Commitment

We went to see The Dark Knight last night, we didn’t get to see it because the power on the whole block went out about ten minutes before it was supposed to start. They had to give out rain checks to everyone in every theater and send us all home. As annoying as it was at least we weren’t in the middle of the movie when it happened.

Not the point of this post though. While we were waiting to go into the theater (we were probably 40 people deep in line) a teenager got in line about ten people behind us dressed as Joker.

His friends all arrived and thought he looked pretty bad-ass.

The whole thing made me sad and disappointed in teenagers today and not for the reason you may think.

If you care enough about Batman to get dressed up in full Joker attire how are you not the first guy in line?

You are committed enough to go to walgteens to buy all the stuff, cover your face in the make up and dye your hair, but you aren’t committed enough to show up early enough to be near the front of the line?

It’s symptomatic of a greater laziness. Kids used to have to drive to different cities, hours away, to sit in line for hours, possibly overnight just to get tickets to see their favorite band, now guys feel it’s enough effort just to dress up in character. And your friends are impressed, even though you couldn’t leave home 20 minutes earlier to be first in line.

Kids today are pussies.

99% of all sports fans are cheering today

YEAH!

Let’s all just sit back and let this moment sink in.

Journalisn’t

I happened across this on digg this morning.

Aside from my general cringiness at the thought of the 4th amendment being effed in the A, here’s my problem with this.

I happened to see this piece on Countdown the other day, and this piece accurately describes what happened on the show.

And that’s all it does.

This isn’t reporting. It’s transcribing. David Edwards and Muriel Kane watched Countdown and wrote down what was on it. There is no other source material, no opinions given. They watched TV and wrote down what they saw.

And it took two of them to do it.

I have not read anything else on The Raw Story, but if this is typical of what is on there, and based on my tendency to make snap judgments after only one exposure to something, I assume that it is, then I can’t imagine going to this site learn anything.

And, as my last point of annoyance, I found it because it had been dugg by almost 1000 people.

I would like to recommend that our newly all-powerful government add the 1000 people who dugg this thing, and the two people who copied it down from the TV and begin wire tapping their phones without warrants, because they are clearly a danger, if not to others, certainly to themselves.

You’re right, Ray, no human being would stack books like this

The purpose of staying in Stamford, CT should be quite obvious, but I will state it forthwith. It was massively cheaper than staying Manhattan. Through Hotwire, we booked three nights for less than one night in Manhattan. The problem, and this one is all on me, is that we only booked for three nights, when we needed four. I figured we’d just add a fourth night, negative perspiration.

Perspiration. When you book through a third party vendor, like hotwire, it is much more difficult to add another night in your hotel. To make a long story much shorter, here were our options. 1.) Pay the walk-up rate. 2.) Roll the dice to see if hotwire can book you another night in your same hotel. 3.) Go through hotwire and just change hotels.

1.) Our rate was $60. The walk-up rate was $300. Eep!
2.) Hotwire was not able to get us back in the same hotel.
3.) We switched hotels Monday. No big whoop.

We availed ourselves of the fine public transportation system in and around New York City. It was roughly a 30 minute train ride into Midtown. We arrived at Grand Central Station. It was exactly like walking into a movie.

We walked out onto 42nd Street, and took a moment to get our bearings. This was surprisingly easy. I was surprised at how much New York felt like Chicago. It’s a big city, with a lot of people and it’s laid out on a grid. It was very easy to figure out which way was which.

Grand Central is about two blocks from the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Where ten people witnessed a free floating full torsoe vaporous aparition. It blew books off shelves from twenty feet away and scared the socks off some poor librarian. (Not Laura)

 

This was a day destined to be spent afoot. We walked from 42nd and 5th to 20th Street, taking in the sites and photographing the tall buildings. For those familiar with Chicago, think about walking from 42nd to 20th streets. For those not familiar with Chicago that walk would take multiple hours. In New York it took about 30 minutes. For as big a city as New York is, geographically, it’s not that big, and one block is about 1/3 as long as a block in Chicago. It was a great day, and a nice walk.

We went to the Theodore Roosevelt Museum.Bring our Presidential homes total to three for this trip. It was a nice museum with an 18 year old tour guide. The artifacts were really cool, including the shirt, speech and glasses case that were in his breast pocket when he was shot while giving a speech in Milwaulkie. The speech and case taking the brunt of the bullet. He gave a 90 minute speech after catching the bullet before going ot the hositpal for treatment. Teddy was FIERCE!!

We then walked up 9th Avenue to 39th street to go to a flee markey in Hell’s Kitchen. one guess whose part of the trip this was.

Our plan was to walk back to the library so was could go in, as it was closed when we arrived earlier in the day. There was a considerable construction on both 40th and 41st, so we walked up to 42nd, thinking we’ll just walk down 42nd to 5th and we’ll be right there. No problem.

Would anyone like to guess what lies between 42nd and 9th and 42nd and 5th?

This is me, pointing to my (and Michael Scott’s) favorite New York Pizza Place.

That’s right Times Square. We accidentally walked into Times Square. It was pure madness. Lots of tourists, lots of stores, lots of lights.

It was Picadilly Circus on crack.

Broadway, north of 42nd was blocked off to traffic for a giant flee market. I don’t know if this is normal for a Saturday or just something that happened to be going on that weekend, but it was a really crowded version of every street festival in Chicago.

We abandoned our plans to go to the library and walked north toward Central Park. We zigged to the east and walked to the Apple Store of 5th Avenue first. I wanted to see if I could get my iphone headphones replaced. That was pure folly. It was way to crowded for that type of small request. We gave up and walked across the street into Central Park.

After a directionally challenged attempt to walk from East to West across Central Park, where we walked East to sort of the middle, then South back to 52nd, we walked around to Central Park West and Spook Central.

This is the point in our story where I do a small commercial for the iphone.

When walking around a city you don’t know, and you have an iphone, you get to avoid being the tourists on the street corner holding a huge map out in front of you, turning it right and left trying to figure out where you are and where you are going. All you have to do is hold your phone in your hand, pull up the map feature and you’re good to go. We put in addresses, names of places, etc. and it would map out directions from where we were standing. We also used it in the following scenario.

We walked up to the Dakota and into Central Park so we could see Strawberry Fields. It was a great experience for me, both as a Beatles fan and as someone who desperately needed to sit down in the shade for 20 minutes.

While we were sitting there we caught a whif of Chinesse food in the air. And, not possessing the same olfactory abilities as Scooby Doo we could not simply follow the smell to its source. We pulled out the trusty iphone, typed Chinese Food into the search box, and were promptyly shown 5 or 6 restaurants in our vacinity. We chose one and walked there for dinner.

It was great. We never would have found this place on our own. YAY iphone!!!

According to Laura’s pre-trip internet research there was a restaurant where John and Yoko used to hang out. We walked to that address only to find out that it hand closed the previous year. Damn, the luck.

At this point our fatigue set in pretty fierce. We walked the thirty blocks South to Grand Central, for our ride back to the hotel. Our first day in New York was a lot of fun andc very tiring. It set the tone for the rest of our time in the Big Apricot.

Walking. Seeing. Eating. Fun.

Marriage via I-91

By my current standards of roughly one post per month, this qualifies as more frequent posting.

The next day of our vacation, the day of leaving Boston, is the perfect example of what it means to vacation as a married couple.

The plan for the day was to travel from Boston to Stamford, CT, which would be our base of operations for the next three days, via the scenic route (read, the longest way we could find). We drove to Amherst, MA, following the directions of my trusty GPS. We got there with no difficulty, but I am now of the opinion that there must have been another way to get there that was at least an hour quicker than the route we took, but not knowing Amherst, MA from a hole in the ground, I didn’t think to question it at the time.

The purpose of the Amherst trip was to visit the Emily Dickinson Museum. As an aside, as we sat in a restaurant about a block from Boston Common the night before, we were discussing Emily Dickinson. Laura started to be surprised and offended that I had not read Emily Dickinson. My contention was that, as I am male, there was no reason in the world to be surprised that I had not read her. In an effort to bolster my point, I turned to the two women who were sitting next to us. They were of college age and, as I had been eavesdropping on their conversation for the entire meal, I can say with fare amount of certainty that they were students in one of the 45,000 universities in Boston.

"Excuse me," said I, "but out of the two of us, which would you assume had read Emily Dickinson?"

"Oh, I’d say that’s more of a girl book." answered one of our news friends.

She also mentioned that she was an English Lit major.

I don’t know which of the 45,000 she attends, but she is not getting her money’s worth if she thinks Emily Dickinson is a book.

We arrived in Amherst and took the tour, where we saw something that Emily Dickinson never saw. The OUTSIDE of her house! Boom! Reclusive poet joke. DAMN!!!!

Laura loved it and, in the week hence, has read an Emily Dickinson biography and used her recipe for gingerbread to tempt me into eating sweets. Foul 19th century recluse!

We loaded up the car with our bodies and new knowledge and set off toward Stamford. As we were driving through Massachusetts, we saw a sign that said, "Basketball Hall of Fame Next Exit." It had not occurred to me to visit there, as I had no idea we would be driving past Springfield, but here we were. So we stopped.

Our excitement to disinterest ratio had inverted in the distance between Amherst and Springfield. We only had about 30 minutes to spend there before it closed, but it was worth the visit. I don’t know that I’d make a specific trip to Springfield, MA just for that, but there was a Cold Stone Creamery in the same building so that should add to the draw of Springfield a little bit.

Our check-in in Stamford was much less interesting than our previous experience in Boston had been, but it struck me that night, how perfect this day was as an example of the compromises of marriage. Each of agreed to do something we had little to no interest in doing, so that the other could do something they were extremely interested in.

For that reason alone, it was a great day.