#48 - totally rippin' on places.

i friggin' hate connecticut & it isn't just because of joe lieberman or their inability to keep the whalers. ever since i moved to nyc back in 01, connecticut has become the two-and-a-half hour nuisance in the middle of my four hour drive to boston. when i first moved here, i used to love driving through connecticut. i had to drive up to new england a lot for work, so i'd often grab a rental car & take an afternoon drive up the west side to the merritt parkway, gliding through its twists & green trees & under its uniquely designed bridges. in recent years, as i've become uber-acquainted with the cheapo nyc-boston chinatown buses, which travel up interstate 95 out of nyc, i've wasted countless hours sitting in traffic near bridgeport & new haven & hartford and i now curse the state. i'm sure the 6pm holiday traffic tomorrow to nh will be swell, especially since i've now acknowledged my curse in writing.

florida obviously sucks intensely. it makes connecticut look like disney world. i've made many many quick judgements about florida, most of them based on my eight months of residency & two weeks of "vacation" there. i went through two hurricanes. some dude driving a van that transports disabled people around was waiting in front of my girlfriend at the time & i, as we sat in her car at a red light leaving the borders parking lot. when it turned green, the dude accidentally put the van into reverse, stepped on the gas & drove right up onto the hood of our car...& then tried to flee. this woman in our apartment complex had a daughter in high school who had no homework because there weren't enough text books. the sushi place in the shopping plaza next to our apartment complex made me sick. there's also the 2000 election, the two florida marlins world series wins, jeb bush, awful tans, sprawling development, disney world, oppressive anti-gay movements, the miami p.d., trafficking trafficking trafficking, more hurricanes, etc.

you know what place is even worse than florida though? zimbabwe. growing up, when i heard the word "zimbabwe," i envisioned it as one of the cool places in africa. in later times, i'd often choose the zulus (impi power!) when i played civilization. i thought of it as some place i'd want to check out some day & at one point, it was that place. people considered it to be one of the jewels in the african crown. then president robert mugabe came along & in 1999, 19 years into his rule, he introduced his whole land reform program & agriculture & tourism went down the pooper & the country has just spiraled downhill since then as he's violently held on to power. technically, they now have a 10 quintillion dollar bill in circulation. back in august, a loaf of bread went for 1.3 trillion dollars. inflation is at 230 million percent...& mugabe just won't quit. he's probably waiting for them to come out with a googol dollar bill before he decides to hang it up.

#48 - totally rippin' on places.
snack: frey pear & caramel chocolate bar
drink: rype orange tingled wheat beer

this frey pear & caramel chocolate bar is really tasty, with lil crunchy bits & pear flavors & whatnot. they don't have this particular flavor listed on their website, but there are a boatload of tasty sounding flavors (they claim to have 350 choices!)...tiramisu! hot chili pepper! cinnamon & blood orange! wha wha! oh. apparently they're only available at target...how exclusive.

anyway, if there's one thing that the swiss should be known for, it's chocolate. oh and their cheese & their babes & their army & their army knives and backpacks, which they don't even use because they're all peaceful & neutral & whatnot. two of their cities, zurich & geneva, are considered some of the best places to live in the world. they have all that stuff down pat. get this though...most of the people don't even speak english. and instead of baseball, they have hornussen, a cross between baseball & golf. seriously, i watched a few of the videos. i can't even begin to tell you what's going on or if it might be fun. the name means "hornet" though. never was a big fan of things that can sting me, especially when they don't make me honey.

in the "washing it down" department, i'm having me a rype orange tingled wheat beer. it has a sharp & clean, modest looking label, but the beer's pretty bland, clean & boring. the moniker-advertised "orange tingle" doesn't even tingle. it turns out that the beer's made by four+ brewing company, out of salt lake city. this could explain its blandness. it has 4.0% alcohol by volume, which by utah law, is the highest amount of alcohol any beer can have if it wants to be served within the beehive state. mormons hate alcohol almost as much as they hate fun. take mitt romney. it's a good thing mccain didn't pick him as his veep. sure, he's from massachusetts, one of the best places on earth, but that dude's a mormon & he hates fun. nothing like his actual pick, that non-mormon sarah palin, who clearly loves fun. hockey moms! lipstick on a pig! nothing but priceless yuk-it-up gems out of that sarah. but seriously, i hear that utah should never be visited ever, unless you have a really good reason. "i was on my way to vegas" is an acceptable reason.

UPDATE: turns out that utah is the fastest-growing state in the country. god knows why...or maybe joseph smith does.

#47 - the olden days.

i was doing some research & have discovered that you used to be able to do everything back in the day! nowadays, in the 08, they don't let you do anything, let you have any fun. it's soooo lame.

for starters, you can't even drink after the 7th inning any more. back in the day, you could drink til the end of the game. back then, people actually liked it when baseball games went into extra innings. this one pawtucket red sox game went 32 innings & they eventually had to finish it the next day. nowadays, if the game hits extra innings, that's just time for your buzz to wear off & make you care that your seven-year-old has school in the morning.

back in the day, in this country, it used to be that if you owned a business & your employees tried to bring fair labor to your workplace, you could whack the snot out of them pinkerton style. pfft. if you want to do that nowadays, you have to open up a plant all the way down in south america. i can't say that there aren't any upsides to the current situation though. after all, if you move operations to south america, you get to hire paramilitaries instead of pinkertons & disappear people, which is SO rambo compared to the twirly moustaches & derbies of the pinkertons.

once upon a time, you could walk up to the side of the road with a bindle & a dream & a lucky thumb and hitchhike across this great nation, doing odd jobs, sleeping with random women & philosophizing with random hobos, just like in on the road. you try to pull that crap in the 21st century & you're nuts. i can say from my own experience that i've never been tempted to pick up a drifter & if i was the kind of person who was crazy enough to actually pick up a drifter, i'd likely also be the kind of person who was crazy enough to murder them & store them in my freezer. luckily i can't afford to own a car. it just doesn't seem safe to hitchhike any more is what i'm saying...definitely frowned upon.

i mean, it used to be that you could smoke cigarettes anywhere & drive snowmobiles on whatever land you wanted to under the influence of whatever you wanted to & shoot as many buffalo as your uzi could handle. then you could bring it home & feed your family for months. that's gone now. your son is vegan & the buffalo are protected & if you have weekend plans to grab your favorite automatic weapon, down a sixer of bud on the drive to yellowstone & hang out in the old faithful inn sucking down winstons & whiskeys before hopping on the ol' arctic cat for a couple of hours of bunny hunting, you can forget it. that ship has sailed. this is 2008. POST-9/11.

#47 - the olden days.
snack: archer farms spinach & artichoke tortilla chips
drink: peak organic pale ale

the snacks have gotten better though. when i was growing up, there was no way on god's green earth that you could get your hands on a spinach & artichoke tortilla chip. if you lived outside of cali & did get your hands on a tortilla chip it'd be flavored with salt and/or cheese and you'd like it. in the nowadays, i can get all sorts of flavors in a tortilla chip, like the target brand archer farms spinach & artichoke tortilla chips. i was originally going to grab some sort of dip to go with these chips, but they've got the flavor to satisfy my aching heart. dip would have been overkill...but if you hate flavor chips, i can't help you son.

& i'm washing down these tortilla chips (FROM THE FUTURE!) with a bottle of peak organic pale ale, brewed out of portland, me. the bottle has a picture of an outdoor gathering with the quote "friends gathering on a fine evening" at the top. looks like a bunch of dudes on one side & a bunch of ladies on the other side. i bet you nobody got laid at that party. although...it's a pretty tasty pale ale and goes down easy. maybe this photo was taken early on in the night, before they had drank LIKE FIFTY peak organics. it's ten times better than bud.

nowadays, beer is definitely better. fo sho. there are organic beers & beers from around the country & around the world & brands with more than one type of beer other than "regular" and "light"...but we do miss out on those sweet beer cans with the pull top. those things rule. in conclusion, we couldn't have expanded our beer quality & taste without the help of our global economy. let's have a round of applause for our global economy. hip hip.

#46 - fin.

this tuesday night, as the first snow of the season fell outside my apartment, i sat warm watching the third season finales of two of my favorite picture stories--heroes and dexter. there's that good old saying, "third time's a charm," that is actually not really all that good, and relative to history, not really all that old of a saying...but it is a lot less gay sounding than the british version--"third time lucky."

"third time lucky, smithers?"
"indeed. three card monte."
"splendid."
"third time lucky, indeed. tally ho."

in this case, for these two shawn parow-endorsed picture stories, the third seasons have been slightly flawed at times, subject to doubt, imperfect chapters in the shows' histories. both are already scheduled to return in 2009 for a fourth chapter, with heroes coming back in february with a new chapter,"fugitives," that is technically the second half of the third season for those of you who still care. dexter is already scheduled for at least two more seasons. showtime knows better than to let go of michael c hall...spoilers until the snack break...

heroes season finale
there have been numerous occasions during this 3rd season of heroes where i've wanted to fill my ear canals with fire & splash piranhas toward my eye sockets to avoid the horrendous dialogue & painful exposition that has filled this season. as a complete season, it works fine. i was most pleased by the appearances by actors who used to be on other shows i like, actors like bubbles & marlo stanfield from the wire. both survived the streets of baltimore, but not the third season of heroes...nor did chad faust's character, a marine who, in the second-to-last episode of the third season, becomes the first person injected with the formula for abilities & then is quickly killed in the next & final episode. chad faust was also in the 4400, where he plays a person who injects himself with promicin, the thing on that show that gives people abilities. talk about being typecast.

the third season had its flaws. one of the first things i learned in my intro to screenwriting class was "show, don't tell" and the 3rd season of heroes has so many thousands of storylines going on that there are an abundance of occasions where characters blatantly tell & are all like "gee that must feel really bad to see that happen to your father" so that an ADHD-inflicted fourth grader can follow along with the story...& stupid plot points. elle, the character with the power of electricity is having trouble controlling her power, so what does she do? she gets on a plane. obviously. because there is no chance that that could go wrong...& then there are the abundant lame love stories. overall though, i'm still looking forward to the fourth chapter. i mean, not every pearl jam album is ten. sometimes it's a no code, but you deal with it & pick out the good parts & hope the next one's better.

dexter season finale
early on during the 3rd season of dexter, before things turned around, i was all "you need to start killing bad guys ASAP dexter." things were slow. he was totally not killing any killers. at times i'd secretly hope that rita would turn out to be a child pornographer or have fed elderly folks fatal dosages of meds or something so dexter would have to kill her blatantly one-dimensionally exposition-laden character off, but no such luck. luckily, by the season finale, the killing picked up enough to satisfy me.

& by the season finale, dexter marries rita...& finds out that she is lying to him. she has been married three times, but only says she's been married twice. doesn't talk about the first one, when she was 16. mildly mysterious. he doesn't seem to care though, since he has a secret too, what with the whole being a serial killer thing & she doesn't even know that he used to be gay & work in a funeral home. it's totally like that madonna song. mmm mmm. something's coming over. mmm mmm...so next season, rita will give birth to their kid & there'll likely be whole mess of "new life. taking life." subway ads plugging season 4 of dexter come late summer.

#46 - fin.

snack: pringles select jalapeno ranch potato crisps
drink: archer farms blood orange italian soda

with my finales, i'm enjoying a bag of pringles select jalapeno ranch potato crisps. they don't come in a cardboard cylinder like your everyday peasant pringles. these pringles are S-E-L-E-C-T. i really like them. the texture's crunchier than your average pringle, closer to a tato skin-like texture. the flavor's also stronger than what you get from an average pringle. i found myself licking the flavor powder off, just like i used to do when regular pringles used to have a ton more flavor. in my day! turns out that, according to the back of the bag, these jalapeno ranch potato crisps are designed to "kick my taste buds up a notch." i'm not sure how much more they can be kicked up at this point, if you know what i mean, but i ain't letting that stop me.

to wash down these extraordinary chips, i'm going with a cool glass of archer farms blood orange italian soda. i know what you're thinking, but stop right there. i'm no sicko. it doesn't actually have blood in it, just blood oranges & those are completely legal, at least in italy, which is where this particular soda comes from. italian soda. product of italy. it comes in a bottle that just makes me want to open the window wide & store it in a basket on the sill with a pellegrino & a couple tomatoes. it tastes like if fresca was a little more appealing & also didn't have that disgusting aspartame flavor. this blood orange italian soda has black carrot juice in it. wha? i had no idea such a thing existed, but it does. amazing. black carrots...now that's change you can believe in.

#45 - eat! drink! smoke!

today's "stupidest thing ever said," courtesy of my one-a-day calendar:

WOMAN NOT INJURED BY COOKIE
- actual newspaper headline

thank you for your guidance, one-a-day calendar. thank you for providing me with an example of a brave woman who, when she found herself face-to-face with a cookie, emerged victorious...a real story of human triumph over a snack item. i take this as a logical sign that i have the o.k. to throw caution to the wind on this saturday evening, as i too, am human.

#45 - eat! drink! smoke!

snack: rold gold dipped twists fudge coated pretzels
drink: dogfish head 120 minute i.p.a.
smoke: imported dreams belgian blend

i picked up a bag of rold gold dipped twists fudge coated pretzels to snack on tonight. i love chocolate covered pretzels. back at the tail end of the 90s, i was in my mid-twenties & living in boston & working extra hours part time at a boston university "campus convenience" store. i used to eat chocolate pretzel flipz for breakfast, usually with a nantucket nectars orange mango juice. developed me a sweet extra chin for a little bit during that period of my life. anyway, i like these rold gold ones. they're nothing special, but good nonetheless.

holy crap this beer is hoppy. it's a dogfish head 120 minute i.p.a. and it's amberish & opaque & when you bring it to your mouth, your nose finds itself buried inside the glass & it's all holy friggin' hops!...it does smell nice, like when you get a whiff of a really good wine or champagne or scotch or what have you vice wise & smell-related. maybe you like dirty diapers. to each his own, i say. at least you've found something to appreciate. so this beer experience is like that.

on the side of the bottle it reads "what you have here is the holy grail for hopheads. this beer is continually hopped over a 120-minute boil and then dry-hopped every day for a month. enjoy now or age for a decade or so." a decade!...says "ages well" right on the front label. i'm telling you, aging beers is the cool thing to do. take your aged wines & cheeses & cram them. i have one beer that i'm aging. it's this beer from belgium that's "brewed with dandelions." my bottle is from 2004, so the label is all crudely hand-sketched & totally different. i have no idea what the deal is with the crazy ghost on the current label. ms whitney rodgers gave it to me along with five other beers, a gift from a short ways back from an auction she went to & thought of me at. i drank the others a while ago, but now know when i hope to enjoy this final sixth bottle & why.

& tonight with the chocolate covered pretzels & the hoppy hoppy beer, i'm having me a flavored cig. why not? i don't REALLY smoke. the best part about these, other than the slight chocolate taste left in your mouth (which is fine if you don't mind the accompanying smoke taste), is the name. apparently, they used to be named "sweet dreams chocolate." now they've changed the name to "imported dreams belgian blend." why? because flavored cigarettes, whose yumminess appeals to teens (teens love yumminess!), have been a recent target of lawmakers, even though they only represent a mere fraction of overall cigs smoked. at the same time, the menthol cig (like a cigarette AND a minty breath mint!) remains free to frolic unfettered through african american communities. obviously. so the flavored cig companies had to change their product's names to make them less appealing to teens, and if there's one thing that teens could care less about, it's belgium. so they're now a "belgian blend." obfuscation mission accomplished.

#44 - oh c'mon.

i'm generally a pretty upbeat person, but this past weekend friggin' beat me down emotionally. looking back on it, it's your classic case of one main draining event combined with & compounded by a million tiny, absolutely insignificant events & eventually ending up in a state of quite irrational utter blah sadness by the weekend's finish.

it all started quite promisingly on friday. my company was moving offices (from dumbo/north brooklyn to times sq/hell) over the weekend, so the majority of my friday work day was brainless packing of boxes, mixed in with a "closing down the office" beer or two & the ability to leave slightly early...but then i stopped by brooklyn's cadman plaza post office & the downward spiral began.

i stopped by the post office to drop off a package for a co-worker. the package was already all postaged up, but since it was all international & junk, i had to actually hand it to a postal employee, so i got in a 12-person line serviced by 1-4 windows & waited. for 40 minutes. these days, my ipod remains charged for an average of 40 minutes at a time. it has its bad days & good days & on this day, the bitchy lil nano died half way through the line experience. there weren't any luscious babes to gander at, so i alternated between leaning on the counter & huffing for the remainder of the time. when i finally got to the window, i inserted the package into the special bulletproof glass package sender & the guy behind the counter waited for me to shut my side of the sender & pulled out the package to examine it. i let him know that it already had postage right there on the front & i just wanted to hand it to him to make sure we were kosher. he smiled & pleasantly told me that we weren't. my co-worker had miscalculated & i was two bucks short on postage. at this point, i had had enough of cadman plaza & its persistent suckiness, so i refused to offer up an additional $2 for postage, had him slide the package back to me through the bulletproof glass package sender & went home.

but everything would be fine. i grabbed two dogfish head ales on the way home & settled down round the apartment for a few hours whilst preparing to go see a band i'm attempting to manage to deserved superstardom and/or infamy, the amazing missing teens. eventually, i finished off both of the dogfishes, so...

#44 - oh c'mon.

snack: archer farms jalapeno savory pretzels
drink: berkshire brewing company berkshire ale

...i cracked open the 22 oz of berkshire brewing company berkshire ale i'd purchased for bloggin' purposes whilst visiting a friend's new condo in ipswich, ma over the holiday. i suppose i should have bought an ipswich ale & blogged about that given the proximity of the condo to the actual brewery, but who's watching? the blog police? i don't think so. it has a pretty tasty, caramely sort of flavor & the company's initials are b.b.c. & that's cool, so i finished it off, grabbed my vacuum (my management contribution to that evening's live performance) & jumped on the subway.

the evening went well overall. a few of my friends represented at the show & we hung out & that ruled. i met some new peeps & adorable ladies. that ruled. i drank lots more beer. that ruled...until the end of the night, when i was wasted & as a result became internally deeply unhappy when i discovered that the tube to the vacuum had been lost during the evening...so i carried my crippled vacuum home on the subway at 3am filled with the sadness, got home, drank some water & crashed. when i awoke around 10am, i was TOTALLY ILLIN. it was like that scene in spaceballs, but with more hot flashes. my body expelled everything that was in it & everything i subsequently tried to put in it (it was all "f you water! f you fruit punch gatorade!") until about 6pm that evening, when i finally slept it off. the weird thing was that it didn't feel like puking from a hangover though. it felt like puking feels when you're twelve years old, puking from actually being sick & i wanted my mommy...& then hours later it was gone.

in the course of that pukefest, i expelled the bounty of archer farms jalapeno savory pretzels i'd consumed during the previous eve. if you're like me & the dryness of pretzels starts to get to you, even when accompanied by a tasty beer, these pretzels are for you. they have what critics like to refer to as "zingy powder flavoring" & that goes a long way toward upping the amount of these i can consume in one sitting. in summary, they tasted really great going down.

once the pukefest was done, i was in no shape to leave the house & was unquestionably chillin' for the eve & eventually, the rest of the weekend. hasbro had finally forced scrabulous to change their game board a few days earlier, so it's no longer a copy of scrabble & i no longer care to play it. without it, i went through withdrawal this weekend, as i was bedridden & unable to kill hours playing scrabulous.

...& on sunday i woke up & checked out my "the 365 stupidest things ever said" calendar. the day's entry, a quote from football player cadillac williams, read "he might have won the war, but the battle's not over." even with its illogical logic, it felt like quite the defeatist way to start the day.

...so on sunday, i stayed home & killed lots of time watching episode after episode of the shield. it's damn good tv, but the setting & circumstances & overall despair of the show definitely wears on you, especially after 7-8 straight episodes. when this marathon of despair was mixed in with all the emotionally downwardly spiraling events of the past two days (including other stupid things like the cat annoying me or the shower water taking too long to heat up), i was not in a happy place, so i drowned my sorrows in the rest of that bag of pretzels...& things turned out ok. this time i didn't puke them up.