The Curse of the Braves

The Atlanta Braves can't help but win the NL East every year. They've won it for 14 straight years now. As a point of comparison, the Yankees have only ever won the AL East 14 times in the club's history (though they've won 26 World Series), the Baltimore Orioles haven't won the division in eight years, and the Washington Senators/Nationals have only existed one season in the past 30 years. The Braves have only won one World Series title and haven't won a pennant in six years despite their division titles, but I would still consider them to be the best organization in the past two decades of baseball.

I'm only as big an idiot as the other guy

So the last two days at work were taking care of bullshit computer problems. Today I spent the morning fixing Microsoft Outlook. I cannot do anything at work without this POS program. For some reason, beginning this morning, it would freeze everytime I tried to do anything other than scroll through emails--and even doing that was dicey. I ignored Erin's advice to call those fuckers in IT, who know about as much about fixing this shit as I do. I just went to the Microsoft and Office update web pages and downloaded all the security patches and the like from the past year-and-half. It took all morning and about eight reboots to get everything working again, but by noon-thirty I at least had Outlook running in safe mode. My guess as to what caused the problem? Probably the 6500 emails in my inbox and the 7500 emails in my sent box. I'm a hoarder when it comes to useless information like when our last at getting together for a happy hour was or what the gutter margin is in a book that was printed 5 months ago. Plus I'm lazy and don't like sorting things into folders.

Then yesterday I spent a goodly amount of time force-quitting and re-opening Quark, as it froze every time I tried to open a new Quark document. Thankfully, we'll be getting InDesign installed sometime in November. So, ideally, I can forget all the crap I learned about Quark and tranfer everything I know about Acrobat, Photoshop, and Illustrator and apply it to another sweet-like-Santana-Moss Adobe program.
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On a more sparkley, small-children-eating-ice-cream-on-a-summer-afternoon note, I had a meeting last night with my friend Tera about putting together a comic book sometime over the next year. We concluded that, yes, it is something we'd like to do. Then today I actually had a story idea. I'll hold off on revealing it until it is either (a) given the stamp of approval by Tera, (b) wholly rejected by Tera, (c) modified into something related, but different, or (d) am forced to reveal it via some mild form of torture, like being forced to snort habañero chili pepper, or roll around in pig vomit.
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Also, Kanye West (or Roc-a-fella) took down the album from his website. Now I have to buy it. It was bound to happen at some point. There are still a few tracks up at the myspace site though.

de-blogged

Some of you may have noticed that I haven't been blogging very often. I've gone from two or three entries a week, to once a week, to once every 10 to 14 days. What's going on? Am I depressed? Have I lost interest in life? Are cow udders just like those hippity-hop balls you used to bounce around on when you were naught but a wee lad until one day you ran into your younger sibling and knocked her off the porch and she cracked her head wide open on the brick sidewalk below and you got a stern talking to even though it was an accident and you now hate your younger sibling for bringing such mental anguish on you when you were only four-years-old even though your younger sibling is dead because her brains spilled out of her head and were then run over by a speeding car, only the bouncy ball is attached to the cow instead of bouncing freely like an uncaged bonobo? The answer to the middle two questions, is no. I'm just busy at work. I haven't had time to muse on important things in this world, like pizza and how big a cubit is.

Thumbsucker is good. Go and see it, motherfuckers.

'Skins rule! I can't remember the last time I was so excited about a sports related event as when I jumped up and down clapping my hands and then raising my arms in triumph after Santana Moss caught that second touchdown early Tuesday morning. The Tuna can go eat himself.

I just finished watching the four final episodes of the brilliant yet shortlived (that's just typical) television show Wonderfalls. It follows the rollercoaster life of Jaye, a philosophy major from Brown, who, completely lacking direction after graduation (sound familiar to anyone?), ends up living in a trailer park and working at a gift shop at Niagara Falls. I'm only being semi-sarcastic when I write "rollercoaster life," because while she's driving her promising life into the ground, inanimate object with faces--mostly animal faces--start talking to her. Thinking that maybe if she listens to them, they may stop, she starts doing what they tell her to. Misadventures ensue resulting in, among other things, existential crises, smuggling a Canadian across the US-Canada border, stealing endagered species, and romance.

As some of you who have talked with me recently about movies know, I love romantic comedies (it's a recent revelation). While I may appear to be emotionally stunted (or dead) on the outside, my gooey innards are collectively a hopeless romantic. The romance in Wonderfalls is the kind that Yasmin dislikes so much--it's so perfect, that after bearing witness to it, it makes you feel empty because you know that your romance and love will never be as true and fulfilling as it is for these fictional characters. I love that stuff though. (Does that make me gay?) Watching it always makes me want to see more afterwards. Maybe it's because that while I watch it, I project myself onto the characters and am happy like I imagine they are--that in some way I love Jaye just as Eric does and I love Eric just as Jaye does (that really would make me gay, wouldn't it...)--and I just want to recapture that feeling. Or, I suppose it could just be my repressed self getting it's ya-ya's out through a third party. Or, as Ducore would say, it may be some third thing (or, really, any other numbered thing). Any way you look at it though, I have an urge to watch more people fall in love in ever more clever, endearing, and quirky ways. And I'm comfortable with that.

Sorry if this posts scares anyone. The night brings out the truth.

West on the South

Before I get into this, I think it's only fair to mention that I really haven't been paying much attention at all to the situation in New Orleans. I'm only aware of the generalities of it through newspaper headlines, Joel Achenbach's blog, and the contents of a smattering of newpaper articles from the Washington Post. That said, I think the way our government has handled the situation is just pathetic. And I don't just mean the Bush administration. I mean every level of government. Considering the scale of the catastrophe that occurred in New Orleans, the fact that it took essentially three days for any relief from our government to arrive leaves me with no confidence in our government to achieve anything competently. That is a complete failure. In an opinion article, Eugene Robinson points out that "an administration that tells us a terrorist strike is inevitable should have had in place a plan for evacuating a major American city." Apparently New Orleans was a catastrophe waiting to happen that should have already been planned for anyway.

On a slightly more lighthearted note, for those of you who missed Kanye West's rant about race and the situation in New Orleans on NBC the other day, you can find a transcript of it here. Incoherent as he may be, the man is right when he's right. Also, if you hit up his website, you can stream the entirety of his new album. I very much enjoy it.

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Those going to the Weezer/Foo Fighters show, I'm working on a way to "procure" general admission tickets to replace our ones for seats. E-mail me for details.

Also, I saw the Washington Social Club in concert for the 2nd time on Friday. They're a DC based band and are playing a couple of shows in the DC area in the coming weeks. They play highly danceable rock music for the masses. They've got a couple of Vassar grads in the band--one of whom is a very cute blond bass player, who is worth going to see even if you don't like dancing or rocking out.

whassup, homie?

For those of you frothing at the mouth (or other orafice) for another ho-hum blog post from yours truly, froth no longer!

A momentus occassion has occurred here in good ol' Crown Heights--we finally have our third roommate installed and she is Sarah Thomas. I look forward to re-attaching myself to her hip. As she noted this evening, sometime in these surrounding days, will be or have been our five year anniversary of heathen friendship. So far our Brooklyn exploits have brought us to the wonderful world of pizza (twice in two nights!) and cleaning up kitty crap and watery vomit out of a cat carrier. These among other things. Catsby hates the box. But she had her powers of immunity upped with a booster shot of something. I don't recall exactly what it was, but it was very expensive.

In other news, I got a ticket or two to go see Weezer and the Foo Fighters in Fairfax, VA on October 10th. So, it looks like I'll be taking a little extended weekend from the 8th to the 11th.

Other stuff has happened in the past couple of weeks, but that's the fun stuff. At least for me.

Pizza-Fest '05

This past weekend I went on a self-guided pizza tour with my dad and my cousin as part of my dad's birthday visit to New York. We hit up three pizza joints--Di Fara, Joe's, and Patsy's--as well as Cones, everyone's favorite gellateria. What follows is a review of the pizza eating extraveganza.

After meeting up at the 7th Ave Q train stop, my dad, Jeremy, and I took the subway down to Avenue J. Around 12:30 we arrived at Di Fara, where Domenico DeMarco was already hard at work making pizza. Lucky for us the line was only a couple of people long, so the wait for our slices was maybe fifteen minutes (a far cry from the hour I spent waiting the last time). I downed a slice of regular and a slice of pepperoni with an IBC root beer while my dad and Jeremy each took on a slice of regular and pepperoni, respectively. While the crust was so thin that it practically disintigrated under the weight of the combination of cheeses, and the pizza was so hot from the oven, it was difficult to keep the cheese from sliding off of the slices, the flavor was outstanding--their pepperoni is still the best I've ever had. The three cheeses--buffalo mozzarella, fior di latte (regular mozzarella made from cow's milk, which according to Italian regulations cannot be called mozzarella), and parmesean--were all freshly sliced and grated onto the pizza as it was being made.


From there we made an attempt to patronize Una Pizza Napoletana, but it was closed. So we hit up our backup--Joe's Pizza, which is the quintessential New York slice--big and greasy, with a crispy thin crust. As always, though, the edge crust was very dry. It seems that in order to cook the underside to perfection, the edge suffers.


After Joe's we took a break from our pizza consumption for a trip to Cones where we relaxed at a table in the air conditioning savoring our chosen sorbet or gelatto flavors. (I recommend the dulce de leche gelatto and the blackberry sorbet.)

Our last stop, after a bit of confusion as to its location, was the original Patsy's on 118th and 1st. We split a pizza with basil. Apparently at this Patsy's (the original, established in 1933), the fresh mozzarella is an extra three bucks. We settled for the aged (what gives pizza its yellow-ish color), which was nice and evenly distributed. The crust, like that at Di Fara, was incredibly thin and nicely charred, but the grease soaked through leaving it a little on the limp side. All in all though, not bad. Though the pizza's I've had at the Patsy's on University and 11th are better. They always use fresh mozzarella, and instead of baking the basil on the pizza, they use uncooked leaves, which are more potent.


A poll taken at the end declared Di Fara the best pizza of the day--incredibly flavorful, with it's fresh ingredients. And, of course, the experience of watching DeMarco making the pies is unlike any other. It's pizza with character.