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6/30/05: Compress several personal memories into one evening to save hard drive space

If you were born on this day in 1987, you can now walk into a store, slap down $8, and walk out with a brand new pack of cigarettes. Maybe you should, I don't know. Probably you should.

On this day in 1987, I was one month and twenty-two days from being legally allowed to walk into a store, slap down $3, and walk out with a brand new pack of cigarettes.

Do you remember your first cigarette? Maybe. Do you remember your first legal cigarette? I doubt it.

I was never quite cool enough to smoke, but I do remember my first legal beer. On the evening of August 20, 1990, I sat around my apartment drinking illegal beers with my friends, who were drinking legal beers, as they had been for months. At around 11:47, we left the apartment en route to the bar down the street. I was already drunk at this point no doubt.

When we got to the bar, it was like 11:53 or something.  We got carded. I explained to the bouncer that I was turning 21 in, like, 5 minutes, so you gotta let me in, man.

He let me in. A couple of minutes passed. I got me a beer.  A free one, as I recall. Drank it right down. Tasted almost as good as the illegal beers I was drinking fifteen minutes earlier. The world felt right.

Then for some reason -- perhaps it was an attempt to get an extra free beer -- I told the bartender that Dillahunt was my dad, and he was taking me out for my first night on the town. Or something like that. I even had an explanation for why he was only 13 months older than me.

I thought it was real funny. The bartender nodded politely as another stupid tadpole lost his tail. He'd heard it all before, and it probably made more sense the first time, too.

Then we asked him for some olives.  We used to eat olives with our beer a lot. Believe it or not, I think we thought it was sophisticated.

After awhile we realized that this bar had been conquered and it wasn't really any more fun than the apartment, just louder and more expensive. We often forgot that lesson in the days and years that followed, but at 2 am on 8/21/90 it seemed completely clear and obvious.

So we went home and grabbed our backpack full of fireworks and a garbage bag full of ice cold bottles of Old Milwaukee and you can go to bed tonight confident that yes the next thing we did is we went and we blew some shit up. On the way to the as-yet-undecided-upon place where we would eventually blow the shit up, we ran into a genuine drunk. He was an old-timer, a barfly, a guy who had seen the ugly, unromantic side of alcohol abuse and decided it was still better than the alternative. He must have been almost 30 years old.

We were maybe six guys, 21 years old, armed with the freedom of youth and close to ten pounds of low-grade explosives. We moved efficiently through the streets like an elite fighting force. We were all drinking bottles of beer and one poor guy had the garbage bag with all the extras slung over his soldier. Whoever that guy was, you're a prince. Maybe it was me, fuck if I know.

Our new buddy, the 30 year-old, asked where we were going. We told him we were going to blow things up.

"Can I come?" he asked.

"No, man, sorry," somebody said. He was trouble, this interloper, we could tell. You can't have a flake like that on board when you're attending to the serious business of blowing shit up. Plus, he was Super Yucky Older Guy.

"Well, can I at least get a beer?" he asked, trying to extrapolate the cigarette smokers' unspoken bumming pact into the world of alcohol. "The bars are closed."

"Nah, dude. Sorry," somebody said.

"Please," he said. He had now been following us for about two blocks.

"Tell you what," somebody, I think it might have been Dillahunt, said. "We'll SELL you a beer for five bucks if you promise to leave us alone."

And that's what we did.

What a bunch of animals.

After we blew the shit up, we went back to the apartment, ordered a pizza, and promptly got into a wrestling match that turned mean-spirited when I slammed Dillahunt in the eyes with a handful of baby powder. When the pizza guy arrived, one guy answered the door while two other guys pretended to be engaged in oral sex in the background. The delivery guy ran out of there before we could give him his tip.

Charming people.

It's amazing how when I look back even a month into my past, I am stunned by what a tool I was back then. This type of self-evaluation is especially painful when you have a website on which you post your daily feelings about the universe. A website which allows you to check back to any point in the last two years and realize exactly how stupid you were on that date.

Just embarrassing.

Remember ten years ago? 1995: a primitive time. And I was a primitive man. First of all, email was still in its infancy, and in fact at our office only cW, our IS Manager, had external email and internet access. So I would write actual, typewritten letters to friends and then forget to send them. Here's one (very slightly edited to preserve a fraction of my dignity) from that era that takes me back in time; it was intended for my friend Brian C. but I didn't send it to him until like a year or two later.  I like to bust it out every year or two for the cringe/nostalgia factor. It sort of breaks my heart.

A guy came by my desk at work today and installed my own personal TV/VCR with cable. I get YES Network and ESPN. Too bad I don't have an office or I'd be watching that shit like a champ. You could come over and we could share some popcorn and watch the Yanks.  Oh well.

Folks, I am running out of ideas in a big way. My real job and my real life have intensified just enough to eat up the 12 percent of my brain that I used to set aside for this website. I hate to say it, but we may be in the home stretch here. My plan is this: I will keep posting semi-regularly until the latest Genius Challenge is complete and somebody has 250 Genius Points. After that, perhaps a li'l hiatus until reality slows down a bit. And after that, maybe a once a week post, I dunno. It's just clear to me that things are starting to get lamer and lamer and it might be time to wrap it up. If this were a sitcom, we'd be well into our second Darren by now. If this were the Lord of the Rings movies, the Hobbits would already be fucking. If it were the New York Yankees franchise, it would be the team of June 30th, 2005. We ain't what we once was. We've collapsed to the point of talkin' haircuts and college drinking stories. What I'm saying is that things are winding down, friends.

So help yourself to a delicious, nutritious, 12-point whodat and let's all be thankful for how far we've come.

6/27/05: Bad Haircut

I got another bad haircut on Saturday. There are two barbershops on 1st avenue between 22nd and 23rd streets, and when I moved into the neighborhood a few months ago, Big Jim Lang strongly recommended that I walk past the first and go to the second.

"There's a dumb old (guy) there, in the seat second from the left, and he'll take care of you," BJL said. "The rest of the guys there are totally clueless, so make sure you wait for him."

So I went to that barbershop, where I found a bunch of people waiting and a general sense of chaos in the air. No taking a number, no leaving your name with somebody, no official record of who came in when. I guess a lot of barbershops are like that. When a chair opens up, that barber yells, "Next!" and all the waiting customers look up from their Playboys and Soldier of Fortunes and kind of nod at each other politely, as if to say, "Is that you? Or is it me?" And somehow it all works.

And on that day, when the nod came my way, I threw Big Jim's advice out the window and went with the First Available Barber (FAB). It was the dude in the first chair, the guy who seemed to sort of be running the place. And he gave me a pretty bad haircut. Almost without fail, the guy who runs the place gives lousy haircuts. It's like he doesn't feel obligated to improve his game, because he owns the joint or at least gets some kind of manager-level salary bump. So he gave me a crap-ass haircut, but it was only $11, so I didn't feel too bad about it. Haircuts and sunglasses, I've never been willing to spend a lot of money on either, and it shows.

The next time I went in I lucked out and got Big Jim's guy, and sure enough, he did me much better. Then the time after that I got another barber and another clunker of a haircut. But I just can't bring myself to insult an Available Barber (AB) by saying, "No, that's OK, thanks. I'm waiting for the other guy." So I continue to suffer.

On Saturday, that barbershop was closed for a wedding or some such nonsense. So I was forced to go to the dreaded Barbershop #1 and try my luck.  I had never gotten a haircut there, but I had set foot inside their walls once before. Here's how it went down: one day, I was on my way to Barbershop #2 when I saw a friend of mine sitting in Barbershop #1 waiting for his nod to come up. I walked by sorta quickly because I felt an odd sense of guilt towards the barbers at Barbershop #1.  I mean, I could very well have gone there for my haircut, but I was instead deliberately walking right past their door to go somewhere else. And some part of me felt like they'd sense this about me immediately, that I was on my way to another barber. Just by looking in my eyes or something.

But then, after I shuffled past the store, I felt a different kind of insane guilt. What if my friend had seen me staring into the store and then I didn't even stop in to say hello? We hadn't made eye contact, of that I was pretty certain, but maybe he looked out and saw me right as I began turning away. I should probably go say hello to him, I thought. Let's be realistic, those barbers don't know that I'm about to walk right past their place and get a haircut at their archrivals' place down the block. I could be going out to buy an extension cord, or perhaps I'm looking for a lost kitten, or maybe I was on my way to catch the M23 and head over to the Wesssside to play roller hockey. They can't possibly know. So one of my ridiculous paranoias trumped the other, and I went inside to say hello to my friend.

We talked on the side for a moment, out of his barber's earshot.

"So, you should come here and get your haircut," my friend said in a fairly low tone, not even knowing I was on my way to the next barbershop at that very moment! "My man Ron here is the best. He'll take care of you."

I checked to make sure Ron wasn't listening, and then I said, in my most whispery-whispered voice, "Actually, it's funny you should mention it, because I was just heading down the block to the other place."

At this exact moment, Ron perked up. There's no way he could have heard me, but I guess his Barber Sense kicked in and he knew exactly what the deal was.

"You want a haircut?" Ron asked. "Don't go to that other place. You come here, we give you the best haircut."

I felt like a schmuck now. "Um, hey, maybe next time," I said. "Definitely another time, yeah...." I started backpedaling out the door.

"OK, you see...you come here next time," Ron said. It was practically a threat the way he said it.

Later that day, I saw my friend again at basketball. He had a pretty awful haircut, real tight along the sides but bushy and moussy on top. He looked pretty stupid.  But he was happy with Ron's work nonetheless.

So this Saturday, when Barbershop #2 was closed, I found myself with no choice but to head over to Ron's place (yes, Ron's name is on the door, so he's the guy in the first chair who always gives bad haircuts) and take my chances.  Luckily, I bypassed Ron himself and headed down to the fourth chair, where I was greeted by a young guy with an Eastern European accent and a haircut almost identical to the crappy one that Ron had given my friend a couple of months ago. This is going to be difficult, I thought. There is a definite conflict you feel when the person who is about to sculpt your head has vastly different sensibilities than you about what makes a good haircut. And this guy made it worse by continually asking me to compare what I wanted to his own haircut.

"So, the sides," he'd say. "About as thick as mine you want them?"

a. you don't want to insult him, right as he's about to carve you up.
b. you don't really want the sides the same as his.

So what do you say? In my case, I just kind of mumbled a few answers here or there and waited for it to end. "Yeah, that looks good" or "Maybe a little more off the top?" or "The sides look really good now."

At one point, he said, "We're gonna give you a nice summer fade here." That was scary. Almost as scary as if he would have said, "I assume you want an elegant rat-tail in the back?"

So it was a little shorter on the sides than I wanted, and a little bushier on top than I would have liked, and he did some weird sculpting of the hair right around the ears, but I got out of there basically intact and it only cost me $12. On the way out, my guy said, "OK, I'll see you next time" while staring me dead in the eye. Again, it sounded like a threat.

I'll probably go back to Barbershop #2 next time, but it's nice to know I have options.

***

I actually got to play some sports this weekend, and it was fun. I sucked at both sports, but that's OK. I worked up a sweat. I missed most of the gay pride stuff, which is too bad. That is one of the best parades in town. I also didn't get my annual cheering section at softball. I must be getting old.

Wheredat?

6/24/05: One Cingular Sensation

Even though the Pistons lost to the Spurs in what turned out to be -- let's face it -- a boring NBA Finals, I think we may have finally settled a debate that's been raging for over ten years. It pains me to say it, but I must: Rasheed Wallace is a better all-around player than Rashard Griffith.

My cellphone saga continues. I won't bore you with too many details, but let me just say that I have already taken back my Verizon phone because it got zero reception in my office. Today the wife and I signed up for Cingular. We went with an old fashioned phone choice, none of that camera bullshit, and it's also my first candy bar-style phone: the Nokia 3120. I bought it at one of those little cellphone hut places, and they were unable to "port" my old number. So adios 917-531-****, hello to the 646 area code. I wish I was mature enough not to care about my area code, but damn, 646? Pretty crappy. 917 is macho as all hell.

I will be emailing many of you with the new number as soon as it passes the office test on Friday. Sorry for the inconvenience.

So the Yankees kicked the shit out of Tampa Bay...in one game. Then they got smoked in the other three. Bad signs are everywhere for this Yankee team, and one of those signs is their tendency to have huge offensive explosions in one game and then barely scrape across two runs the next day. And another bad sign is that there really isn't a cavalry coming. Unless you count Jaret Wright as a cavalry. This is our team, nobody's really been hurt that much. Nobody's waiting to come in and save our ass. And it's getting to the point where we don't have much young talent to dangle in hopes of landing a veteran for the stretch drive.

Today three runners scored on a ball hit in front of Bernie. His arm gets about as much respect as an investigative report by Jeff Gannon. Poor Bernie.

For some old school fun, here is a GISG (8 points). You may answer immediately. And for another 18 points, whodat (answer immediately, in fact always answer immediately unless otherwise specified)?

6/21/05: What the fuck is "PCS" anyway?

Dear Sprint,

First, I want to thank you for 6 great years. You were my first cellular service provider, and part of me wishes we could have stayed together forever. From the beginning, I heard the whispers about you: you had terrible signal strength, you didn't have as many towers as the other guys, your customer service was a joke. But at every step of the way, you surprised me. Throughout the New York City area, you gave me quality service for several years. Dropped calls were rare. My plan was reasonably priced and more than covered my calling needs. When my contracts expired, I was able to get new phones for decent prices, and you guys had some of the coolest, most gizmo-loaded phones around. My Sanyo 8100 (R.I.P.) will always hold a place in my heart. You never failed to treat me with courtesy on the phone and your website was easy to navigate.

Sure, we had our problems. Outside the city, reception was spotty. I was often frustrated by one or zero bar service when my Verizon-subscribing traveling companions were at a full four bars. And I admit it, maybe that was the beginning of the end. My eye started to wander towards Verizon, and we've probably been living on borrowed time since then. My new phone, schnazzy as it may be in terms of features, ultimately turned out to be a tremendous piece of crap. If it's any comfort to you, it was that phone more than anything that's caused me to end our relationship. It took cool pictures, it had a sorta neato internet thing going on, and it was a dark, swanky shade of blue. But none of these things could excuse the fact that it gave me terrible reception. If I made 1000 calls on that phone, 997 sounded as if they were transmitted through a rusty old lunchbox. Calls dropped as often as they didn't. And I got rotten reception in the two places where I spend about 70% of my life, home (0-1 bars, often no service at all) and work (2 bars max, tinny, unintelligible conversations).

Sprint, I've enjoyed our little run. Together we discovered the joys of ass-finger phone photography. You gave me the ability to check my email through my phone for the first time. I loved my old "Immigrant Song" MIDI ringtone (although I am pissed as hell that you discontinued it). But now I've reached a point in my life where I appreciate the simple things, like complete, clear telephone calls. So today, the wife and I went to the Verizon store and signed up for a family plan -- $59.95 a month for two lines; 500 anytime minutes included; nights, weekends, and all Verizon calls free; plus she gets a 15% discount through her job.  I wanted to tell you in person, because I knew it would hurt you to hear that name, but the sales lady was so efficient that she handled the entire phone number migration thing herself.  So let's let this be our special farewell.

I know it will also be painful to hear that I am paying a cancellation fee just to get away from you. Perhaps the $150 coming your way will soothe you in some small way.

So I guess this is it. I am sitting in my apartment awaiting a text message on my new phone telling me that service has been transferred. I'll miss you, Sprint. But we've just grown too far apart and I think this move will be good for both of us.

Love always,

Hans Bungle

P.S. If it's any consolation, I am only getting 1-2 bars on my Verizon phone in my apartment, which is still pretty suckworthy. But it's more than you could offer me.

***

Glad to hear there was softball this weekend, and nice recap job by D. Lee. I think I am out for the next six to eight weeks, so it's good to know we have some new players joining the fold.

***

Whodat? (12 points, you may answer immediately.)

6/20/05: Bearded and Bewildered

It was Father's Day on Sunday, although my pops has never believed in celebrating Father's Day. He says it's a Greeting Card Holiday and an excuse to buy a bunch of shit for your old man that you know damn well he doesn't need. Nonetheless, I spent a nice hour with pop today, watching the Yankee game and talking. He showed me an item from a book about the Today Show in which he was mentioned. He was a producer on the show in the late 60's, and they had set up one of the first-ever multi-location satellite dealies for the show. For the open, they had a correspondent in Berlin, one in DC, one in Rome, one in London, Paris, etc. They were gonna have kids from each site say, "Welcome to 'Today'" or something like that, and show some of the legendary sights from each city, all live. And they actually had the Pope on hand to say a few words. My dad got to write the Pope's part, earning him the nickname "The Holy Ghost Writer." That's pretty cool, writing shit for the Pope. I would have thrown something in there like "Tawana told the truth" or "Waaassssssuuuuup" or "I'm here to tell y'all, Popin' ain't easy" or "Some folks call me the space cowboy, some call me the gangster of love" or "Have you ever met a girl that you tried to date, but a year to make love she wanted you to wait?" just to see if he'd read it. And I'd have been canned.

Anyway, part of the open was going to feature the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, which was scheduled to be completed at exactly 7am. But for the show's purposes, they needed that change to take place at like 7:01:30, so they could include it in the open. However, Buckingham Palace refused to reschedule the guard change to accommodate the show, so the producers decided it would have to be left out of the open. Then the night before the big show, one of the producers was drinking in a bar in London and happened to run into one of the royal guards. The guard was like, "Hey, I hear you're gonna show us on TV tomorrow." The producer said, "We were gonna show you, but now we can't because the change will already be complete before our show starts. So we'll just show something else." The guard said, "Horseshit. You leave it to me, we'll have that change ready for you at 7:01:30."

The next day, the producers were lining up all the shots for the open, and sure enough, the guards were changing a minute and a half late. It timed out perfectly with the rest of the open. The guard from the bar had purposely dropped his rifle to delay the change, even though it meant getting chewed out by his superiors.

TV was fun back then.

My pop also expressed his dismay that his name no longer appears in the phone book. He lives with his lady friend, and the phone is under her name. And my mom must have finally had his name removed from the number we all grew up with, the number that now belongs to her alone. So there is no way to find him if you don't know his lady friend's name.

"Who knows how many people have been looking for me over the years?" he said. At first I didn't think it was a big deal, but then I remembered the whole fiasco from last fall with his ex-wife thinking he was dead because his name was no longer in the phone book. And it's true, if you don't exist in the phone book, you're dead to an entire segment of the population. We all deserve a place of our very own in the phone book, even if we're living with people whose last names are different than ours.

***

About three months ago, I was out in the bar with D. Lee and Big Jim Lang and Joe Monkeyweb, sitting around and minding our business. Then D. Lee spoke up and gestured across the room.

"That is one bad beard," he said, nodding towards a guy who, indeed, had a terrible, terrible beard. It was sort of a slightly-more Amish version of Everlast's beard from a few years back. It was horrible. It was offensive. I wish I had a picture.

"It's like the Brad Daugherty of beards," Big Jim astutely observed.

Beards are a complicated matter, and a subject I really wish I knew more about. D. Lee has been cultivating various beards for years, and has become a master of their slippery nuances. There's a right way to grow a beard and a wrong way, and he could explain the difference to you in a moment's time.  If I were man enough to grow real facial hair I'm sure I'd have a better grip on the whole subject. But even as a novice, I feel compelled to direct you to what I feel must be one of the most noteworthy beards in town. One of the cashiers at the Whole Body* store on 25th and 7th is rocking one of the most intense, and, in a certain sense, most significant beards that this fine city of ours has ever seen. It's a beard with a message, to be sure, and it's only because I am so disconnected from beard culture that I am unable to decipher it precisely.  It's sort of a semi-Jesus, wounded hobo kinda thing. If I had to guess what he's saying, I'd say it was something like, "My beard is the reflection of your broken heart." Or maybe just "Mama didn't love me." I think we all stand to learn something from this beard, and maybe it's something different for each of us. Whatever the case, it is an impressive sight and I suggest you stop in and discreetly have a look if you're in the nabe. But be polite. If he gets self-conscious about the beard, the beard's power may be compromised. And that will make all of us a little bit worse off in the long run.

***

Here are 5ive quick thoughts on Game 5ive of the NBA Finals.

1. Horry - Wow. Wowee wow wow. I've always respected him, always feared him, but I've never seen him play at a level of sustained excellence the way he did tonight. As weird as it is to say this, it was a Jordanesque performance. He refused to let his team lose -- dunks, putbacks, free throws, and of course his trademark threes. Incredible. I also enjoyed his postgame response to the question of why he always seems to come through in these situations.

"I just love playing basketball," he said. "A lot of guys take it too seriously."

It's easy to make fun of his "aw shucks" answer, but when you think about it, it's absolutely true. He doesn't really seem to worry about the end result. He's just playing. While some great athletes raise their level of play as the stakes get higher by intensely focusing on the task at hand and willing themselves to success (Jordan and Derek Jeter come to mind), there is definitely something to be said about being lost in the moment, lost in the game. Just playing like it's a driveway 2 on 2.  Former Dallas Cowboy Blaine Nye famously described backup QB Clint Longley's heroic performance in a Thanksgiving game against Washington as "a triumph of the uncluttered mind." Now I'm sure he meant that derisively, as if Longley was just a dumbass chucking the ball around.  And maybe in Longley's case, that was true. But the "uncluttered mind" is actually a very desirable trait in an athlete, and Horry seems to have one of the best. To me, it means they aren't thinking, "Shit. How much time is left? What if I miss? I wonder if someone else might be more qualified to shoot this shot than me. If we lose, will I get the blame?" etc. They are just out there playing as if it's the second quarter of an exhibition game, and having a relaxed, uncluttered mind at a critical time gives you a tremendous advantage over someone who is wrapped up in the consequences of every play. Which brings us to...

2. Duncan - again: Wow. Wowee wow wow. How about "Stunk-an"? I never thought I could describe a 26 point, 19 rebound performance as "embarrassing," but that's the word that comes to mind regarding Duncan's play tonight. He's the anti-Horry; you can practically hear his asshole tightening up as the game winds down. His free-throw shooting is abysmal, it's Shaq-like. In fact, it's worse than Shaq, because with Shaq, you're likely to get 1 out of 2 no matter what the situation. Pressure doesn't seem to affect him, he just sucks at shooting free throws.  With Duncan, it's clearly psychological. He's thinking about it, he's attaching significance to everything that happens out there. It's reaching Steve Sax/Chuck Knoblauch territory. He was lucky to hit 1 out of 7 in the 4th quarter. And his missed putback at the buzzer was inexcusable, too. He did everything in his power to blow the game for the Spurs, and it's only by Bob Horry's good graces that he was unable to complete the deed.  Somebody better unclutter his mind soon, or they could be in trouble. 

3. The Game itself - this was truly one of the best Finals games I've seen in the last ten years or so. Two excellent teams matching each other shot for shot, and an incredible level of intensity for the last twenty minutes or so. It really felt like a classic.

4. The Refs - several times in the first three quarters, I thought the refs were favoring the Pistons. And several times at the end of the game I thought they simply blew calls. But then, every time they showed a replay, it supported the ref's call. I mean, there were a few plays that could have gone the other way, but considering the level of contact and competition, they did a remarkable damn job. They really did. I would not have wanted to officiate this game. The refs earned their money tonight, and that includes whatever illegal funds they were able to scrape up by downgrading their airline tickets to coach on the flight home.

5. Al Michaels - he did a decent job tonight.

***

Had to miss softball tonight, I hope there was a game and I hope it was a good one.

***

Photo update: I can't wait any longer. I need to tell you that whodat #31 is longtime "Sports Machine" host former Wham! singer George Michael. Yikes. A lot of miles on that face. For a happier "whodat" experience, tell me: whodat (15 points, answer immediately). More happy news: Brady has located the "Hans on Moped" photo and reports that I am wearing some truly incriminating sunglasses in the shot. We hope to get this to you soon. Scan it Brady!

* Which is sort of the non-food part of the Whole Foods store over there.

6/17/05: Avogadro, Manfredi, Gatorade, and Chicago

It's been a little over a week, and I am officially missing the PBdotC. However, I also share fair Lara's intuition that Pete will return before too long.

There was a big scary storm here this afternoon, and after it passed through we were left with a cool, beautiful night with lots of wild-lookin' clouds. I went out around 9:30 to get a light load of groceries and as I walked I cherished every last one of the night's 71 degrees. On my way to the store, I called Brady in Chicago. He was at the bar with fellow Manfredi founding member Rod M., who was visiting from SF. They were drinking beer, watching a meaningless baseball game, and drinking beer. I spoke to both of them and got the distinct sense that life was good in Chicago. I felt a little sad that I couldn't be there with them, discussing matters such as Avogadro's Number and the greatest inventions of the last 100 years, but I was also happy for them. And happy for me that my life has been going remarkably well of late.  I'm not stupid enough to take that for granted.

If either one of you two jokers is reading this, I am certain you are hungover as all hell right now. You know what you need to do: head out to the kitchen and grab a nice 37 degree Gatorade. Drink it. When your strength begins to return, as it certainly will, get in the car and scoot over to Potbelly Subs. Order: a sub of your choice, some sour cream and onion potato chips, a coke, and a strawberry milkshake. Read the newspaper as you eat. Take a full ninety seconds to appreciate the fact that it's Friday at 2pm and you're not at work. Go home, empty your bowels, and then head directly to bed for a revitalizing nap. Wake up around 5pm, shower, and put on shorts and a T-shirt. Go outside to the patio, cracking open a beer on the way. Drink two or three more beers by 7pm. Invite several friends over. On your nice big rooftop patio, grill for yourself and your friends:  burgers, chicken breasts, and bratwurst. Eat. At around 9:45, head out to the bar.  You can take it from there.

On Saturday morning, you can re-read those instructions to help get you through another sunny Chicago weekend afternoon.

If you notice, the key to the entire day is Gatorade. And even here in NYC, where I am not going to be hungover at any point in the next five to seven years, Gatorade is the thing. Tonight I bought a nice gallon-sized bottle of Original Green flavor. After all my stupid experimentation with Vitamin Water and Powerade and even all the gimmicky new flavors of Gatorade itself, it's important to remember that the baddest boy on the block was, is and always will be Original Green Gatorade. I'm used to slurpin' it down right out of the bottle, but I think it's equally nice in a tall glass with ice.

Gadget Corner: At Kissel's wedding last weekend, I was impressed to see that Deion's digital camera has a 640 x 480 video mode. I've been fairly happy with my camera for the last year and a half, but its maximum 320 x 240 video resolution is most wack. I need a new one, I think. And my cellphone is an atrocious piece of shit. Mid-year Santa, if you bring me a new one, it doesn't need to have a camera or an mp3 player or great web-surfing abilities. All I want is a fairly small phone with good sound quality and excellent signal strength, especially in the barren Stuytown area. Oh, and it would be nice if it could shoot out little laser beams.

In fact, we may have done this before, but what features should the state-of-the-art cellphones begin to offer? Here are a few suggestions, please add your own:

-toothpick
-bottle opener
-cigarette lighter
-flashlight
-weed compartment
-garage door opener
-radar detector
-spider sense

Whodat (12 points, answer immediately)?

6/16/05: Strikin' for Sven

Bowled 2 games tonight before the Gas Face-worthy Chelsea Piers bowling alley cut us off and kicked us out. So I paid $50 for two games of bowling, a slice of gross pizza, a couple of beers and a few cups of soda. Ripoff. But still fun as hell. I had a 157 the first game, and a possible-career-high 193 in the second.  That's a beefy 175 average over two games. Yes, as you can see in the picture below, I was in prime position for the elusive 200 game before I blew it with a heartbreaking open frame in the 9th. And if you're wondering why my initial was "S" instead of "H," it's because I was bowling under my grandfather Sven's name. Sven Bungle was one of the best duckpin bowlers in all of Europe from the mid 1920's all the way through the 60's, and I thought I'd honor him with the big "S" tonight. I hope I made him proud.

BC MI, nice get on Crazylegs Hirsch.  I wonder if you recall the day in college when you and I went to the barber shop and decided we'd both get "Crazylegs" flat-tops. You went first and followed through. Then I took a look at the damage they did to you and chickened out. I don't think our friendship was ever the same after that. Do you have any pictures of yourself with that haircut? You were mint, my friend. Almost as cool as when we went and got our cubic zirconia earrings.

I have a lead on the Hans Bungle moped photo. Brady B. Divine in the Chicago office may have a copy, and I have offered him a $5 prize if I can get it back, either the actual print or a nice, high-res scan. Please follow up on this, B. And $5 more if you have a BC MI flat-top shot.

Whodat, people? (#29, 10 points, you may answer immediately.) And, if you're real smart, whodat? (#30, 20 points, answer immediately.)

6/15/05: Give Marv the Rock

Dear ABC,

Here's what you need to do, and I'll say it nice and slow:

Hire.

Marv.

Albert.

Not too complicated.

I don't know what Marv's contractual obligations are to NBC, but it doesn't matter.  Hire his ass away from them, and get him suited up in time for Game 4 of the NBA Finals.  Get him a spankin' new toupee to make him feel at home (and make it a nice dark brown one instead of the weird sandy blonde one he adopted around three years ago in what must have been a misguided attempt to look younger).  Just get him.

I have nothing against Al Michaels. OK, maybe I do. He's a Bush-loving, jacuzzi-owning, scotch-sipping, smooth-talking suburban Southern California guy who has about as much business calling an NBA game as he does playing in one. That said, I don't hate Michaels. I think he's a fine football announcer, because he cares about football, he sees it well, and he describes it astutely.  Owing largely to the fact that he was lucky enough to be in the booth during the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey victory, his voice does bring a certain level of prestige to every game he calls, which is appropriate for the once-a-week theater of pro football.

But basketball is a different sport. It's a city game of concrete and rubber and confrontation and bounce and Al Michaels is the voice of a wealthy middle age man driving a sports car with the top down on a sunny day, playing Classic Rock at comfortable volume levels. Listening to him call a basketball game is like watching your dad dance to hip hop at a wedding. You might like each of them on their own, but the combination simply does not work.

Hoops has a very specific rhythm and feel, and Marv Albert understands this perfectly. He may not even know he understands it, but he does.  Marv Albert was the annoying kid who would show up at the playground and announce the games because he was too young to play in them. Marv Albert's connection to the sport is the same as Michael Jordan's. It's a connection based on a desperate, unhealthy, all-consuming love. Hubie Brown, still calling games with passion in his 70's, understands this love. If you've fallen victim to it, you know what it is. It's the intoxicating feeling of walking by a city court on a warm evening in June and hearing the boing boing boing of the ball and getting the overwhelming urge to toss up a few jumpers in your work pants.

Al Michaels simply doesn't care about or understand basketball in this way. He's too relaxed, he's too detached, and I get the feeling he doesn't even really want to be there, other than the fact that it's a plum gig and dammit Al Michaels should be handling all the plum gigs.  Basketball is a like a volatile but ultimately rewarding relationship; it requires grunting and screaming and a deep level of commitment from everybody involved, and it can get ugly at times. I get the feeling Al Michaels thinks he's too cool for all that.

Right now, ABC, Marv Albert's out there, waiting. He's strolling down the street in his work pants. He wants to take a few shots, I know he does. Won't you please give him the rock?

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

Hans Q. Bungle

***

Last thought on the NBA Finals: I think San Antonio will win the series in 6 games, but I am consistently puzzled by the way they ignore Duncan for long stretches of games. The guy is a gold mine. The more he touches it, the better it is for everyone.

***

So Jacko got off. I was surprised by how many people at my office were completely offended by the verdict. I guess Michael Jackson is so weird that people would very much like to assume he is a child molester rather than consider other possibilities. Although our legal system rightfully requires us to assume a man is innocent until proven otherwise, it seems to me that the default presumption on the part of the average schmuck on the street is "Guilty."  I mean, unless you were really following the merits of this trial closely, what would give you the right to be angry about the verdict? The jurors seem to have reached the correct decision based on the evidence presented. And at least they saw the evidence.  Everybody else, unless you were in the courtroom, please shut the old piehole.  Thank you in advance.

*** 

As a lifelong Gatorade Man, I hate to admit that I've really been digging on the Vitamin Water lately. But I did a little price comparison, and that shit is waaay too expensive. Late for them.

***

And as a shamelessly loyal "Real World" viewer, I direct you to three above-average blogs penned by RW alums:

Melissa from New Orleans

Colin from Hawaii

Dan from Miami

***

If you get ink on a white shirt, as I did today, you should coat that shit with hairspray and rub it like mad. The ink will disappear. I don't know how exactly you get rid of the hairspray, but I will get back to you on that one.

***

Going bowling tonight. I anticipate a high game of 167. If I fall short of that, I probably will not mention bowling in tomorrow's post.

***

Menu Pages kicks ass.

***

Whodey (20 points each) and wheredat (15 points, no googling on this one, please). You may answer in 3...2...1...NOW! Also, click on the white box in the upper right for some new content.

6/13/05: President Bush Monday

To know me is to know I have moments of self-doubt. Maybe 120 times a day. Even when things are going good, I worry that maybe they're not as good as I think they are, or that maybe they're gonna get bad again real quick. Sometimes I can overcome the doubts for weeks at a time, but then they come back and I become a real pain in the ass to be around.

Lately I've been worrying about www.verbungle.com. On the surface, things are good. We've had some popular features lately, like the race to 250 points and the whodats and whatnot. The story about my misspent high school days was warmly received, as were the humiliating photos from Kissel's bachelor party. We now command enough daily traffic to allow us to rent out the top of our home page to corporate sponsors, meaning we are actually turning a profit on the site after two long years.

But something doesn't feel right. The problem, I think, is in the writing. It's bumpy and choppy and never quite gets you where I want it to get you. Sometimes I guess it's in the ideas themselves. They're weaker than they should be, but since this is essentially a blog I need to post something each day. So I go with the weak idea I've got, and try to expand upon it until it fills a few paragraphs. I always try to give you a few paragraphs; I'm far too insecure to just post a picture of an amp and call it a day. So whether I have a bad idea or a good one, I bat it around and toss it and knead it and stretch it out like a piece of pizza dough, until it fills a few paragraphs. Then I hit "publish" and take a look. And I always see a pizza with all the cheese bunched over to one side, burnt on the bottom and cold from a bad delivery effort.

So I decided to look up Mark Leyner.

Leyner, you may recall, was one of the hot young authors of the early 90's. His work from that period is likely the funniest writing of the last 27 years.¹  My friends and I would often read entire passages aloud to one another, because this is the type of thing young men do. No one really understands why; it's just the way of the universe.

I decided to look up Leyner for a couple of reasons. One, he's pretty much fallen off the face of the literary earth over the last five years or so, and at age 49 I think maybe he's still got some bullets left in his gun. Perhaps an appreciative visit from a fan could be the thing to rock him back into action, to rekindle the fire in his eye. To be one small spur in the creation of a new "Et Tu, Babe." Secondly, I wondered if a genius² like Leyner might be willing to give me a few quick pointers to get my own prose headed in the right direction. At his peak, Leyner was known to one of the most generous and accessible authors of the last 49 years. In his first book, "I Smell Esther Williams (ISEW from here on out),"  he actually listed his real home phone number in one of the stories.  That book, actually published in the late 80's, sold very few copies. But when his second and third books³ caught on with college kids in the early 90's, the sales of ISEW got a jolt as well. Suddenly, Leyner was taking phone calls from drunken frat boys at 3am, asking him to recommend a steroid.⁴ Sure, these calls probably grew tiresome. But Leyner never took the number out of subsequent publications of ISEW.

That phone number, I figured, was my chance to reach him. So Sunday morning around 11, I picked my copy of ISEW off the shelf, dusted it off, and found the number. Without knowing exactly what I wanted to say, I just dialed. On the third ring, he picked up. Same number, fifteen years later.

"Hi, Mr. Leyner, my name is Hans Bungle and I run a website called verb--"

"Hi Hans," Leyner said. "Good to hear from you. You don't have to tell me about verbungle.com. I read it every day when I'm having my morning coffee. Loved the pictures from Kissel's bachelor party. And the post about bus travel was spot on.  But why no more softball recaps?"

"Well, the games have been kind of crappy the last few weeks, and a couple times people agreed to do the recaps but then never got around to it," I said, momentarily stunned that he read the site but also intent on giving him a decent answer. "So I've just sort of let it go."

"Do you think Red Smith just 'let it go' when a particular game he was covering didn't move him?" Leyner asked. "I'll answer that for you: No, he didn't. He sat down and he hammered on keys and he put in new sheets of paper and he changed ribbons and he paced around the room and he drank coffee and then he hammered on some more keys and when you woke up and grabbed the newspaper from the front porch the next morning there was a column in it with the name "Red Smith" across the top. And usually it was a damn good one."

I wasn't prepared for him to challenge me like this. I was still reeling from the discovery that he had even heard of verbungle.com, and now he was putting me on the spot about the fucking softball recaps? Surreal.

"Um, no.  No, I guess he didn't," I said. "I'll try to do a better job on the recaps from now on. You're right..." I kind of trailed off.

"Hey, I only say that because I like the site and I care about it," he said. "Do what you want, but I think you're capable of much more than you've been giving us."

Capable of more? I thought. I think I'm giving quite a bit. Six posts a week after sacking shit from 9-7 every weekday? And this criticism coming from a guy who hasn't published a book in seven years? I was mildly insulted, but I also couldn't quite get over my fanboy excitement that Mark Leyner fucking reads my website.

"Yeah, you're right," I said. "We could do better. In fact, that's what I'm calling about--"

"Look, Hans, this isn't a great time. I was just rushing out the door to a dominos tournament in Stevens Park⁵," he said. "But there's a lot of downtime in between games. Why don't you come out and we can talk for awhile?"

"Sure," I said. "What's a good time?" 

"Let's say we'll meet at the cannon at around 2:30," he said, assuming that I was as familiar with the geography of Hoboken, NJ as he was. Luckily, the word "cannon" rang a bell somehow. I think I sat next to that cannon the last time I was in Hoboken, back in maybe 1994. We had a little picnic in Stevens Park. I distinctly remember the cannon, sitting on the top of a hill, pointing presumably at the Hudson river, but seemingly always ready to be pivoted right towards NYC. I always thought that cannon symbolized New Jersey's resentment towards New York, for always being the butt of our snobby jokes. For having a great little arty city like Hoboken right there but never getting enough respect.

At 2:25, I walked into the park and slowly made my way over to the cannon. Leyner was there already, sitting next to the cannon in a lawn chair, playing a harmonica with his back to me. The NYC skyline was in the background, and it was an absolutely gorgeous June day, maybe 80 degrees but not too humid.

"Hi, Mr. Leyner," I said. He stopped playing and turned around. He looked much older than he did ten years ago -- his hair had receded further, his face was gaunt, there was no trace of his trademark muscles.

"Hans Bungle, I presume?" he said. He motioned for me to have a seat in another lawn chair that I assume he brought out there just for me.

"That's me. I really want to thank you for taking the time to meet with me," I said. "You're one of my literary heroes."

"Yuck, you're embarrassing me," he said. "What's in the bag?"

I handed him the shopping bag I was carrying. "It's just a couple things I wanted you to have," I said. "First, there are two egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off from Panya, the Japanese bakery on Stuyvesant Street. They're my favorite. The second thing is a hard copy of an unfinished story I started writing back in 1992, right after I read "Et Tu, Babe". It's basically a day in the life of me at that time. It's really amateurish and I'm not sure it has any point, but it means something to me. It really takes me back to that place and time, although I'm not sure anybody else would get that from reading it. I revisit it every month or so, adding a sentence here, revising one there, removing one there. But it never gets measurably longer and I don't ever feel like I've gotten any closer to finding an ending for it. I just whittle at it here and there. The process started to freak me out, the way I refuse to finish it but I can't just put it down and forget about it, either. I think maybe it's making me a little crazy. So this morning, after we talked, I opened up the file, and I typed for an hour or so, and I think maybe I finally have an ending. And I wanted you to be the first one to read it. Even if it sucks, I'm so glad to be done with it that I decided to print it out and delete the file once and for all. I just couldn't stand to have it sitting there on my hard drive for even one more day. So you're looking at the world's only existing copy of 'Basmajian'. Read it at your leisure."

He fingered through the document. It was about 25 pages and I had bound it with those little brass fasteners kids sometimes use for book reports.

"Do you mind if I read it right now?" he asked. "My next game isn't until 4."

"Sure," I said. "If you want. But there's no rush."

"Just give me about half an hour," he said.

He opened one of the egg salad sandwiches, and had a bite. "These ARE good," he said, smiling. Then he laid down on the cobblestones with his face toward the sky and began reading. I told him I'd be back at 3 and walked off into the park.

When I returned he had finished both sandwiches and the document was sitting right next to him on the cobblestones. I noticed that he had removed the fasteners and left them alongside the manuscript.

Before I could ask him what he thought of my story, he said, "So what's bothering you?"

I assumed he hadn't liked the story and didn't know how to tell me. "Well, the website, for one thing," I said, completely comfortable with the decision to talk about something else. "It just hasn't been the same lately. I'll get a good idea during the course of my workday, and I'll send myself a little email reminding me what it is, and then when I get home and look at it, I have no desire to write about it. So I'll force myself to write about it anyway, and then when I do, it's just so bad. So bad. Do you mind if I record this?"

"Of course not, I figured you'd ask me that. Gonna post a little transcript on the ol' website tomorrow?"

"Yeah, if that's cool. Only if you don't mind."

"No, I don't mind," he said. "Why don't we talk about your background for a minute? Have you ever received any formal writing instruction?"

At this point, I clicked "record" on my iPod, excited to finally use the little Griffin iTalk recorder thing I bought a year ago.

"No, not really," I said. "I mean, I was a journalism major in college, and I briefly wrote for the school newspaper and all that, but even then, it was kinda bad. Here's an example. I was cleaning some old papers out of my mom's house, and I found some old copies of the articles I had written for the school paper, The Daily Cardinal, in 1991. I guess I had sent them home to my parents because I was proud or maybe I wanted them to know I wasn't just drinking beer all day and night. Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to read one of those articles, fifteen years later.  The first article I found was a front page story about Thurgood Marshall's retirement from the Supreme Court, and then-President Bush's plans for a replacement. Wanna know what the first three words of that article were?"

"Sure," Leyner said.

"'President Bush Monday,'" I said. "'President Bush Monday!' Can you believe that? You couldn't phrase it more awkwardly if you tried. I was so put off that I had to stop reading. 'President Bush Monday!' It was something like, 'President Bush Monday named Clarence Thomas, an African American federal judge from Washington, D.C., to the Supreme Court, replacing retiring justice Thurgood Marshall.' And the worst part is, fifteen years later I don't think I could phrase it any better!"

"OK, stop," Leyner said. "STOP. Who cares? We all write things that we're not proud of. You need to stop worrying about stupid shit like that. You also need to remember that most of the people who come to your site don't come for the writing, they come for the whodats and wheredats and the Google Image Search Game. Speaking of which, that was fucking unreal when PBdotC nailed 'Sunday Best' to win the prize. Sorry about that digression. Anyway, I'm not saying there's no need to improve your writing, just that you need to remember that verbungle.com is way more than a chance for you to tell long stories that matter to only a handful of readers. Most people are skipping right to the whodat anyway. Again, I say this not to minimize the importance of your stories, but I want you to relax and realize that no matter what you do, it's OK. And the best part of having a blog is that if you post a lemon, you can always post something new the next day to get the taste out of your mouth. That's why I was so surprised when Pete hung up his keyboard last week. The blog format seemed perfect for a guy like that. Every day was a chance to give his opinions on whatever he wanted. And I thought he was doing an awesome job of it, too."

"Yeah, I don't know what exactly got into Pete," I said. "But I can totally relate to that feeling that you're just done with it all, like the blog becomes more of a burden than an opportunity. In a way I'm jealous that he had the stones to get out when he did. I was planning a similar announcement myself, and now he sort of beat me to the punch."

"Well, don't worry about any of that, let's just worry about getting your stuff going the way you want it to."

"OK, thanks," I said. "Can I ask you a few questions?"

"Sure."

"When you were sort of first starting out, did you ever get overcome by self-doubt?"

"Of course I did," Leyner said. "I used to hate everything I did. That's what got me into weightlifting. I figured that if I couldn't be the best writer, at least I could be the buffest. And when other people start criticizing your work, it's somehow soothing to know that were better than them at something, and specifically that you could beat the shit out of them if you wanted to."

I wanted to ask him why, then, he'd stopped lifting but it would have been rude. Instead, I followed up on the subject of critics.

"Still, when David Foster Wallace called you out and said your writing was 'dead on the page,' didn't that sting?" I asked.

"Nah, I never got caught up in that shit," Leyner said. "I figure the fact that he's spending his words talking about my words means I'm at an automatic advantage. Twenty years from now, will his work resonate more strongly than mine? I dunno. But I do know that only an asshole uses footnotes the way he does. And I know I could beat his ass if it came down to it. Do you lift?"

"No," I said.

"You should. And if you don't like lifting, you should find something else that you're really good at, better than almost everybody else, so you'll always have a pool of self-confidence to draw upon."

Nothing came to mind.

"Here's another question," I said. "Do you have any exercises I can do to improve my writing?  I mean, I look at Pete and Joe and Tony Pierce and Big Jim Lang and Dan Kois and I think, wow, these guys make it look so easy. Why do the words always come out sideways when I type 'em?'"

"Well, here's one place to start. Do you have a copy of the first paragraph of this post, the way you're planning on writing it?"

"Yeah, I do, actually," I said. I opened up my laptop and showed him this entire post, up to the point where I arrived in the park to meet him.

"See, look at the opening paragraph," he said. "Why not just end it after 'To know me is to know I have moments of self-doubt'? You're using way too many words to say way too little. Did you know that as an experiment I once wrote an entire novel while having to urinate very badly?"

"Well, I remember you talking about that in one of your books, but I assumed it was a joke."

"It started as a joke but then I actually wrote 'The Tetherballs of Bougainville' that way. You should try to test yourself in some way, take yourself to an uncomfortable place and see how it affects your writing," he said.

"Well, I do end up staying up to ungodly hours writing stupid stuff for the site. That physical strain must have an effect," I said. "Unfortunately, I think the effect is that the posts get away from me as the hours tick away, and I lose my ability to see if something works or not. I basically go a little bit insane in the course of each of the longer posts and I'm usually embarrassed in the morning."

"I actually think that's a good start, but I also think that nothing great comes from hours of meticulous labor. It should just come out once and sit there, complete. So I am going to give you two exercises. One, I want you to write ten thoughts down at the end of this post, and you can't use more than one sentence for each. And a maximum of one comma in each sentence. semi-colons and colons will be treated on a case by case basis. (And no parenthetical asides, please.) This will teach you to be brief. Secondly, I want you to stop editing. You can fix typos but otherwise you gotta leave stuff as it first came out. Including that cumbersome first paragraph."

Leyner looked at his watch. "It's almost four," he said. "I gotta get back to my game soon. But we'll talk again in a few weeks."

"Thanks, I really appreciate it," I said. I packed up my laptop and was about to leave when I remembered the story I had given him. "Oh, and I hesitate to ask, but what did you think of 'Basmajian'?"

"I loved it," he said, and I saw his eyes start to well up. "Seeing who you were then reminded me of who I was then, and what I had then. Every day, I'd wake up, and every day, something great would come out of me. I felt unstoppable. And now it's gone. I look back on those books I wrote and I know I'll never do it again. Because it'll never be as good as it was then. And as long as those books exist, I'll never even try."

With that, he took the unfastened pages of my story and threw them over the side of the hill. A wind caught them and carried them out towards the river. I ran over to try to catch them, but within seconds, they had floated out of my reach forever. The only page I was able to save was the last one. I looked at him incredulously, then down at the page. There was only a paragraph on that page, the paragraph I had written after speaking to him that morning. I read it. It wasn't any good at all.

"Kid, I just did you a favor," he said. Then he turned and walked off into the park, a lawnchair under each arm.

***

So in honor of Mark Leyner's request, here are ten thoughts:

Where's Sita been?

Great softball tonight, Pacino over De Niro 17-10.⁶

Where's Schictman been?

Kissel's wedding was lovely, and the food was absolutely incredible.

Shocking admission: I once saw "Top Gun" twice in the same day back in 1986, paying both times.

cW got the Steve Miller whodat, but will only receive 8 points because he got a mild hint.

The Yanks don't have it this year, and that goes for Torre as well.

I would someday like to own a brownstone.

Were I to rank this weekend with PBdotC's now defunct weekend rating scale, I think it would get a "$$$."

For 10 points, Whodat? (You may answer now.)

¹ I like idiotic claims like this because they imply that the claimer has read every single thing published in the last 27 years and is thus in a reasonable position to make such a statement.
² Also always fun to throw the word "genius" around nonchalantly.
³ "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist" (MCMG) and "Et Tu, Babe,"(ETB) respectively. These are the two you need to read.
⁴ A question cW actually asked Leyner at a reading in maybe 1995. Leyner had created an alternate reality in which he was Mark Leyner, best-selling author and steroid-addled bodybuilder. And although he did dabble in bodybuilding, he was certifiably freaked out by cW's query, responding with something along the lines of "I wouldn't recommend that anyone take steroids."
⁵ For the last fifteen years or so, Leyner has lived in Hoboken.
⁶ Recap to follow.

6/10/5: The Deutsch of Deion

You know one thing I miss about big drunk nights out? That intense burst of laughter that hits you, sometimes late the next day after an evening on the town big night out, sometimes a week later, when you remember another stupid thing that happened that you had previously failed to recall.  Like you'll be in the shower the next day, trying to piece it all together, and then all of a sudden you'll go, Oh, shit, that girl wouldn't let us bum cigarettes so we stole her whole pack and then we ran out of the bar and then we came back when we realized nobody bothered to chase us and then the girl confronted us about stealing her cigarettes and we responded, "No, these our our cigarettes. However, you may have one if you like." Or you go, "Wait a minute, did Dillahunt and I share a naked scooter ride last night? Jesus."  It's usually the smaller stories, the ones that don't get the front page attention when you're initially recapping the night's events, that create the most durable memories.

For instance, today I was thinking about Kissel's bachelor party, and all the stuff that happened, none of it hugely entertaining but a lot of it worth a telling or two (to be told somewhere else), and then I remembered a little nugget that cracked me up. On the way home, somewhere about two thirds the way across the great state of Brooklyn, the climate in our subway car suddenly became very inhospitable. I won't elaborate, let's just say we had to switch to a new car. 

When we got to the next car, we sat the poor drunk bachelor Kissel down so he could pull himself together. To quote Robbie Robertson, his bag was sinkin' low.  But he wasn't doing anything to anyone, he was just chilling. I mean, he was obviously very drunk, but in a pretty harmless way. So we're riding along, I think our party was down to 4 at this point, and I noticed that a couple of German tourists sitting a few seats away were taking pictures of poor Kissel.  Now, I had already taken close to 100 pictures of the dude that night, but something deeply offended me about these tourist guys taking their pictures. I had appointed myself Kissel's caretaker and I had promoted myself as The Sober Dude, but the truth is I was feeling a little bit of the effects of the woedka myself. So in a boozy moment of courage, I said to the Germans, "You better put that camera away or I'll rip out all the film and shove it up your ass" or something equally brilliant. I then looked across the car at D. Lee, hoping that he would either make a similar announcement indicating that he had my back, or that he'd at least nod at me as if to say, "Good one, tough guy."  But he just kinda stared blankly at me as if to say, "Yeah, I'm not even paying attention to this situation, I just want to go home and get some sleep." So I sat there glaring at the Germans on my own, and they kept muttering stuff back and forth in German, and laughing. All of a sudden Deion, who up to that point was 99 44/100th's percent useless, started going at the dudes verbally, in German. I don't know what he said, but it couldn't have been all that tough, because within about 12 seconds the three of them were old freunds, having a rousing conversation in German about God Knows What. Deion, if you remember what the hell you were talking about and can honestly share it with us, you are entitled to 8 genius points. No makin' stuff up, though.

I still don't understand why major leaguers take batting practice. The guys who throw BP just toss it in around 75 mph, right down the middle. Sure, it can boost your confidence in your swing, but then it must be a huge adjustment when you step into the box during the game and you're facing some dude with an awesome array of different pitches. They should bring in retired pitchers, guys who are looking for an avenue back into the game, to toss BP.  Oil Can Boyd comes to mind.  He could go out there and throw about 5 different pitches with different arm angles, etc., and confuse the shit out of all the hitters. Then when they came to the plate in the game their reflexes would be sharp. That's what I say. I mean, what other sport do you practice in an environment that's so much easier than game conditions? You don't see basketball players shooting three footers when they need to work on their free throws. NFL Quarterbacks don't warm up with the Duke, Jr. Auto racers don't ride in go-carts to prep for the Indy 500. Tiger Woods doesn't play mini-golf. They need to simulate real pitching in BP. That will be my lasting contribution to the sport.

I'm also surprised nobody had any kind words about our table tennis ad. It was a sloppy photoshop job, to be sure, but I still find it delightful. So up your ass. We will be posting more "ads" in the near future, even if we are the only ones amused by them..

We will give Doug ten points and Joe five for their joint solution on David Ruffin. Here are two more whodats: #25 (15 points), and #26 (10 points).  As for hints, #23 was a world class athlete in the 60's-70's and #21 is dead. You can take half of the original point values if you get those two. And you can answer any and all of these immediately.

6/9/5: RIP PBdotC

The verbungle.com offices are still reeling from Pete B.'s sudden announcement that he is shutting down his site. We even have an on-site grief counselor to help some of our more sensitive staffers through this difficult time. Why? is the question we've heard people muttering at the water cooler all day. Making matters worse, it looks like he packed up shop and took all his old posts with him, so we don't even have a chance to do a list linking to our favorite PBdotC columns of all time.

So we will just say this: our small corner of  the blogosphere lost a powerful voice today.  Pete is a man of strong convictions; when he believes something he says it clearly and forcefully and leaves no question as to where he stands. That is not to say that he is sanctimonious or humorless. On the contrary, he consistently managed to say exactly what he wanted to say with bite and humor and an undeniable streak of goofiness that always seemed to pop up at the most delightful moments. We'll miss the bastard.

Just thinking back, here are a few of my favorite memories from PBdotC's two-plus year reign:

-the election night special
-the flash mob takeout
-the always on-point political attacks
-the weekend recaps with $$$ rating system
-his consistent disgust with religious fundamentalism and his ability to find new ways to express this disgust
-the unwavering optimism towards the O's, which finally looks to be paying off

There's plenty more, that's just off the top of my head. What really bothers me about Pete's departure is that I'll miss that point in each day when I could just push aside my work and spend a few good minutes reading his blog. It was a moment of serenity in a day full of huge, unmarked sacks of shit. It won't be easy to replace.

There's also the sense that it is the end of an era. As small as our collective readership might be, I felt like I was part of a little something between Pete, Joe and myself. And when one third of that little something decides to pack it in, it makes the unit immeasurably weaker. We are now tremendously vulnerable to an attack from the South. Also, as corny as it may sound, seeing Pete post something new nearly every single day helped our staff find the strength to do the same.  Now that he's gone, it's going to be harder and harder to keep the troops in line. Just this afternoon I walked through the Ad Sales* department and saw an account executive standing on top of his chair squawking like a chicken. I fired him on the spot, and I hope the message resonated with his colleagues, none of whom had the nerve to look up from their computers as I dressed him down and let him go. But it's only a matter of time, I fear, before the team loses focus and we are forced to radically scale back our staff, and ultimately the site itself.

Even alone here in my office on the 54th floor, as I gaze out my floor to ceiling windows at the city lights below, doubts begin to creep in. I feel like maybe it's time to go and do something else. It reminds me of the period right after college, when I spent 20 months floundering around Madison figuring out what to do with my life while my friends slowly went out into the world and started actual careers. I feel like I'm being left behind somehow, like blogging is the 21st-century equivalent of slinging hash in the hospital food service department. Just killing time when instead I should be squeezing every last drop of joy out of each minute like it's the the end of a tube of toothpaste.

The upside to all of this is that we'll have Pete and Lara here in New York again, so all I need to do to get some more material from him is buy him a beer or two at our local KC McSlackjaw's.

So thanks for two and a half entertaining years, Pete, and good luck to you in future ventures.  I may be joining you on the blogger's unemployment line before too long.

But until then, whodat? (#23, 17 points) and whodat? (#24, 15 points).  You may answer immediately.

ESPN rules.

* Yes, I know it's not what you want to hear, but verbungle.com has begun selling ads. You may notice them creeping in here or there, but we promise they will be a subtle, almost unnoticeable presence and in no way will we tailor our content to appease a sponsor.

6/7/5: Veselka Never Gets Old

For the second time in a week, the wife and I got a mutual late night craving for Veselka and so off I went into the night to pick it up.

As Travis Bickle predicted almost 30 years ago, a real rain came and fell on New York City today, and it fell at least three times. Thunder and lightning and the whole works. And maybe the real rain washed all the scum off the streets, but when I got down to East 9th street at around 1am, there was still a distinct smell in the air. It was the smell of something that hasn't been washed away. It was the smell of youth.

Maybe the East Village isn't what it was when you lived there, or when your father lived there, or even when I lived there a few years ago. Maybe it's gentrified and the juke box at that one place isn't nearly as good as it used to be. But it's still alive and pulsating with its own special energy.

I walked east down 9th, my old block, and the streets were wet and quiet but there was still a hum in the air. There were young people walking all around, even on a soggy Monday evening at 1am. People who were just figuring out what to do with their lives, people who had just gotten their first real jobs or met somebody they were crazy about or joined bands that would eventually go nowhere. 

Young people own the world, of that I am certain.

I don't know what it is, you might call it Spring Fever, but every year around this time I get wistful. I think about days gone by and wish I could do them over, so I could do 'em differently or maybe exactly the same way again. I think I'm happier than I've ever been, which probably explains why I was only partially devastated when I walked by my old bullshit apartment at 345 East 9th Street tonight and noticed that the lights were on and a cheap fan was spinning in the window.

Even though I'm feeling good about my small perch in the universe these days, there was definitely part of me that was sad to realize that it wasn't my bullshit apartment anymore. And it's not my neighborhood anymore. When I walk those old streets I do it with the innocent enthusiasm of a tourist. It's hard to believe it's been almost ten years since cW ceded the BS apartment to me so he could strike out further east to a less bullshitty apartment of his own.

1996. That's a long time ago. If you were young in 1996, you're probably old now. Like the Yankees. Like Bill Clinton. We all got old in these last ten years. Mark Leyner vanished from the face of the earth completely.

I was arguably young in 1996, young enough and snotty enough to take things like Veselka pierogis for granted. To take the Yankees for granted. To take 7B and San Loco tacos and basketball in Tompkins Square for granted, the same way I once took the Pinckney Street Hideaway for granted. It's easy to get sick of things when you know they'll always be there.

Then when it's all taken away from you, you start to treasure it again. I lived on the Upper West Side for the last three years and we had no Veselka, we had no hipster kids trying too hard, we had nothing really that distinguished us from anyplace else in the city. So the East Village feels fresh to me again. When I went into Veselka to place my order tonight, it was dark and slow. It almost looked closed. But they took my order and they gave me damn good food within 6 minutes' time. And I appreciated it like only a stranger does.

There were about 10 customers in the place, all young, at least a couple tables of 'em fresh from The Bar. Remember The Bar? You could make an open-ended appointment with friends at The Bar, and you could do it on a Wednesday afternoon if you wanted to. Or a Monday night, like the young kids in Veselka tonight. I kind of miss The Bar. You can still go to The Bar when you get old, but you can't stay long and if you can't stay long you're not loving The Bar the way it needs to be loved.  The way the kids love The Bar.

I think it's kind of nice that a new generation of kids is moving into bullshit apartments and growing old together in the East Village. And loving The Bar.

Veselka is open right now, and you can order whatever you like. They'll be open tomorrow night at 4am as well. Stop by.

As for me, I played basketball the other day and it was humid as fuck. For some reason, the humidity loosened up my legs to the point where they felt better that they had in years.  And I was doing things on the court I hadn't done in years. After a successful spin move, one of the guys I was playing with yelled out, "Holy Shit! We got Hans Bungle from 1996 today!"

So I don't know, maybe it's the weather and maybe it's the neighborhood, but something is definitely right in the air right now. And maybe some days I'll still feel 50 and some days I won't want to get out of bed at all, but as long as there are also days when it's 1996 again, everything is going to be fine.

***

One of the worst movies I've ever seen, "The Rules of Attraction," does have one very compelling scene in it. The part where Kip Pardue's character is introduced via his recap of the European trip he just returned from is really exhilarating and well done. It does not fit in at all with the rest of this shitstain of a movie.

Here are a few hints for yesterday's whodat, lowering the value to 5 points: she was a sex kitten-type in the 1960's, and she also stripped buck naked in a movie released in 2003. She is British and she is not Lou Albano.

Whodat (#21, 20 points) and whodat on the fingernail that ain't Dubya (#22, 15 points)? You may answer immediately.

I've watched the first two episodes of "Hell's Kitchen" and I must admit to being more than a little amused. That Gordon Ramsay is one mean son of a gun. I wonder if anyone's ever punched him in the jaw.

6/6/5: Bless your children, give them names

I saw a movie this weekend. Since we got the big ol' HD TV and since a few other developments occurred in our lives, we've pretty much stopped going to the movies. Before this one, I don't think I'd seen a movie in the theater since Christmastime.

And after last night's mediocre experience, I think I can officially say that I am one of those lame people who prefers watching movies on DVD/cable over going to the theater.

We saw "Cinderella Man," which was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be. Maybe a 20.11 on the VRS. Ron Howard's about as subtle as a brick to the back of the head. In almost every one of his movies, there is a point where you go, "No, he's not gonna do that...no way he's gonna do that...it's too corny...he wouldn't dare...oh my god he fucking did it." "Cinderella Man" was no exception. Some real heavy-handed emotional manipulation. Some big swaying music cues that are meant to wring a few tears from your eye. And a plot that would be ridiculously sentimental if it weren't based on a true story. Whatever, Russell Crowe is so enjoyable to watch that it sorta worked. And I was having one of those emotionally vulnerable weekends already, so I was able to cry at the appropriate moments.

But the whole experience left me a little empty. I mean:

-$24.50 for two tickets after internet service charge (a service which proved to be unnecessary as the movie didn't come close to selling out)
-stale-ass popcorn
-smelly dude sitting a few rows away
-approximately 12 commercials prior to the start of the movie
-seats mildly uncomfortable
-no pause button

Come on.

The couch, the TV, and the fridge are so reliable that I don't know if I'll be in a theater again anytime soon.

Tonight was a beautiful night and we had an excellent turnout, but softball was pretty lame again. I was quite disappointed in several things, but whatevs. It seems I am always caught in a strange place where I'm taking it too seriously and not seriously enough at the same time. I think the called shot homer rule has to go, at least until we get a real mushy ball again.  Or at least until I can hit it out every time like Justin can. He crushed two of the all-time shots tonight, the second of which smacked against the building across the street, about three floors up.

I think it is only a matter of a few weeks before Gatorade officially announces that they are now producing an infinite number of flavors. For instance, if I told you I had one of the following three flavors this weekend, would you be able to tell me which one it was and which two were made up?

a. Glacier Chill
b. Alpine Frost
c. Riptide Rush

Maybe. Maybe you could. But I'm sure the other two are in the works if they don't exist already.

Joe M. wins the Pierogi Challenge and will get 9 points (approximately half of the original point value) for his guess of four potato, four cheese. The correct answer was four potato, three cheese.  Good effort by Joe.

Whodat? (10 points) And wheredat? (4 points)

I ate a burrito tonight and it gave me heartburn. Weird.

You know what one of my favorite traditions is? Thanking the driver as you get off the bus. It's so civilized.

6/4/5: These 2 gentlemen finished 1-2 in the MVP voting

So far, some very good guesses in the Pierogidat game, but nobody has hit it exactly. If we don't get the correct answer by Monday, we'll give 1/2 credit to the closest guess. Also, a couple of you have asked about this picture from the other day. Both the people in the picture are me; it was a hack attempt at a cool double exposure-type shot I took for a college photography class. You know, you sit in one seat in a completely dark room, then you open the shutter on the camera and your accomplice flashes a light on you sitting in the seat. Then you turn off the flashlight, move to the other seat and the accomplice put the flashlight back on. Then you close the shutter and you've got two of you. Very basic, very stupid, very poorly executed by me. But that was the dealie on that.

So Kissel's bachelor party was a roaring success. We went to Tatiana's again and had essentially the same experience as last time, only people were a little drunker and more fun this time around. Deion Sandals showed up dressed in sandals, which was somehow appropriate and inappropriate at the same time Photos and videos were taken. Music played loudly. Woedka was tossed back. Pieholes were stuffed.   "American Idol" semifinalists were posed with. Hints were dropped by the waitstaff that it was time for us to leave. Trademark faces were made. The train there and the train (most of the way) back turned out to be the way to go. I will spare details of individual performances, but there were definitely some all-star moments. Most of all, it was great to go out with the fellas to celebrate a big event.  Five guys who've known each other for well over 20 years and can still sit around talking and acting like a bunch of 8th graders. Nobody's changed all that much. I am thankful to have met such good friends at every stage of my life.

Thanks to D. Lee for putting it all together.

This cracked me the hell up. And I haven't even seen the new Star Wars movie yet. Here are some more.

I wonder if the Yankees will ever win again.

6/3/5: The Dumbest Game Yet

Joe Monkeyweb has requested a brief indexing of all the unsolved ____dats, to which I reply: Fuckdat. I don't even remember when we started doing the wheredat and all dat stuff. What I will give you, because I care enough to send the very best, is a comprehensive guide to all the whodats, solved and unsolved. I don't know if this helps you, but here goes (answers to previously solved whodats are in Invisi-Text, so you can play along for fun without seeing the answers. If you want to see the answer, highlight the area to the right of any particular whodat on the list or click here):

Whodat #1: (Still Unsolved, 20 points)
Whodat #2: The Wright Brothers
Whodat #3: Rosey Grier
Whodat #4: Martika
Whodat #5: Bob and Ray
Whodat #6: Buck Owens
Whodat #7: (Still Unsolved, 10)
Whodat #8: Skip Stephenson
Whodat #9: Dave Eggers
Whodat #10: Jackie Stewart
Whodat #11: Ruth Buzzi
Whodat #12: Nate Dogg
Whodat #13: Billy Carter and the Hager twins from Hee Haw
Whodat #14: Mr. Greenjeans
Whodat #15: (Still Unsolved, 12)
Whodat #16: (Still Unsolved, 24)
Whodat #17: (Still Unsolved, 8,8)
Whodat #18: Don Novello
Whodat #20: Alfonso Ribeiro

If nobody solves the unsolved ones soon, I may post hints and strip the point value down.

***

I normally don't care about my web stats all that much. To be honest, I don't trust them, either. But I do believe them when they tell me that not all that many people read the site. Is it 10 a day? Or 50? Or 200? I dunno. The only time I've really wished for a broader following was earlier today, when I sat at my desk and cracked up thinking about "Fuck Me On The Orange Thing." Imagine, I thought, if 2500 people came to this site every day. If we had that kind of cult appeal, I'm sure "Fuck Me On The Orange Thing" would've spread through the country in the span of three days, and it would now be an accepted part of the vernacular. Couples would email in with pictures of themselves doing it on an orange thing, which we would dutifully post each day. The actual, original Orange Thing itself would achieve landmark status, but would have to be torn down anyway because adventurous couples would keep sneaking out in the middle of the night, mounting the Orange Thing, and screwing. This in itself didn't arouse too much attention, but the couples would repeatedly scream "Fuck Me On the Orange Thing" during the act, inevitably leading to arrests. Still, new Orange Things would keep sprouting up in cities across the land, and in-the-know swingers would meet there at secret hours to get busy.

But instead we just have our little games.

The last few days have been mondo* busy at work, so my apologies to anyone who's tried to reach me and not been called back. It'll get better.

On the way home tonight, I stopped at Veselka and got some dinner for the wife and me. It wasn't bad at all. I had pierogi. For 17 points, tell me my pierogi breakdown. For instance, if an order was 19 pierogi, a legitimate guess might be, "9 olive, 10 asparagus (if such things existed as olive or asparagus pierogi)." I won't even tall you how many pierogi come in an order or what fillings are available -- figuring that out will be part of the fun.  This challenge will be a little different in that you may each guess only once. However, you may guess the same thing as someone who has guessed earlier than you, and you will each receive full credit if you're right.  Meaning, if my guess was going to be 9 olive, 10 asparagus but I looked and Jimmy had already guessed that, I could still guess it and get the same credit as Jimmy if we were right. You may begin answering immediately.

With those same basic rules in effect, tell me how much I paid for the 1.5 liter bottle of caffeine-free Coca-cola that I bought at the deli on 2nd avenue and 9th street across from Veselka. This will net the winner 6 points.

In addition to my pierogi, I ordered rice pudding for dessert (what a gross man I am). I scarfed down the whole thing and then the wife started eating hers. She was immediately grossed out and said, "This tastes funny." I wondered if I was just so caught up in my love for rice pudding in general that I failed to notice that it was rotten.

It reminded me of a day back in 1992 when I was working at the Athletic Ticket Office (best job ever) in Madison. One thing I liked about working at the ATO was the spirit of camaraderie we all felt. Almost every day, we would all order lunch together. And since I was the proud owner of a Honda Elite E scooter (black with pink trim but not entirely as fem as it sounds), I would often be the one to go get the food.** We had some excellent choices: Cousins, Subway, McDonald's all come to mind. But often we would just get food from a local bar or restaurant (Copper Grid, Jingles, Mickey's Dairy Bar). One day we ordered from Jingles, and about four of us ordered French Onion Soup. Unfortunately, we got a bad batch -- it was so salty that to drink more than a half a teaspoon would pucker your lips and make you shiver. We all threw ours out immediately except for one girl, whose face I remember clearly but whose name I have completely forgotten.  She had a bad cold that had dramatically weakened her taste buds, and she slurped down her entire bowl of soup with gusto. It was insane. She was all, oh this tastes pretty good. But it not only didn't taste good, it was inedible. We all looked at her like she was a mutant. I wonder if my wife thought the same thing about my enthusiasm for tonight's rice pudding.

***  

Heading out to Brighton Beach tonight for another B. Party, this one for Kissel. Prediction: it will be one of the most well-behaved bachelor parties in recorded history. I will try to take photos and I will try not to lose a bottle of woedka this time.

* Should we bring back "mondo"?
** That detail is not relevant to this story in any way, I just like talking about my scooter whenever I get the chance.***
*** I seem to have lost the one existing photo of me on my scooter -- if anyone has a copy please let me know. I'll pay $5 for it.

6/1/05: Crazies

There was a lunatic screaming at the top of his lungs in the middle of Stuyvesant Town tonight. It's been a while since I heard a good old fashioned screaming lunatic doing his thing. I grew up on Washington Square Park in the 1970's and 80's, and I want to assure you that was one glorious heyday for shouting street maniacs in this city. I lived on the second floor, so if the window was open, you could hear every last crazy word. I would estimate that two or three nights a week someone would walk by outside late at night, shouting at the top of their lungs about something or other. Often threatening violence. Often predicting the end of the world. Often making absolutely no sense at all. Sometimes it was the same guy for weeks on end. There was something comforting about crawling over to the window with all the lights out and getting a front row seat, knowing you couldn't be seen. And knowing that even if you were seen, there were several locked doors between you and the chaos below. Several times I saw drunken street fights, including at least a couple where one guy broke off a bottle and attempted to wield it against his opponent.  I never saw any of the fights really get violent, though. Somebody always backed off or it disintegrated into a bunch of awkward, inconsequential wrestling. That's just as well, I didn't need to see anybody getting murdered.*  The mess downstairs did always put my own troubles on the back burner, just seeing this amazing freakshow unfold. Tonight's whacko took me back to the early days of Ed Koch, when the city reeked and garbage lined the streets and there was an atmosphere of lawlessness hanging over the entire city. For some reason, it felt good to go back.

***

Tonight I had intended to let rip with one of my in-depth dissections of the obvious, this one relating to blogging. I have been kind of stuck for how to start my stupid short story, and so my point was gonna go something like this: the problem with blogging, as opposed to a more serious and respected art form, lies in its instantaneous nature. I am hesitating to publish the start of my story because once it's published, it's official. It's out there. The eight of you have read it and there's no taking it back. I can't change directions halfway through the story and then go back and edit the first part so it all makes sense; you're done with the first part and you're not going back to read it again. And even on regular blog entries -- once it's out there, it's like a tiny raft straying further and further out to sea.  There's no way to pull it back. The fact that bloggers are always writing quickly only makes errors of typing, grammar, and judgment more common and unavoidable.

For instance, there are many mornings when I go to work, re-read my post from the night before, and I'm buried by a thirty foot wave of cringe. From small typos to places where I know I could have said something better to entire idiotic concepts that seemed adequately post-worthy the night before** -- there are a world of ways to embarrass yourself on the web. I for one definitely suffer from Blogger's Regret. The good thing, I guess, is you get another chance to do things right with the next day's post.

Anyway, my theory was all set until I read Pete B.'s site today. Pete recently got caught in the position of letting a blog entry escape while he was drunk.  I suppose I am a dick for linking to it, because I don't think he's particularly happy with it, but he's shown the courage to leave it up, so I assume he's cool with people looking at it. What struck me upon reading it was that it's actually kind of neat that someone's drunk tirade can make it to the eyes of many other people. That closeness, the way you can instantly express yourself to your audience, whether it's five or fifty or five thousand, is part of what makes the internet such a great and democratic place. Just not the most forgiving place. In this case, I actually appreciated the raw emotion of the post itself. It was like sitting on the barstool next to Pete and listening to him go off, without the fear that he would grab me in a headlock and slice open my eyelid with an Exacto knife, as he has done in the past.

***

Note to my male friend who shall remain anonymous: I am sorry I had to tell you that it was not me you kissed (on the cheek?) while appearing on the Metrodome Jumbotron ca. 1991. I hope you find your man, and I want to congratulate you for what was still a top-notch move. I wish I had thought of it, and I am actually sorry I wasn't your guy. Your idea reminded me of a dream I had about what I'd do if I ever got a foul ball at a game (from 7.4.4):

"Last night I had a bunch of crazy dreams. That always seems to happen to me when I'm sleeping in a foreign bed. In one dream, I kept catching foul balls at a Yankee game. After each one, I would pump my fist and then give the entire crowd the finger, as if to say, "In your face!" The people I was with would remind me that I was probably on TV, and there were kids watching, etc., so why don't I tone it down? I would realize they were right, and apologize, only to do the exact same thing minutes later. I just couldn't help myself. It's probably how I'd actually react if I ever got a foul ball, too."

***

Whodat (#16, 24 points) and whodey (#17, 8 points each)? Oh, and whodat (#18, 11 points)? You may answer right now. These are tough ones, so you can also answer this one for 1 point: Whodat (#20)?

* My friends and I did witness a murder in the summer of 1983, and it happened it broad daylight on Greenwich Avenue. A lawyer from Philadelphia who was visiting the city for the day was gunned down by two men in what was either a case of mistaken identity or an ill-conceived robbery. I was playing left field in a three on three baseball game in the P.S. 41 schoolyard when the shots rang out just beyond the wire mesh outfield fence. At first we thought it was some pre-4th of July fireworks, but then we saw one guy drop and two other guys sprint to a waiting car. The victim was laying there on the sidewalk with only that fence separating him from us. I remember my friend Journey ran down the block to St. Vincent's to get help; the rest of us stood there dumbfounded. The guy was still conscious, and his wife was kneeling beside him in absolute panic. They were clutching hands and he just kept telling her he loved her. It was heartbreaking. I remember being surprised that there wasn't blood everywhere. He was shot in the chest, and every time he took a breath, a thin film of blood covered his stomach and chest and then rolled down across his sides onto the sidewalk as he exhaled. He died on the operating table at St. Vincent's and the murderers were arrested the next day. About ten people had gotten their license plates.

** Like, for instance, this concept itself.