Well, it's finally here. Tomorrow, I leave for my very own European Vacation. To get yourself in the mood, please click here.

I have been to Europe before, but that was some 6 years ago, when the dollar was strong and there was no Euro at all. These days, it's a $1.30 to buy €1.00. Good times.

I'll be spending 12 days cruising the Mediterranean with my wife and her parents. There will be four stops in Italy: Rome, Florence, Naples (Pompeii) and Venice. There's a stop in Monte Carlo, where I'll be betting it all on black. There's a stop in Turkey, where I'll be making every attempt to get thrown into a Turkish prison. There will also be five stops in Greece: Santorini, Mykanos, Athens, Olympus and Corfu. There's only one way to separate the men from the boys in Greece, and that's with a crowbar.

I'll be posting from the high seas, provided that I'm not vomiting over the side of the boat the whole time.

Buon Viaggio!

Labels: Europe, vacation, vomit

NBC orders 6 episodes of American Gladiators

I just had a complete geekgasm.

Labels: American Gladiators, geekgasm

I didn't see the whole roast. I really had no intention of watching it. But I'm sitting here in my office. It's 1:30 in the morning and I'm waiting so I can continue QAing the website. While I watched I found out that Flavor Flav has 7 children and 2 grandchildren, leading Jimmy Kimmel to drop this remark.

"Flavor Flav is responsible for more homeless black children than Hurricane Katrina."

I have a new love for Jimmy Kimmel.

Labels: Flavor Flav, Jimmy Kimmel

Well, by "Stonewall Jackson," I mean, "Delta" and "Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta" and by "the North," I mean, "me."

I was in Atlanta for business. I flew in Wednesday night and was supposed to fly out Friday night, but they cancelled my flight. I sat on a standby line for a bit to try to get on an 8:45pm flight out, before it occurred to me to cut my losses (they'd already postponed that flight to 9:20pm) and just accept the flights they'd given me for the following day.

What were those flights? A 9:10am flight to Tampa, FL, which landed at 10:35am and then an 11:15am flight to LaGuardia, which landed at 1:30pm. All of this meant two things:

* I actually had to fly south to get to my home, which is north
* I ended up wearing the same clothes for like 36 hours

Also, I've decided that I'm never going to complain about the heat in NY anymore. Atlanta was unbearable while I was down there. It's just a thick heat that never seems to end. Even things that can't have human feelings, like buildings or Jesse Helms, looked tired of sitting outside.

Additionally, I'm going to start an online petition to have Hartsfield-Jackson Airport renamed Hartsfield-Sherman Airport. I like the idea of burning Atlanta.

Labels: air travel, Atlanta

I'm just wondering at what point a hotel chain thought that it became worth 7 bucks for the convenience of having a can of macadamia nuts in a small refrigerator in my room?

Also, with the room service thing, is having room service so convenient that the prices can be both 50% higher than they would be ordinarily and charge a convenience fee?

Don't get me wrong, you'll never find a stronger proponent of convenience than me. Ask my wife. She hates that I'm willing to go a crappy deli and buy a turkey sandwich when I could by a pound of turkey and a loaf of bread at the supermarket for roughly the same price. I can't be bothered to comparison shop, even on the InterWeb. I feel like in the time it takes me to search out a better deal, I could already be doing something else.

I guess it's my own fault that I'm willing to pay $17 for a club sandwich and $2.50 for a medium sized bag of M&Ms that have been sitting there for god knows how long. I just hate that they know exactly how to take avantage of me.

Labels: random thoughts

Interesting article in the Times related to what I wrote the other day about traffic around New York City. The U.S. Department of Trasportation has given the city $354 million, so Mayor Bloomberg can move forward with his plan to charge commuters:

The mayor’s plan was first aired in April as part of a package of proposals meant to guide the city’s growth in an environmentally sensitive way over the next two decades. The plan proposes to charge drivers $8 and trucks $21 a day to enter or leave Manhattan below 86th Street on weekdays during the workday. Those who drive only within the congestion zone would pay $4 a day for cars and $5.50 for trucks.

No truth to the rumor that he plans on charging people who walk to work 7 cents a step.

Labels: commuting

"I have this computer at home. A friend needed to get rid of it fast and he needed a vacuum, so I traded him. Anyway, I don't even use it that much. Sometimes if I'm going to a coffee shop to look at women, I'll bring it with me to look busy, but that's about all."

Creed Thoughts.

Labels: Creed Thoughts

Phil Rizzuto has passed away at the age of 89.

There are tons and tons of stories about what a character Phil Rizzuto was. But to this day when I'm keeping score at a ballgame (I always keep score), when I get up to get a hot dog or glance away from the action and miss something, I always put "WW" into the scorebox like Phil did. I learned to keep score with him on the air.

How about when the Pope died in 1978, and Phil announced to the home audience, "Pope John Paul I is dead. Sure puts a damper on a Yankee win?"

Or when he was giving his Hall of Fame induction speech and he stopped in the middle of his speech to ask former broadcast partner and president of the National League Bill White to help him remember a word?

He was the king of unintentional comedy. And a total character. He'll be missed.

Labels: New York Yankees, sports, the Scooter

Neil Diamond rules. Anyone want to challenge that?

My wife's cousin had a baby, so we came out to LA for a party that they're throwing for the little whippersnapper. We saw the kid last night and he's absolutely adorable and tiny (which I believe are two adjectives that can be applied just about any baby).

In any event, due to the absolutely overwhelming and ass-reaming nature of my job lately, I worked from home yesterday and actually came into the LA office this morning. I'm about to leave to go for dinner, but I'm the kind of tired right now that actually defies description. This will translate into as much sleep as possible tomorrow.

Labels: Los Angeles

Another lovely day in New York City. Temperatures reaching the upper 500s, with humidity reaching 8000%. Today, however, in addition to the balmy weather, 45 minutes worth of rain caused a flash flood. A tornado actually touched down in Brooklyn as well, causing damage to Sunset Park and Bay Ridge that will probably result in some SEMA and FEMA money for those folks. We're lucky also, because we don't lose power a whole lot here during storms because the power lines are underground. Yet, with all of that, the public transportation system of the entire city and its surrounding area was crippled.

It took my boss three and a half hours to get to Manhattan from Connecticut. You might be saying to yourself, "Well, that's kind of far to begin with. What about some place closer?" I'm glad you asked. People from Forest Hills and Kew Gardens in Queens (which is no more than 15 miles East of midtown Manhattan and normally takes about 35-40 minutes) took nearly 4 hours to get to work today because both the E and F subway trains were suspended in both directions and the LIRR wasn't running on the Port Washington line. People from Jersey faced equally awful commutes

The MTA (New York's most efficient bureaucracy) actually told people to "just stay home" at one point, as though that were a acceptable solution to the problem. It's not like flooding on the tracks is an uncommon occurance either. This happens at least 3 times a summer. The MTA raised the fares a year and half ago (and phonied their books to show a deficit in order to demonstrate the need for a fare increase) to $2.00 from $1.50. What are they using this money for? I have to believe that if Yankee Stadium can find an effective way to drain the outfield during rainstorms that the MTA can figureo ut a way to minimize delays with effective drainage. No one's saying it should happen over night, but what the fuck are these people doing? Throwing keggers? It's absurd.

Something's got to give here. The traffic around the city is already unbearable, and not only during rush hour. Ask a cab driver and they'll tell you that the only time there isn't any traffic at all in the city is at like 6 AM on New Year's Day. The subways are great, but every time we get a a couple of inches of rain, the tracks get flooded. When that happens, the buses are busting at the seams. The whole system is balancing tenuously and when one small thing goes wrong, everything tumbles over like dominoes.

I don't profess to have the answer. When the Second Ave. line is complete in 20-30 years, maybe that will help ease some of the east side traffic. Who knows? I'd love to see people stop driving to the city as much, but I don't think Metro North and NJ Transit could handle the resulting bump in riders. They'd either need to add a new train line or more trains, both of which are probably logistically very difficult (if not impossible). Maybe more buses and the same amount of trains with fewer cars could help a little bit. But the proposed commuting surcharge for passenger cars isn't going to do anything for many reasons. I believe largely because if we viewed this in economic terms, the curve for driving into Manhattan is very inelastic, almost like a drug addicts view of drugs. If you're addicted to the comforts of driving yourself in the city, it would take a large amount of money to deter you from doing it. Is $8 a day, 20 days a month, 12 mnths a year going to do it? I don't think it would.

All I know is what's happening now isn't working, and something needs to be done soon.

Labels: commuting, MTA

When I was a kid, there were all kinds of commercials on the air about which cola was better: Coke or Pepsi. Each one of them had hundreds of taste tests around the country, spent millions of dollars in advertising and figured out nothing other than people are a) psychologically persuaded by the label and b) brand loyal. In reality, the two beverages taste different, but they're different in the way that a chihuahua and a German shephard are different. That is to say, they're different sizes, but at the end of the day, they're both fucking dogs.

But the reality is there are two types of people in the world: those who are so fiercely loyal to their beverage of choice that they won't drink the other one because they think it tastes like raw sewage and those who'll drink whatever the hell you give them because they've got other less trivial things to worry about than what kind of fucking soda they drink.

These days, it's the same thing, only now that Verizon's in the TV business and the cable companies are in the phone business, these two are at each other's throat over who provides the better service, who's using fiber optics and who can come up with the most ridiculous line of advertising (Sir Charge? Really? That's the best you could do?). And again, I get the sense that the results are going to be the same. I even feel myself drawing a line in the sand. I won't ever switch to Verizon FIOS from my cable. I don't want to lose the speed of the cable modem, so I'll suck up the cable company's sometimes shitty service and their "maybe we'll show up at 12 noon or maybe we won't show up at all" line of crap, just because I'm used to it.

The pervasiveness of the advertising is what really gets me though. Over the last few months, it feels like I can't watch TV for more than 6 minutes without seeing one of these commercials. It was in this vein that I conducted an experiment. I work for a media company as my "day job," so I have a TV in my office that's on for most of the day. I selected a random hour of the day (5pm-6pm EDT) and a random network (a major cable network with sport and sport-related programming) and I counted exactly how many of these commericals that I saw.

Only one single commercial break went by without at least one of these commericals appearing. In total, I saw 10 cable (this includes Time Warner and Cablevision)/Verizon commercials. 10! It's not really a huge surpise. Anecdotally, that's what it felt like. But I have to wonder if these commercials have hit the point of saturation. At this point, it feels like election time and the campaign commercials. How effective is an advertising campaign that's this pervasive? People have to be tuning them out at this point. When I see one, I sigh and see if there's anything to flip to during commerical time, or I'm fast forwarding through something that I've DVR'ed.

I wonder how much these guys spend yearly to hold their customer base. I bet 10% of that money spent toward improving customer service would go a long way toward the same goal.

Labels: Fiber

Summer used to be a vast wasteland for TV. It still is, to some degree. But the basic cable channels have been airing their shows during the summer to build an audience that wouldn't be there when the networks begin their fall schedules. The networks have also put some summer programming on, rather than repeats. Of course, it's complete shit reality shows based on karaoke and dancing, but it is new.

Anyway, things you should be checking out:

- Flight of the Conchords (HBO) - very quirky. Also, very brilliant.

- Mad Men (AMC) - this is based on recommendation. I'll be watching one of them tonight [*editor's note: I watched two episodes this evening and it's outstanding. It's a really interesting portrait of advertising's good old days]

- Monk (USA) - this show keeps getting better and better.

Labels: TV