Every year, I throw a New Year's party, and it's always the same setup. Good people, good booze, and rollicking good time. We don't mess with the formula because you don't mess with success.
The only change this year is a jar on the bar with a sign asking people to toss in a few bucks for the people who have been devasted by the earthquake in Asia. I figure it's the biggest natural disaster since Atlantis sunk, so intruding on the festivities with a little grim begging isn't so bad.
I tossed in some twenties, so people get the point that we're not looking for pocket change. I have some idea of how much I'd like to raise, but I'm sure I'll be unhappy when I actually count out the cash. Even good people can be stingy at times like this.
My girlfriend wondered if we should worry about somebody making off with the pot. I promised her that anybody stealing from earthquake victims would be in for a rough time, and she forbade me to beat people up in the apartment. She said I have to take the person outside if I want to beat somebody up. I really don't think it will be an issue, but it's nice to have the ground rules covered.
I hope everybody has a good New Year's and remembers what they value and why. I have a friend who was supposed to be in Thailand last week (his work puts him there a few months a year). He hasn't responded to emails. I'm not worried yet-- I'm sure he'll turn up on a beach in California, laughing at me.
A friend of a friend is a diving instructor who lives in Thailand half the year. His house was on the beach. He survived by swimming off the top of his house, clinging to anything that would float:
Our house was 150 feet from the beach, that is THE hardest hit beach in Thailand. As water rushed into our house and then ripped open the second story wall, I leapt off our second story roof and swam and swam and swam, riding the wave deep into the jungle, as it destroyed building after building, ripping up trees and spinning diesel trucks into the air. All this with me in the center of it clinging to anything that floats and swimming to avoid the standing buildings or trees that crushed and impaled many others.
The wave deposited me, a small swedish girl and a 60 foot poilice cruiser (medium sized steel patrol boat - around 20 tons) 1 kilometer from the beach - in the jungle.
He spent the day providing first aid and care to injured people. He says his village had a 60% survival rate. The entirety of help offered by the US government to him was "a phone call, a toothbrush, a paperback book and a temporary passport." In other words, things are ugly over there.
If you're hosting a New Year's celebration, put out a jar. Even small amounts can make a big difference.
In France, Santa was mugged while giving out sweets. Apparently some teens were upset when he wouldn't cough up more candy. They started beating him, which is horrible, but because it's Christmas, some passersby chased them off. Too bad they didn't score his swag bag.
Of course, Santa's not always the victim. He has a long and hidden history of torturing children. Santas rival clowns for the down low scary sadism, and finally somebody has put together the proof.
Via The Morning News.
My girlfriend is on a holliday diet. The pants she wants to wear to New Year's are a smidge too tight, and she only has a few days to slim down enough to squirm into them. It's funny and a little sad to see her diet because at 105 pounds, she's never been on a diet before in her life. Her big fear this week is that she'll no longer be a size zero.
She keeps asking her mother for advice on how to lose weight. Her mom responded by heaping more macaroni and cheese on her plate. To mom, this woman will always look too thin.
This morning, she woke up, reached over to the nightstand and ate a cookie. "Shit! shit!", she said. She'll never lose that weight if she keeps forgetting she's on a diet.
My diet recommendation, for all you people that gorged on christmas: Grapefruit juice for breakfast. Grapefruit juice and laxatives for lunch. Cigarettes (or heroin) whenever hunger sets in. And a sensible dinner. It's what all the top models do.
I think all this dieting is stupid. Sure I like thin women, and I'm quick with the fat jokes, but when skinny little things with 24-inch waists are eating like North Koreans, it's a real sign that something is a little out of whack.
I just can't get behind this diet nonsense. I'm going to go buy some brie and see how long she can hold out.
Everybody seems to think Pedro Martinez is worth about $13mm a year, but only the Mets were willing to give him a four-year contract. Although I really don't like Martinez (I'm just glad he's not in pintstripes), I hope the Mets haven't fallen prey to the winner's curse. Pedro's numbers have been declining steadily for a few years. He's still a great pitcher, and he'll be worth $13mm this year, but he's no longer a strikeout king and he'll need better defense and run-support than the Mets have provided since 2001. Four years from now he'll be an overpriced third starter and the Mets will be trying to figure out how to unload him.
Meanwhile, Jesus hates Curt Schilling. The pitcher famously attributed his postseason perfection (that first ALCS game aside) to "the Lord". But now, it seems he isn't recovering from surgery too well and is likely to miss the start of the season. It must really suck to have fallen out of favor with the Lord and it looks like Boston's fortunes will be reverting to the mean.
If your're like me, you're always scrabbling in your shelves for a book to read-- hoping for something you somehow haven't read or perhaps an old book that deserves another look. Too lazy to walk to the library, too cheap to go to the bookstore, you just want books to magically appear in your apartment every few days, Happily, somebody heard my cry.
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I'm all about enjoying Danger Mouse's mashup of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. It gets regular rotation on my music station. In fact, I'm listening to it right now.
I never really thought about video mashing, but when I saw that somebody made a Gray Video (mirror, torrent) from old Beatle's footage and some live Jay-Z stuff, it piqued my interest. It's well done, and even the obvious seams just add to the wonder, like the puppet strings you can see in Team America. - And while we're mashing, check out the Kleptone's Night at the Hip-Hopera. The Kleptones have Disney all a twitter because they repurpose Queen all over the album. I'm on Disney's side for aesthetic rather than legal reasons. They should have ignored Queen in favor of something more like Yoshimi Battles the Hip Hop Robots. Still, Hip-Hopera is worth a listen, just for the creepy, prescient bit that comes at -20 seconds of the ODB remix in track 4.
- And finally, Allan Holdsworth -- synthy, jazzy electric guitar. Musically, it's the most interesting stuff done with guitar since Dylan went electric. He's not on my daily playlist, but is worth hearing, just to expand your conception of guitars.
A new children's book tries to explain marijuana to children. It's Just A Plant is about a little girl who walks in on her parents smoking. Her mom takes her for a bike ride and introduces her to the wonderful world of weed. This work is a long way from the books I read when I was a kid. Illegal drugs! Main characters that aren't white! I just know somebody is going to object to exposing kids to such things.
According to the Morning News, you can get photos of your NYC building, circa 1940, from old tax records. My building is an old armory, and I'm sure it looks much the same as it did 64 years ago, but I can't resist.
India observations from Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen:
Biggest surprise about food in India: How much it draws on Chinese influences, even at the regional level. There is even a uniquely Indian version of Chinese food, which is derived from adding Indian spices and peppers to basically Cantonese dishes.
I can't wait for somebody to bring that taste to NY. The global economy can save New York from the bland fusion food that currently reigns here. Why must every restaurant re-invent food in the exact same way? Blech.
Oh, and file this observation under "Funny 'cause it's true":
Favorite Indian joke about the Chinese: How do we know that Adam and Eve were not Chinese? Because they ate the apple, not the snake.
Lean Left's tgirsch hauls off and tells Yankee fans to cry him a river. Apparently Yank fans don't understand pain. He would love his team (the Brewers) to have such problems as a four-year ring drought. All Yankee fans are to him fair-weather fans.
It's true that everybody loves a winner. And Yank fans love to see their team win. And we're spoiled by the constant winning. But most of us have been here since way before 1996, and most of us will be here long after Torre is mismanaging games for Tampa Bay.
Remember the Yankees of the 1980s? Hell, remember the 1990 Yankees? Their best starter won 9 games and nobody had an ERA under 4. Leary posted their best and worst numbers, htting batters and tossing the ball like he was aiming for the dugout. Their best hitter (Roberto Kelley) batted .285. They won 67 games and came 5 short of losing 100. Even Mattingly, the iconic Yankee of that era was down with the back problems that would prematurely end his playing career. We stuck with the Yanks then and we'll stick with the Yanksnow, but there's nothing fair-weather about Yanks fans.
No matter how many rings and flags the Yanks have, you always want your team to play to their potential and to go all the way. Past success does not soften the blow of seeing your team fall apart and fail to execute when it counts most. The problem wasn't just that they played poorly. The problem was that they could have done better. And should have.
Yankee fans have trudged through the valleys and to pretend we're spoiled brats for bemoaning our team blowing a three-game lead in the ALCS holds us to a ridiculously high standard.
Maybe Curt Schilling hurt his ankle inserting his foot into his mouth. This is what he said before the game: "I'm not sure I can think of any scenario more enjoyable than making 55,000 people from New York shut up."
You gotta love it when a the Red Sox ace goes from champ to chump in just 3 innings. Oh, wait a second. The Sox haven't been champs since 1918. Make that "chimp to chump".
That said, any team that almost comes back from an 8-run deficit has some chops. Sox fans are rightly touting last night as a moral victory. For me, as long as the Yanks keep winning the pennant race, I'll gladly concede victories in the morals race.
It's gonna be a long series if these teams keep swapping momentum every few innings. I stand by my prediction: Yanks in 6.
We've waited all year for this showdown. It's the culmination of the greatest rivalry in baseball, if not in sports. Whoever wins, the World Series will be a letdown after watching the two best teams in baseball battle in the Bronx.
I'm a big Yankee fan, but let's not pretend the Red Sox aren't a threat this year. Schilling and Pedro are the best starting pair in baseball. ManRam and Ortiz are the best 3-4 hitters in baseball and rest of the linup can swing for the Green Monster every at-bat.
The Yankees, meanwhile, have question marks in their middle relef and their starting rotation. Kevin Brown's back is healthy, but only when compared to his hand. Lieber's back is fine, but only when compared to Brown's. Somebody let the lightning out of El Duque's bottle. And while Javy wasn't quite terrible in game 4 of the ALDS, he serves too many 0-2 meatballs when you consider he's not the Yankee nicknamed 'Chef'.
From the other side of the plate, the Yankees have a better 1-9, but the Manny-Ortiz one-two punch leaves you hoping for a double off the Green Monster rather than a homer over it. The Yankees's best hitter is Jason Giambi (whose two solo homers kept them in Game 7 of the ALCS last year), and not only is he no Manny, he's never going to leave the bench.
That said, the Yankees have six guys with more than 20 homers. Lieber in the Bronx is like Ali in Zaire. Brown is on the mend and looking to redeem himself. Gordon and Mo are the best setup and closer baseball has ever seen. And if Mystique and Aura don't win it for them, we can always count on Pedro running out of gas in the 8th inning of Game 7. Yanks in 7.
The NYTimes obits Midcentury Modern and crowns Directionalism the young upstart king. Of course, the only problem with Directional furniture is that it's ugly. Even mid-80's minimal modern pieces are tacky formica monstrosities, so before we let the taste makers from Times Square burn our furniture, let's see if people are really willing to trade their sleek, low-slung Le Corbusier chaise lounges for a giant aluminum cookie-cutter turned on its side.
On Thursday, the Yankees will play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to make up a game that was cancelled by hurricanes. The Yanks have the best record in the American League. The Rays are 30 games out of first place and their season is over. Anybody want to come watch the Yankees ronk all over them?
Because the game is a make up, tickets for any seat in the stadium are just $5. Also, hot dogs and sodas are half-price. Proceeds from the game go to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.
If you want to get to a ballgame this season, this is one of your last chances. They only play six more games, and three are sold out. If you're an American, you gotta go to a baseball game once in a while.
The game is at 3:00. We'll be there. Who wants to come? Take the afternoon off and let's day trip to the the Bronx. Come play hooky with us tomorrow. It's for charity.
Email any of the Brutal Huggers if you're interested.
Michael Chu has a beautiful cooking blog aimed at people with analytical minds. Recipes are presented as tables, and he works methodically through various issues related to cooking. You'll find informative articles on knives, cutting boards, fats, oils and more. If you approach cooking as part art, part science, check out Cooking for Engineers.
While I try not to burden this blog with it, I am a huge Yankee fan and a huge Steinbrenner fan. Steinbrenner gets slammed for carrying a huge payroll, one that no other team can match. The competitive advantage of outspending your rivals by $100 million can't be denied.
But the Yankees are not just a rich team buying championships. It's true that the Yankees spend a lot because they make a lot of money. But they also spend a lot because Steinbrenner invests his profits back into the team instead of putting the money in his pockets. Other teams (the ones complaining that Steinbrenner is outspending them) are making huge bank off their teams. If they had more money, they wouldn't spend it on player salaries. They'd pocket it. And we know this is true becase as these teams have taken in more money through revenue sharing and the luxury tax, their payroll hasn't increased at all.
Buster Olney, writing for ESPN, wants to see Steinbrenner go to Cooperstown. I agree. When Steinbrenner goes, it will be the end of an era, one that won't be repeated by his successor.
Digital Journalist has a page of 100 Photos that Changed the World. They're all Life photos, they're all mezmerizing, and they're all heart breakingly depressing.
Clicky the linky at your own risk.
Burning Man is over, dude. Black Rock City is going, going, gone. Guess I have to stop neglecting this blog. Soon. I promise.
I've long thought cemetaries to be rather tasteless and ghoulish. I'm not the only person to see that if we insist on burying our dead, there has to be a better, more life-affirming, less mournful way to go about it. And now there is.
Italian artists have designed a biodegradable coffin that holds the deceased in the fetal position. The body is planted in the ground like a seed, with a young tree above it. Over time, the tree grows and is nourished by the decomposing body.
Imagine forests instead of cemetaries, where we tend to living trees instead of cutting back the plants around a headstone. It's hard to change a culture's death rituals, but I hope this idea catches on.
Via Boing Boing.
A woman in NYC couldn't figure out how to use her Metrocard, so she complained to the clerk in the token booth. She asked the clerk for assistance. He refused to come out and swipe it for her. She begged, he responded with insults, she responded with insults, he came out of the both and proceeded to kick her ass.
So far this is a tragic story about a woman who can't figure out how to swipe a metrocard, fiery tempers, and an asshole who beats helpless women. But these kinds of stories happen every day in every city.
Here's the part of the story I love: while this woman and her friends were fighting with the clerk, she dropped her wallet. It was promptly stolen by somebody quitter-witted than the combatants.
I love New York.
Burning Man has released the 2004 map, and the street names are planets, in order from Mercury on out: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Sedna.
I'm sure your first question is what the hell is Sedna? For those of us who haven't taken fifth grade science in a while, Sedna isn't a social disease. It's a recently-discovered planet-like body at the edge of our solar system. It might be a planet, it might just be a big rock. But really, what's a planet if not a really big rock, so call it a planet, call it rock, just don't call it cuntface. If it's anything like my girlfriend, it hates being called cuntface.
And because this is a family-friendly blog all about the educational experience, here's a handy mnemonic to remember the order of planets. You can try to remember it Saturday night when you're tripping your face off and trying to find that guy with the thing:
My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizza Slices
There's a movie about Che Guevara's days of motorcyle wandering coming out. He is played by Benicio del Toro, which is to me just about perfect. Since I've always meant to pick up his scoot diaries, maybe this will prod me. Or not.
I've never really been sure what was up with Che. Lots of people have Che shirts, but they're all young, dumb and full of class guilt or hipster irony. Or they're old, bearded and smell like dirty sock stew. I've never really been into the Che worship.
I did some googling to see what what I could see about Che. Sartre called him "the most complete human being of our age", which would be quite the recommendation coming from anybody but Sartre. I'm not sure what makes Che complete. Maybe it was his relentless womanizing. Or maybe it was his willingness to exact revolutionary justice on the very peasantry he was trying to liberate. That's the kind of thing Sartre really respected.
My favorite Che anecdote is about how he ended up the Governor of Cuba's National Bank. Right after the revolution, Castro gathered a bunch of guys to try to figure out who would do what in the new government. Somebody said, "Is anybody here an economist", and everybody was surprised when Che raised his hand. Who would question Che? He'd cut your fucking balls and shove them up your ass. Che got the job. It turns out he thought the question was "Is anybody here a Communist?"
Ultimately, Che seems like another "sacrifice the peasantry for their own good" asshole to me. I won't be buying his t-shirts any time soon. But I'm still interested in seeing the moto movie.
The movie drops on 27 August. Peep the trailer and go see it.
What would the world be like if a different winner had emerged from Florida in 2000? What if Bush had lost and we were instead ruled by a Florida orange?
Via Boing Boing.
One of the great things about the internet is all the niche content it offers. Everything from low-fi electro synth-pop to vegetarian porn. No matter how freaky you are bent, you can find other people who are bent the same way. People used to have to go to New York to achieve that. Now you can find a Tribe or a Yahoo Group for any kink up you might think up.
Christopher Isherwood is an odd sort of literary figure. He is known best, perhaps, for authoring the auto-biographical books that were adapted as the play (and movie) Cabaret. He also wrote the Berlin Diaries. Isherwood is well-regarded for his works, most of which draw heavily from his life.
What's interesting about Isherwood is that he is known mainly for his memoirs even though those memoirs are the total of his life's accomplishment. Usually we read somebody's memoirs because we are already interested in them-- nobody would be reading Clinton's My Life if he hadn't been President. But we read Isherwood's memoirs because they're just some fine writing.
Isherwood's memoirs and auto-biographical fiction are worth reading even to a reader with no interest in Isherwood himself. He writes about himself and his life, tells a lot of lies, and casts himself as his own main character. Along the way, the reader meets the colorful and distinct people that populate Isherwood's life.
He write languidly, with little driving the plot (if there is a plot) and much time spent on petty things. And yet the reader is drawn and engaged. Perhaps it's because Isherwood tells of rubbing shoulders with all the famous literary figures of his day. Or perhaps it's because he has a first-hand American perspective of pre-WWII Germany. Or maybe we're fascinated by trying to figure out who is the real Christopher Isherwood.
Isherwood is also known for being gay. In his earlier works he cover this up, but eventually he comes clean with the dirty stories. In Christopher and His Kind, he retells parts of his life and it is clear that he was quite the little player. It is fascinating to see how much his memoirs were changed by his writing them from the closet.
There is an article about Isherwood in yesterday's New York Times.
The Washington Post reports that teen-poet, Mattie Stepanek, has passed away. Is it too churlish of me to point out that this teen's poetry was about what you'd expect from a kid? Sure, he chose his words as if he were 15 rather than 13, but let's not pretend we're putting down, say, Seamus Heaney for his stuff. Kudos to a kid with a tough life, but had he lived, his future was as a copywriter for Hallmark, not poet laureate.
The Mo has an interview with Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball. Moneyball is slowly changing the way baseball evaluates, selects and compensates players.
The interview has some great bits of baseball information, including musings on the Red Sox curse, fans and speculation on trading Nomar or Pedro. Lewis also talks about how the ideas he exposed in Moneyball are spreading beyond baseball. People in football and basketball are interested, but more interestingly, people in Hollywood are interested.
Quantifying talent goes against everything we learn in kindergarten, but the ability to determine a person's true contribution is immensely valuable to any effort.
Kevein over at Lean Left thinks Joyce is overrated. I agree and put Joyce in the same box as Faulkner and Woolf-- self-indulgent writers who seek less to communicate than to show off their ability to play with words.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I only say that because I don't understand their genius, etc. But genius isn't always valuable. These folks might have been operating at superhuman level, but given that their art is all about communicating with humans, I'd say that's a weakness rather than a strength.
Everybody has an opinion on the cigarette tax hikes, and that opinion is that the new taxes suck (unless you're some government flunky trying to squeeze every last dime from the yellowed fingers of addicts). And I agree that the tax hikes suck, but I'm reminded of a different kind of cigarette tax, which I call the Pack Tax.
In many bodegas in NYC, you can buy single cigarettes for around 50 cents each. You put down two quarters and the man behind the counter hands you a Newport, then lights it for you with a lighter he keeps by the register for just this purpose.
The young men that hang on the corner in front of the bodega smoke all night long, and they go into the store and buy their Newports one at a time instead of by the pack. They can do the math. They know it's a ripoff. And yet they persist in what looks like economically irrational behavior.
But of course it's not irrational. As it turns out, buying 20 cigarettes at fifty cents apiece works out to be cheaper than buying a pack for $7.00. This is because whenever any of them has more than one cigarette, the other few guys on the corner each bums a smoke. If he only has one, he can say "Sorry, man, it's my last one."
The "Pack Tax" must be more than 6 cigarettes a pack, which erases any savings of buying a whole pack at a time. I'd be curious as to know how much the bodega could charge for individual cigarettes before buying a pack and paying the tax became an attractive option. I suppose it would depend on how many guys were hanging on the corner that night.
Of course, being rational, economical people, a few of these guys were constantly trying to reap the savings of buying a pack while avoiding the Pack Tax. When nobody was looking one would run to the counter and demand a pack of Newports. "Hurry, hurry," he'd say. He'd throw down exact change and shove the pack in his pants. Then he'd buy a single cigarette, calmly wait for a light and saunter outside. During the rest of the night, he'd sneak his smokes from the pack while pretending to buy them from the bodega.
We are all readers. We all have sagging shelves and bursting boxes full of them, books we've loved but will never open again. There's no more room, but there's always more books. And we're all covetous sluts eagerly eyeing the dust jackets at our friends' apartments. More books are both the solution and the problem.
Fortunately, there's help.
On Sunday, June 6, from 2 to 6 pm there will be a book exchange on the roof of my building in Hell's Kitchen. I'll have a grill going up there and a cooler full of ice. Bring your own grillables and some beer, browse the books and take what you want. If you have some books you want to pass on, bring them. If you have no books to share, come anyway. There's more than enough to go around. Oh, and if you want to bring some food for the crowd, that's always appreciated too.
From my shelves, I have pulled three boxes of books. There's a lot of great fiction from Rushdie, Twain, Roald Dahl, Shakespeare, Rushkoff, Homer, Dostoevsky, Joyce and more. There's reference books, new fiction, classics, travel, philosophy, art, sci fi, law, sociology and computer books in there. It's all good stuff, stuff that survived my culling the collection many times over the last few years. I guarantee that you will find something you want to read. And my books are just the start.
Any books left over from this event will be donated to various libraries, communities and schools.
Wanna come? Send an email to gonzo@brutalhugs.com for address and details. See you then! :-)
OK, this game is hilarious. Dick Cheney has recruited Voltron as the latest soldier in his compassionate conservatism army. You lead the forces of Hulk Hogan, Mr. T and He-man in an all-out war to defeat the five lions of Voltron. Watch the intro. It's amazingly funny and includes a cameo by R2-D2.
Note: This game isn't work safe, as it includes a scene of Voltron bending the Statue of Liberty over and violating her in the harbor. That scene alone is worth getting fired for, so go ahead and click anyway.
Say Uncle is building a dog house. He's impressed by the fancy dog houses he's seen, including one with a patio and an air conditioner. He should come to New York, and meet Brutus, an English mastiff with his own one-bedroom apartment, complete with doorman. When Brutus's owner divorced his wife, he endedup staying on Brutus's couch. Talk about being in the dog house.
Say Uncle wrote a nostalgic post about 80's sitcoms dealing with touchy political issues, like drugs and guns. It reminds me of the A-Team episode where Mr. T and company are called in to break the backs of labor agitators. The labor organizers were depicted as cruel, violent thugs in a 30-minute call to patriotic union busting. Ah, the 80's...