got yelled at for "ruining a taboo" game in college. Anytime someone can ruin something that people take too seriously, I approve. All the better that they are doing it to protest human rights violations.

Mike and the Mad Dog Argue about Yankee Stadium (part 1)

These guys are the Sports guys on the radio in New York. Phenomenal

The Masters is this week. Next to opening weekend of football, no sporting event gets me more excited.

So your night is ending... those single people in the room are making their last minute attempts at finding friends. The line for the coat check is long. The bouncers are positioning themselves to move everyone on the street in search of cabs, buses or long walks. But wait there is one more song you get to hear. Three suggestions I heard were:

1. Last Dance - Too Literal
2. American Pie - Not a bad guess, actually has a similar sentimentality to the right answer
3. Don't Stop Believing - Don't know if they play it, but if they saved it for the last song, it would be waisting it.

The answer:
Put on my Blue Suede Shoes and I boarded a Plane, Touched Down in the land of the Delta Blues in the middle of the pouring rain.

Walking in Memphis? Really? Thats where you end the night?

someone much funnier than me, must have already said this, but with Charlton Heston dead I guess now someone can pry the gun from his hands

I love curling, in theory. It just seems like a sport that I could do. So last night on one of the other TVs they showed the semi-finals of the World Curling championship. You know who is the finals?

Germany and Australia...

Australia is good at curling????

so since being in London I have been at locations where people in their twenties, or people who pretend to be in their twenties go and dance and consume beverages. Most of the times I have been in such places is due to the fact that the only places in London to watch American sports, still shows American sports, but turn into a nightclubs after like 9. So last night under the auspices of watching the final four, I end up in one of those types places. For the most part I have been very impressed with the DJ's at these places. They all seem to cater to white kids who think they can dance but who also can rock. So there is always an interesting mix including the following music:

1. There is always a Grease medley
2. Always two or three Michael Jackson songs
3. Sweet Home Alabama
4. Summer of 69
5. There is always a Dirty Dancing medley.
6. Always a lot of Diddy, B.I.G.
7. Amy Winehouse
8. Some australian bands I have never heard of
9. Bon Jovi
10. Talking Heads.

But here is the odd one, is that at the end of the night they always play the exact same song. I will give 25 pounds to the person who can guess by end of day Monday what that song is.

One thing you have to love about the British is their outlook on delays. I have been at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports and seen people look at the departures board to see their flights delayed. In America this results in a lot of frustration. People are frantically on their cell phones. We have all seen people angrily read books like the DaVinci Code in airports. The British however see that their flight or anything is delayed as a rational reason to stay in the pub longer.

One thing I question about the British however is their ideas on Transportation. Sure the Tube is exceptionally clean, and they don't even mind if you eat on the Tube. As an aside, sometimes on the weekends I do a fun thing I like to call "Tube Picnics" where I stop off at the local supermarket and while going to visit friends, a tourist site, or the aforementioned pub, and pick up a sandwich and ride the tube with my own movable feast. But anyway, when I worked in NYC, I arguably worked in the heart of the financial district for 7 of the 9 years I was there. From where I worked there were a plethora of transportation options, I could take the subway, trains to New Jersey, ferries, buses, affordable cabs, and in a pinch it was an easy walk to other parts of Manhattan. I was in Manhattan for five incredibly nightmarish transportation events and all of them it took me no more than double the time to go home. The five, for those keeping score at home were:

1. 9/11
2. The blackout
3. The day it poured rain and the subways went down (2007)
4. The subway strike
5. The GOP Convention 2004

So now I work, in arguably the new financial hub of London. They have set this up smartly in old docklands on a peninsula on the southern shores of the Thames. Good Ideas so far! But here is where it gets ugly, they have two train lines going in and out. They have some buses that go to places the majority of people don't want to go, and where there are no real connections to anywhere else. So last night the magic train that takes me and most everyone else to and from work was down. No problem, like all proper British employees we retired to the pub. It was however while on my second pint I realized the ultimate fear. What if the trains do not come back up. I am going to have settled in for a few hours with everyone else and then have to figure out my way home, and while I am doing that with a few thousand slightly to very intoxicated other frustrated commuters. In the old days my sense of adventure would have lead me to up my pint intake up and throw caution to the wind and prepare to ride such chaos like I was Patrick Swayze in Point Break. But the Lake can be responsible from time to time, so I left at 8PM. Here is the rest of my journey home.

• Wait for about half an hour to get on a train
• Take said train in the opposite direction from home
• Walk for about an hour, kind of knowing where I am going
• Check and see, yup trains are still down
• Take a bus towards home.
• Check and see, trains dead.
• Get to a bus stop, see there are throngs of people. Wait for third bus to come to finally get on
• Stand. upstairs on the bus for 40 minute ride home.
• Finally arrive home.

All told it took me about four times as long to get home as it normally does. My one saving grace is I checked the web and the lines were still down, and that was about the time the pubs start shutting down.

Can't wait to go to work this morning!!!!!

1. 
   

In college how many times when someone was invited over to watch a movie was a movie actually watched.

Yesterday, all told there were about 57 minutes in the office about Ironing... Sigh...

I am a bit of a pop culture aficionado. That may or may not be obvious. One of the toughest part about living in London, even though, I am also a complete Anglophile too, is that I miss American trash. Once I read that there is nothing called guilty pleasures, that if it brings you pleasure you shouldn't feel guilty. Now that may sound like something Eliot Spitzer said to his wife or Bill Clinton to Hilary, but when it comes to Pop Culture I disagree. I love Karate Kid, Dirty Dancing and Saved by the Bell. To me there are few songs that are more enjoyable than Total Eclipse of the Heart or More than a Feeling for that matter. Just because something is either made or loved by the masses doesn't automatically make it bad. I am sure if you have read this far and know my writing style, you know that this intro is a set-up for something. I commented to Slinger the other day, about it and that is Slingbox.
Slingbox is something that you can hook-up to your DVR (can you believe there are still people without DVR, their inefficiency is an affront to human intelligence and decency) and allows you to watch the television anywhere in the world over your lap top. As I type this it is 1243 in the morning in London and I am watching Tuesday nights Jeopardy. My subscription to Entertainment Weekly may not make it all the way to London, but at least I can still watch, Lost, How I Met Your Mother, and Saturday Night Live.

Today at work, I listened to and partcipated in a conversation that was as long as all other conversations about a specific topic in my entire life: Guess the topic:

A) The difference between Groundhogs and Hedgehogs
B) Ironing
C) Why Blowpops have a questionable brandname
D) Cardigan Sweaters

Answer tomorrow...

Best clean joke I have heard in a while

What did the zero say to the eight?

"Dude where did you get that awesome belt?"

TALES FROM THE AIRPORT

1. Yesterday, I really have wanted since being over here to get a Yankees hat. The official kind they wear on the field (say that I am poseur that's fine... I am a lot of imperfect nouns). Anyhow I have a lifetime to kill at the airport and there is a lids or whatever. So I walk into the store and the person working behind the counter is a "pat". I can't tell if its a girl or a guy. Basic description: Jeans and a uniform T-shirt, super skinny, shortish hair under a cap. two earrings in each ear. Voice that sounds like it could go either way. So I ask for the biggest Yankees hat they have it doesn't fit. So I say, "thanks man" to which SHE now replies, "Actually I am a woman".

2. I later have to do the pre-flight visit to my other office. So I walk into the rest room. Completely empty. So I go into the Handicap stall. Not to go into too much detail, but it took a little bit of time. So I finish and walk and guess what, two people in wheelchairs are lined up waiting for me.

Valerie Tagged me...so follow along and learn something

1. Post the rules before you give your answers.

2. List one fact about yourself beginning with each letter of your middle name. If you don't have a middle name, use your maiden name or your mother's maiden name.

3. At the end of your blog post, tag one person (or blogger of another species) for each letter of your middle name. Be sure to leave them a comment telling them they've been tagged.

Jello-mold. Are you ready for the most unmasculine post of the blogs storied life. When the field is down in the dumps I make her Jello-mold. its simple, costs about 5 dollars, and always comes out tasting well and usually both the taste and my effort prove that i am a halfway decent guy to her and that puts her in a better mood... (note this is better for "she had a bad day at work" surprise, than the "i said i would be home at 7 and come home at 9:30 having been at the bar with the guys" surprise that requires me to have 1-800-flowers in my fave five... (which is clearly a joke since 1800-flowers is a free call, and its not a hard number to remember)
Ingredients:
2 Apples
Bag o' nuts (preferably wal)
one container of red jello (i know red is not a color, but pick a flavor that looks red, i prefer the mix of blackberry and raspberry)
1 can of jellied cranberry sauce


Recipe

1. make the jello per instructions, but as you are mixing the jello crystals also mix in the entire can of cranberry.
2. let jello set for 2-2.5 hours
3. mix in nuts and diced apples
4. let set for another 2 hours
5. Garnish with cool whip or other topping.

Organism/orgasm - Not really about me, but every biology teacher in the US must get excited for the day in class you start talking about Organisms and see how many goofballs say Orgasm instead. I think that is the only reason I would ever want to be a Biology teacher. Number one reason I wouldn't - dealing with uppity teenagers who take it on as their cause that they are not going to dissect the frog.

Hulu - when i was home i looked at it, realized it may be the greatest site ever, and it isn't available in the UK.

New Jersey, a lot of people make fun of, but being back there this past weekend, reminded me about what a great place it is. There is no place like home.

Wow a recipe and Wizard of Oz reference, not that there is anything wrong with that...

so the last two weeks i have been from London to Munich to New Jersey to heading back to London tonight some fun stuff to report.

5 highlights

1. The dump came to Easter Dinner. I must say the Dump in mixed company should really be referred to as the Landfill.
2. Nobody drinks like the British, on an afternoon flight the guy to seated next to me put away 6 or 7 beers on the flight. He was in his mid thirties, professional. My states, puritanical background thinks this may be extreme, I don't know if the British do.
3. In a moment of interesting cinematic choice, the field and I went and saw Never Back Down, which is pretty much a shot for shot redo of the Karate Kid, with better fight scenes but worse acting, storytelling and factors of interest.
4. If I found out tomorrow that I was going to die in 30 days and could not spend time with friends and family, I might choose to spend that time in Munich. It's like New Orleans was pre-Katrina, Good food, Good beer, people in good moods, decent weather and a lot of the people speak a language I don't understand.
5. I feel like Lost is building itself up to either be the greatest show ever or a major let-down.

more to come...

The closest I think I will ever get to going through a time warp is when I am using a toilet paper and somehow I am unrolling instead of the top and bottom of a set of two-ply, I am unrolling the bottom of one and the top of the level below. Only happens every few years but when it does it is memorable.

Phenomenal

Before there was Matt Damon or Ben Affleck

Eliot Spitzer... a few comments

1. In college I remember there was a group cleverly, (although I am guessing a professor thought this up) called Bacchus. (Bacchus being the god of wine... unlike Steve Urkel who is the god of whine)... yes I just made an Urkel joke, its taking me a few days to get fully back in the blogging Swing. Anyhow Bacchus was one of those awful acronyms that just doesn't really make sense. I think it was something awful like Behind all college consumption healthy University students. The thing was they would have these parties with mocktails (fancy drinks that help guys who couldn't find a girl to make-out with even less successful). They were the ones who aided the feminist club in espousing the real but over hyped dangers of date rape. They wore Tee-shirts with things like, I can have fun sober. I remember my first semester Freshman year thinking about these people suck. I was mature enough to know that there was some validity to their cause, but I also knew that the only people who joined this club, were guys whose wrap was being sensitive, and girls who weren't hot enough to get into a good sorority. It was only after a few weeks, that my initial judgment was sullied even worse. The members of Bacchus were the biggest boozers and sluts on campus. Which brings me to my point... the people who preach the loudest are hiding the most.
2. The libertarian in me is reminded of George Carlin, If selling is legal, and a word that rhymes with ducking is legal, then how come selling ducking isn't legal.
   
3. The former 13 year old boy in me can't wait to see the photo of this woman. If he was willing to risk so much, she better look like Jessica Alba's prettier sister.
4. What I do know, is that if Spitzer was client number 9, there are a lot of guys out there that are praying for two things a) that there name isn't implicated b) that if their name is implicated they don't get known as client number 792.