My thoughts for the day

We saw the new batman movie over the weekend. I wasn’t a really big Heath Ledger fan before, and, as cruel as this may sound, his passing really didn’t mean all that much to me. That being said, in The Dark Knight, Heath ledger was all that and two bags of chips.

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In Yahoo news today, one of the headlines is this:

Obama Polishes Foreign-Policy Credentials in Mideast

If you’re polishing something, doesn’t that imply that you already have it/them? Also, this is the first few lines of the article:

“For his presidential campaign, what he says on the trip may not be as important as the photos and videos it produces. ``The visual images will say that he can play in the major leagues, and that will be very important for him,''

So, essentially, style is more important than substance? Perfect, just perfect.

Drive Time

Last week, I was driving home late from work one evening. The big muckety mucks were up from the corporate office, and we had gone out for a late, decadent dinner at one of the local dining facilities. The food and wine continued over a 3 hour, non-stop onslaught and I was already beginning to feel the pain from my over-indulgence.

Home is 40 miles away from work, and at 10:30 at night, with a belly full of food and alcohol, it was going to be a chore not to pull over and go to sleep. Why is it on the weekends we can drink and eat until the wee hours of the morning, but during the work week anything past 10PM feels like the crack of dawn is just around the corner?

The vast majority of my commute is along the NYS thruway, a four lane highway that stretches the length of NYS. They have just finished resurfacing a good portion of the Thruway, and it’s so smooth right now that it’s like driving on glass. No bumps, no pot holes or that thumpity thump of expansion joints that is so common on concrete highways. At night it’s this jet black river, without any lights, and just the yellow lines on the side to keep you from driving off the side into neverland.

The sky had some high, wispy clouds and two, parallel contrails that pierced the full moon, almost as if the moon was riding along on a pair of ethereal rail road tracks. Now, normally, I don’t recommend driving home at night, after you’ve had a few drinks, and taking your eyes off the road to stare up at the stars, but if you did, on this night, when you looked away from the moon’s glare, there were stars aplenty up in the firmament to reward you for your efforts. Again, don’t try this at home, or at least when I’m coming the other way on the road.

My Ipod served up for my listening pleasure Rush’s Red Barchetta, which just happens to be one of my favorite road songs. I turned up the volume, pushed my four cylinders for all they were worth, and raced home to my family. For a brief moment in time, it was heaven.

My Contribution to ICHC

A course observation on life

Report: Alex Rodriguez has split from wife

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080703/ap_en_ot/bba_yankees_rodriguez;_ylt=AnXHaZQIRhyeqQZbRsQCyfes0NUE

Proving once again, that for every beatiful person out there, there is someone tired of screwing them. In this case, maybe mutually tired.

Recently it was reported that A-rod was seen running around with Madonna, during the reporting of which the phrase "All the doormen are talking" was used.

Is there a place where doormen hang out and kibitz together, or some online forum or someplace else where they talk with each other? Certainly, if doormen were just standing at their posts and yelling across the street at one another, secrets wouldn't be kept for very long, and it would seem as though this form of communication might get a little old after a while. Maybe the doormen are harking back to the town crier days, yelling the news of the world to each other over the cacophony of NYC street life, when, all of a sudden, these reporters were just strolling along, minding their own business when out of the blue they hear that Madonna been shagging A-rod's fly balls.

Mmmmm, then again, maybe not.

The Column Caper

This was originally done on my 360 page. So if you read it there, you don't need to bother reading it again. Also, you may not actually want to bother reading it now, but I'll lead that up to you. Everyone thinks they can write and be funny, but not everyone can. I'm pretty sure I fall in the latter group. And in case I don't see you or hear from you, enjoy your holiday and try to stay out of jail.

One night a few of us were sitting around the fraternity house, enjoying a few brews. As luck would have it, we ran out of beer and a couple of us had to head out on a beer run.

Now, since this was during the middle of the week, and we weren’t actually drinking that much, it really wasn’t a big deal. If it had been the weekend, a beer run would have consisted of firing up the VW rabbit, dragging the treasurer out with a wad of cash and heading off to the beer distributorship, with a couple of our more burly brothers. We didn’t fuck around on the weekends when it came to beer. We had a system, it worked, and if you weren’t in the beer acquisition chain of command, you stayed the hell out of our way. On the weekends, we never ran out of beer and as I look back it, it was one of the few, true accomplishments of my term as president of the fraternity. Sure, maybe we had low expectations, but that just makes it so much easier to achieve 100% satisfaction.

Anyway, on this given evening I headed out to the local store with my roommate. There was a convenience store a few blocks up the street, and since we were really only looking for a few 6 packs, we decided to hoof it up to the store for the exercise. You know, like the 10 minute walk was really going to offset the thousands of calories we were pouring down our gullets that evening.

On the way to the store, we passed this big old mansion on Main Street that was under renovations. It was a beautiful old house, with monstrous Greek columns on the front porch. Well, normally they were on the front porch, but since the porch was undergoing a major overhaul, the columns were lying on the front lawn in nice neat rows.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen a whole lot of these fluted columns standing up, but never lying on the ground. They looked so unusual there on the ground, so mundane, compared to the way they normal look. In hindsight, I’m not really sure what piqued my curiosity (or my buddy’s) about these columns, but something did.

We ambled up the store, spent some time comparing the intrinsic differences between various low quality alcoholic beverages, consummated our purchase and headed back. Along the way, we paused at the mansion and again were intrigued by the columns.

Now, I’m not really sure what led me to jump the short wrought iron fence and attempt to pick the end of one of the columns. In any event, what initially began as a somewhat inebriated theoretical discussion as to the weight of these columns lead to where both of us were inside the fence, had one of said columns up on one shoulder, and our beer slung under the opposite arms.

At this point, what’s a fraternity brother supposed to do, right? We were concerned that trying to place the column back on the ground may actually lead to us dropping our precious beer, which would have been a very negative outcome, at least to our perspective. We decided that the best course of action was to carry the column back to our fraternity house and employ the assistance of our bothers to rectify the situation. As we headed down Main Street, Greek revival column on one shoulder, beer swinging from the other arm, we began to sing that stupid dwarf song from Snow White “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go…”. Once we got to the house, we managed to ring the door bell and waited patiently as our fellow brothers got their heads around the fact that at 10:30 at night there were two guys with beer and a Greek column at their door. Even for fraternities, this doesn’t happen every day.

A little while later, once all the hullabaloo settled down, we were sitting back, enjoying our hard won beers and watching the late news, when the door bell rang. There, at the front door, much to our surprise, was a member of the local law enforcement agency. Since we were all white kids from the suburbs, with a strongly ingrained respect for authority, we politely asked our fine officer what brought him to our house so late that evening. Trying to keep a straight face, the cop said to us:

“Let’s cut the bullshit. If you guys put the column in the back of my car, I’ll take it back to the house and that’s where this thing will end.”

Try as we might, we couldn’t get the 20’ wooden Greek column into the back of the dude’s cruiser. Look, I know those Ford LTD were big freaking cars, but there is a limit as to what you can put in the back of them. Bodies, yes, columns, no.

So, at about midnight, my roommate and I carried the column back to the mansion, under police escort and placed it back among it’s column mates.

And so ended the column caper, where we learned at even at 10:30 at night, people will call the cops if they see a 20’ column walking down the street.