1993Saturn

NASA a Total Killjoy on End of the World Thing

2012-01-24T04:46:00.000-08:00

In a statement on its website late last month, NASA made it quite clear that the world will not end on December 21, 2012 as predicted by Doomsdayers . The agency was unequivocal on the fact that there will be a world and people living on it on December 22, 2012. The statement did not deny that December 21 will mark the end of fall.

Doomsdayers claim the Mayan calendar ends on 12/22/12 and there is a hidden planet called Nibiru is on a direct collision course with earth.

This is what NASA said:

Yes, the Mayan calendar ends on Dec 21^st, but that only means Mayans need to order a new ones.

Nibiru speeding toward earth is an internet myth. If there was such a planet, we would be seeing it by now. NASA says relax, the real collision to fear is Astroid 2004 MN4 which has a 1 on 60 chance of hitting earth on Friday the 13^th 2029.

Assuming my mother is right about the world ending, and she has an excellent track record for these kinds of things. She said she would hate my wife and she absolutely does. She also said that her world would come to an end when I left home. I should call her.

NASA has built a high level of credibility after it predicted that the world would not end when CERN starting colliding particles when it switched on the Hadron Collider in 2008. Of course the agency lost some credibility when it began tracking Santa only two days after the press release.

But we're certain the world won't end on December 21 because NASA has all the facts and Doomsdayers only have a web page. But in the off chance that the world will end like my mother says, and that we really knew it would end, how would it play out? This is what we know:

· Steve Jobs would have beaten Bill Gates once again.

· RIM can claim they survived to the end of time. Then again, maybe not. December is pretty far off.

· GroovyPost would find a How To angle somewhere in it.

· Apple would be forced to release the iPad 3, 4, and 5 in quick succession.

· The astronauts on NASA's space station will return to earth only to discover (a movie) where a planet is ruled by smart, yet oddly angry apes.

Of course NASA is free to debunk any end of the world scenario because if they're wrong, no one will be around to say told you so.

A Vicious Cycle

2011-05-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

2011-02-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

Football Fetish

2011-01-03T06:33:00.000-08:00

Forever I’ve been saying that football is getting too gay. And I didn’t mean gay like players stare at each other in the showers kinda gay. I mean gay like soft. But now I’m not so sure, meaning it really might be gay gay. If you have the NFL network, you know this commercial where a shirtless Adrian Peterson is running full bore toward the camera. It’s an ad for the NFL’s brand of fantasy football. Peterson is ripped. In slow motion, his pecks ripple the thin line of body fat. Let’s not lie to ourselves. He is a gorgeous black man in physical peak perfection coming right at me and the last line of the commercial, "What is your fantasy?" Are we still talking about football? He’s not holding a football. He’s not dressed like a football player. Hell, he’s not dress at all. If I was ever on the fence (or as they say in football, D-Fence) then I’m beginning to rethink my fantasies.

In this spirit, I have to wonder why a successful field goal is only called Good. Why just good? If the field goal kicker makes it from the 30 yard line, then that’s good, but if he kicks it from the 50, I want Chris Collinsworth and Al Michaels to scream, “It’s Fantastic!”

Football has really changed. In the old says, before TV, (but just after radio and right in the middle of newspapers) the field goal was earned very differently. When a team scored the ref would raise his arms above his head like he does today, only back then the kicker had to kick a field goal between his two raised arms. That was a man’s sport.

Crisis or Opportunity

2010-06-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Chinese word for crisis is opportunity Did you ever think that the inverse of opportunity is crisis? When I see it that way, which I do, then why would I take a chance on an opportunity when it could turn into a crisis. No take your opportunity and knock somewheres else.

And why must it knock. My door is always open to opportunity so if it has to knock it ain't opportunity. Do the Chinese say crap this is a crisis. Wait we have another word for crisis and it's also crisis. If only we had another far-less-understood language to get our asses in gear and do something about this problem.

Losing Wait on the Stares

2010-06-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

I had been taking the steps to get up to my apartment instead of the elevator and I noticed an immediate weight loss. This was good of course. I had been trying to lose weight since I moved here. Then I started to take the steps to go downstairs and I started putting the weight back on.

Cun't

2010-06-03T06:03:00.000-07:00

As some of you already know, I have Tourette syndrome. You may have heard of Tourettes which is a condition where the brain cannot control the irresistible urge to say naughty words. Luckily I don’t have that specific condition, but I do have a far rarer tangent known as Finger Tourette’s where I spend my day fighting the maddening urge to flip people off with both hands. This affects me at work where I mostly stay behind my cubicle walls when I speak with colleagues, but it has cost me dearly during employee reviews.

This has also affected my ability to write because I also cannot resist the urge to type nasty words while I’m typing an ordinary email. I spend most of my time revising a simple correspondence letter to remove the profanity. This page has been cleaned up already, but this is how it originally read: “As some of you SHIT SHIT SHIT know, I CUNT have tour FUCK YOUUUU…” Ah, maddening. My fingers completely take over and make all caps and italicize and even change the fonts to Arial, because my doctor thinks it sounds like areola.

Tourrettes was named after Jeff Tourrettes, a man in London who was a cunt cunt cunt, and I didn’t accidentally type that. He really was. He was a fucking asshole who played up his condition for sympathy and free stuff. It’s like people who use their limp as a crutch.

Cunt. People hate that word, but how would they feel with an apostrophe in it. Cunt is horrible, but can't we can live with. It's all in the cuntext.

Cun’t – to cun not. Used in sentence: Mort would like to get together with his ex-wife for a night of drinks and memories, but in all good conscience he cun’t.

I'd like to think my dad had Tourettes, but he was just always mad at me.

MicroLoans

2010-06-01T06:38:00.001-07:00

I did a $50 microloan so an African woman could buy a replacemnt oven for her bakery. She couldn't pay it back and I forclosed on her and got an oven for fifty bucks!

Free Range Chicken Farming Unethical

2010-05-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

I've stopped eating free range chicken. Yes, they taste better; yes the chicken doesn't fall off the bone even before cooking. They are not bloated with growth horemones and are allowed to see a bit of sunlight before they're killed. And that's where the cruelty lies; Those chickens had hope. Those are the chickens who were fooled into planning where to build their nests and how many eggs they will have with the rooster. God the surprise they must show when you come after them with an axe. Now, the chicken locked up in dark cage with their beaks cut off so they can’t peck themselves to death are happy the day you end it for them. Those are the ethical chickens to buy.

How to Become a Manager in Fifty Words or More

2010-05-11T08:03:00.001-07:00

To be a manager you must ACT like a manager. Start the day by firing someone. Take them into your cubicle, sit them down and explain to them that we're going in a different direction and it's not personal but their position is redundant. Then go to lunch with one of your favoritie employees for two hours and put it on the company card. Come back, take credit for someone elses work and go to lunch again. Since there is a new opening in your department, you need to start the hiring process.

No one ever said this was going to be easy. It was John F. Kennedy who said, "Shit Jackie, they're shooting at us and there's three of them. See the one in the Grassy Kno..." We don't know what Kennedy would have said after than but it may have been, "...in the Grassy....no there is just one lone gunman up there in the book repository."

I miss him. And I wasn't even shooting.

Getting Sober

2010-03-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

I’m proud to say I quit drinking. As of this writing today, I have will have been sober for now forty-five minutes. GOD, just reading that gives me chills. I admit, it has not been easy. All I thought about was taking that next drink. But so far so good. I could have run to the liquor store in all this time, but I said, NO, I don’t know where my keys are. It’s time to stop. So now I’m sober forty-five minutes. And I already got a chip. I got a whole bag of them.

My drinking finally came to a head last week when I was in Manhattan after work on a weeknight. I should have been home playing with my three little girls or in bed at least. But I was in a club on the Upper West Side and I was on my sixth or eight bourbon & Coke and found myself hitting on a woman half my age, talking her up and watching myself talk her up at the same time, like I was watching myself from the corner of the room. She was just so hot and now I remember in a blur we started making out. My phone rang and I knew who it was but I switched it off and we went back to her apartment. Oh my God that was a good time.

Wow, forty-eight minutes already!!!

Of course the emotions I was suppressing with booze are just now surfacing. Just off the top of my head the first emotion I feel is pusillanimity. I’m also feeling smug because I know what it words mean. I'm pretty horny too, actually. Does that count?

No, come to think of it, my drinking came to head last Sunday, not Wednesday in the city, like I thought. In my drinking days I was what you would call a secret alcoholic, hiding the empties everywhere. It was all working pretty well I thought, until my three little girls looking for Easter eggs started showing up with small bottles. First off, I totally forgot the eggs and then I had to pretend to be really impressed with baskets full of airplane Smirnoffs.

I realize that honesty is the most important trait in my new life and as I sit here and type I’m grateful to all the support and all that I’m happy for. I have three lovely girls after all who, like me, won’t remember much of this. And I’m especially grateful to my wife for giving me the Bob Newhart Show Season One DVD for Christmas.

As I approach sixty minutes, I want to warn others who may choose to follow in my footsteps of sobriety on their own that other vices are ready to fill the void that my sobriety created. You might find yourself eating more, or even drinking again. For me, drinking fills the void the best. This way I just keep it to one vice. God knows I don’t need to start making new ones.

Me Getting Ready for Work

2010-02-25T11:00:00.000-08:00

Fatherhood

2010-02-25T07:15:00.000-08:00

As my dad always said, fatherhood was God's punishment for his irresponsibility. It's not like he said it once in awhile either. He said it all the time, like coming out of a long yawn, or screaming it just before a cannonball dive into the pool. This was heady stuff for an eight year old. He asked me why I penetrated that egg, and what was I thinking. He believed it was both our fault; he for putting me in that position of being so close to the egg and me for taking advantage of it. Sorry wasn't enough for him at that point.

You can imagine no one wanted to be around him when he got angry either. He would hit us often for things we didn't do, like if the Jets lost. He'd tell us that we were lucky and I would think the Jets were getting a new quarterback, but he meant that he never had a father to hit him. His mother had to do it all. When I got older and stronger, he would hit me with the car. Of course I don't talk to him anymore if you don't count hang-ups.

Where was my mother during all of this? In the closet with her chocolate. She ate like a bird: Three times her weight everyday.

How to Write Well

2010-02-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

Remember, you don't want to write good because good is an adjective to write is a verb. So you don't want to write good, my friend. You want to write great.

The first secret to great writing is of course a secret and I won't be the first one to give it away to people who don't know it. But I can give you the second secret to great writing: Don't' write right away. Save it for the day after the deadline. Some writers would argue that you want to write your piece the night before the deadline because that's when you do your best work. How would they know that? I'm drunk. That's so presumptuous. No the best time to write is one or two days after the deadline. The first thing you do is don't check your email, because there is someone in there asking for the thing you should have written. In fact I would suggest not checking your email throughout the day, just to be safe.

Now get started. There's no greater rush than trying to be creative and thorough when every second of the clock brings disappointment and self loathing. This is where magic is made. You commit to writing the best piece ever, that this is the last time you will ever do this, etc etc. etc. After lying to yourself you commit that you’ll make your word count because after all what kind of magic can be made while you're also watching Oprah.

Stretching

If you are only a few words short of your word count, say you have 989 of a thousand words, it is perfectly acceptable to break apart ‘can't’ into ‘can not,’ and 'may' to 'just might be able to.' Shakespeare did this.

Any writer worth his weight can pitch an idea to an editor and get it published, but how many writers can cross the magical deadline and live. That is the real art of the pitch. It's balking and still getting the batter struck out.

Deadline...what a joke. I'm not dead. I crossed it and have cheated death. It's like show people who swear the show must go on! The lead has the flu or broke a leg, or there is only two people in the audience, but the show must go on. Why? What's so important about the show? I'm sure people would understand that shit happens. They might go to dinner and say, yeah the show was cancelled what else do you want to do? Show people only have the show and they don’t - or should I say do not - get to do something else. They’re doing the show for themselves, not for the audience, and that is selfish. If they really cared about their audience they would let everyone leave early.

Don't Digress

Talking about selfish show people in an essay about writing great is an example of bad writing, but is very important if you have a word count that needs fattening.