Blasphemy on Yahoo! IM

My friend Matt is a terrible person for reasons too numerous to list in one posting, but this really takes the cake:

Matt
5:14
someone needs to rein joe morgan in

Me
5:14
is he worse than tim mccarver?
mccarver is the one i really hate

Matt
5:15
yeah
every broadcaster sucks
there are few that are good

Me
5:16
except vin scully
even chick was questionable esp at the end

Matt
5:16
sorry, I never liked vin scully

Me
5:17
WTF

Matt
5:17
his voice bugs the sh*t out of me

Me
5:17
you go to hell right now

Matt
5:17
ha

Me
5:17
seriously

Matt
5:17
can't stand him

Me
5:17
you must die
and go straight to hell

Matt
5:17
I watch dodger games on captioning

Me
5:17
that is unacceptable

Matt
5:17
it's just his voice
OBNOXIOUS

Seriously, people. What kind of world are we living in? I thought this was a civilized world filled with rational human beings. I guess I was wrong.

Kudos, Judy Chu

In one of my Random Thoughts rants a couple weeks ago, I posted this:

In my hometown of Monterey Park, CA, some of the officials running for city office used to send pot holders in the mail to each resident with their names printed on them. I guess the hope was that we'd remember their names by using them often. My sister was baking something the last time I was home, and promptly burned her hand using this flimsy pot holder. I said, come on, if you were dumb enough to trust Judy Chu to protect your hands, you deserve to get burned. So, Judy Chu, if you wanted us to remember your name, mission accomplished! However, just know that we associate it with crappiness.

Apparently, no one else associates the name Judy Chu with crappiness, since she's just become the first Chinese-American woman elected to Congress. From the Los Angeles Times:

The San Gabriel Valley Democrat, who will represent the 32nd District, adds the victory to a 24-year political career. She won with nearly 62% of the vote and the support of local political leaders.

So my apologies to Judy Chu, who like me is a fellow Bruin alumnus and former Monterey Park resident. We will cherish your flimsy pot holder for all eternity as you represent a zillion Chinese folks in DC.*

*Actual Chinese population may be slightly under a zillion in the San Gabriel Valley. It only seems that way.

See Ya, Trev

The Lakers lost Trevor Ariza, their starting small forward during this past championship season, yet they arguably got better, signing former All-Star Ron Artest in his place. I'm not sold on Artest -- he's a talent for sure, but also a head case. We'll leave that story for another day. My biggest beef is with Ariza. Laker fans are outraged, stating the ball club was too cheap to shell out and keep Ariza around. To these fans I say, check your facts.

Look, I was a big fan of Ariza, given his L.A. roots and UCLA background, but the kid completely misplayed his cards. He was at best the 5th or 6th best player on the Lakers, but for some reason thought he was entitled to a big payday... in the worst recession in the past 50 years... with the salary cap decreasing for the 2009-2010 season.

When the Lakers offered Ariza the full mid-level exception of $5.6 million a year for 5 years, Ariza reacted as if they gave him Lyme disease. His agent thought the offer was a slap in the face and vowed to shop Ariza around the league to get him the payday he deserved. Turns out no one else was willing to pay the kid anything more than the original Lakers offer. And fewer still were willing to give him the 5 years the Lakers offered, an offer that came with the benefits of playing for a team that should be championship caliber throughout the bulk of it.

The ultimate trump card? The Lakers knew Ron Artest wanted to play with Kobe Bryant. Badly. Sure, they felt a kinship to a kid they helped to shape into a valuable NBA contributor, but when Ariza and his agent started making noise about what inconsiderate villains the Lakers were, well, kinship only goes so far. So General Manager Mitch Kupchack picked up his phone and gave Artest a buzz. And not surprisingly, Artest -- a man who needs a championship to validate his star-crossed career -- jumped at the chance to win a ring with the Lakers. In comes Artest. Out goes Ariza.

In the most interesting twist of fate, Ariza ends up signing with the Houston Rockets, the former team of Artest, swapping spots with the man he'll replace. The only problem with this swap is that Ariza will be making the exact same money but playing for a team that is going nowhere. So instead of holding a handful of championship rings, the move will likely lead to Ariza being exposed as an overpaid, offensively limited player. Not the ending I think he had in mind for himself when he started playing hardball.

Here's to you Trevor Ariza. Thanks for helping us win the NBA championship. I wish you luck with your Rockets career, but I can't help but think you'll live to regret this when you separate emotion from fact. And that agent of yours that helped you into this mess? He'll be fine. He gets his share of your contract, no matter how happy you are with the end result. At least someone's a winner in all this.

Teaching in the Big Apple

From the AP via Yahoo! News:

700 NYC Teachers are Paid to do Nothing
By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK – Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do. Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

"It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

So let that be a lesson to all my not-so-hard working friends out there (um... you know why you are).  If you want to hang out and still get paid, just teach for 3 years in NYC (that's the minimum length of time needed to acquire tenured status), then start verbally assaulting your students. You'll be in the rubber room in no time!  Man, who needs a fat corporate banking severance package when you can exploit this little loophole for all it's worth?

The best quote from the article?  Probably this one:

"Most people in that room are depressed," said Jennifer Saunders, a high school teacher who was in a reassignment center from 2005 to 2008. Saunders said she was charged with petty infractions in an effort to get rid of her: "I was charged with having a student sit in my class with a hat on, singing."

Singing in class?  Ok, that's reasonable.  But with a hat on?  My god.  What kind of monsters are our school systems creating? Let's give this teacher a paid vacation... that'll show 'em.

Don't Hide Money in Your Old Sh*t!

From Yahoo! News:

Israeli woman mistakenly junks $1 million mattress
By IAN DEITCH

JERUSALEM – An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress she said had almost $1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites on Wednesday.

The woman told The Associated Press that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise present on Monday — and threw out the old one.

The next day, she said, she remembered that she had hidden her life savings inside the old mattress. "I woke up in the morning screaming, when it hit me what happened," said the Tel Aviv woman, who asked not to be identified.

Oddly enough, this happened to my Dad a couple years ago, who for some unknown reason used to hide money in an old sport coat. The amount was nowhere near the earnings of a modest Israeli woman living with her mom (really, that's what single women living with their parents in Israel can amass these days? I'm definitely living in the wrong damn place).

My mom was doing some spring cleaning and of course she ran across some hideous 70's-style coats in my Dad's closet and decided to donate them to charity. When my Dad realized it, he freaked out, and my Mom went back to Goodwill to dig through piles and piles of clothes in search for the golden sport coat. Think it's hard to find a mattress in a dump? Try finding one article of clothing in a room filled with clothes donated over a series of months. Needless to say, she turned up empty.

The moral of the story? Buy old 70's sports coats from Goodwill and always choose matresses from the dumps of Israel. In this economy, it's probably your best bet.

Random Thoughts

Some more random things that you probably have zero interest in:

• While watching the NBA Finals last night (Go Lakers!), I noticed that GM ran an ad about how although they were bankrupt, they still have awesome plans in the works. Hey, wait a minute, GM. Let me repeat, you're bankrupt. This is even with a extra couple billion dollars in your pockets after the big bailout. And somehow, after being terrible enough to burn through all of this cash, you are spending big dollars running an ad campaign about how awesome your plans are? And people wonder what's wrong with the automotive industry in the U.S.
  
• Dwight Howard has the broadest shoulders in the history of humanity. This is a scientifically proven fact*
  
• When did they stop making regular shorts? All I ever see these days are either plaid shorts, or regular colored shorts with 50 cargo pockets sewed onto them. Can't I just get a regular solid colored pair of shorts sans ancillary pocketage? Why is this not an option anymore?
• And on that note, how come I can't buy multi-colored striped knee high socks to wear with aforementioned shorts?
  
• In my hometown of Monterey Park, CA, some of the officials running for city office used to send pot holders in the mail to each resident with their names printed on them. I guess the hope was that we'd remember their names by using them often. My sister was baking something the last time I was home, and promptly burned her hand using this flimsy pot holder. I said, come on, if you were dumb enough to trust Judy Chu to protect your hands, you deserve to get burned. So, Judy Chu, if you wanted us to remember your name, mission accomplished! However, just know that we associate it with crappiness.
  
• Wi-fi on Virgin America is the best idea since live TV on airplanes. Flying is now just like being in my living room, only with more neon lights and a very, very tiny couch.
  
• Science has shown that skinny jeans have proven to be an indicator of mental retardation in males.*
• This is a fun article.
• I like dogs.
  

* Keep in mind that "science" is defined in this blog as "stuff that seems true to me with utter disregard for fact"

Feeling oh so swine

Swine flu. It's all I hear about these days. On the news, on the web, even on everyone's Facebook and Twitter statuses. I can't escape it. And I'm sure it's no laughing matter, but isn't this whole thing a bit overblown? I looked up the average data on yearly flu related deaths on the CDC website and found the following:

Every year in the United States, on average: 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu; more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu-related complications; and about 36,000 people die from flu-related causes.

Here's the current stats on the swine flu: 109 reported cases, 1 death. Any sort of death is lamentable, but in the grand scheme of things, this strain of flu seems no worse than any other strain of flu that we encounter each and every year. Again from the CDC:

The symptoms of swine flu in people are similar to the symptoms of regular human flu and include fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue... Like seasonal flu, swine flu in humans can vary in severity from mild to severe.

But yet, the Mexican Football Federation says all pro soccer games in Mexico this weekend will be played without fans in an effort to slow the spread of swine flu and high school and college games have been cancelled altogether to curb the spread of swine flu. Why don't we do the same to curb the spread of the regular flu if it's just as, or even more deadly? Am I completely underreacting to this? Is underreacting even a word?

Someone please enlighten me if I should be running out and buying a mask tonight. Until then, I'll just react to this the way I've reacted to the bird flu. Wake me up when it's over.

Worst Recession Discount Ever

I got this email from Ticketmaster yesterday:



Sadly, I missed out on saving an extra 5% to something I have no interest in at all because I didn't check my email fast enough. Oh no! How can I live with myself knowing that I could have saved a couple bucks on tickets I would not even spend a couple cents to buy?

How did I even get on a Sparks mailing list? Because I used Ticketmaster to buy Lakers tickets a few times? If the common ground here is basketball, let me throw this out there: Both NYPD Blue and Cop Rock were TV shows about cops, but the approach and the execution were very, very different. Let's not pretend it's all the same, shall we?

Set It and Forget It

Behold. The madness that is the Showtime Rotisserie Grill. For some reason this thing was a crazy hit seller about 10 years back. The only question, why?

Because in reality, you're paying about $200 for this tool, which still doesn't actually do anything, until you:

1. Buy a raw chicken
2. Clean it
3. Prep it
4. Place the raw chicken in the Showtime Grill
5. Set it
6. Forget it
7. Wait 1 hour
8. Pull flaming hot rotisserie chicken out of grill
9. Take flaming hot rotisserie chicken off the flaming hot chicken holding unit
10. Put flaming hot rotisserie chicken on plate
11. Eat rotisserie chicken
12. Go back in the kitchen and clean grill

OR, you could just do the following:

1. Go to grocery store
2. Buy rotisserie chicken
3. Eat rotisserie chicken

All for about $2 more than buying a raw chicken. Um, is this really a difficult decision? You'd have to cook about 100 chickens for the grill to break even on the cost vs. buying the fully cooked chicken, not to mention the 50 other ridiculous steps needed.

Showtime Rotisserie Grill owners... you all fail.

*Special thanks to Jenn for making me think about this lame product this afternoon.

A Valentine's Day Card For You...

Thought it would be nice to have a Valentine's Day card that my readers could download and share with their loved ones. Enjoy everyone! And, have a very happy Valentine's Day!

Random Thoughts

Some random thoughts on a Wednesday evening...

• Why is good mexican food so hard to find in NYC? It really doesn't seem that hard to make. Spices, meat, tortillas... am I missing something here? Note to all taco truck operators in California -- if you move to NYC there's an absolute KILLING to be made here. Seriously.
  
• Do not buy 2-in-1 stain and polyurethane. It way too hard to control the depth of color and amount of sheen this way. Definitely buy them separately. It's a little bit more work, but you'll thank me in the long run.
  
• Whoever created the 25 things about me phenomenon on Facebook, kudos to you! Even I'm surprised at what a phenomenon it's become. Although, I highly doubt it was just some individual user somewhere in the world that started this. I'm sure Facebook slyly perpetuated the chain letter to make people aware of the Facebook Notes feature, and show an example of why you'd want to tag people in a Note. Well played, Zuckerberg.
  
• If you can't trust Chris Brown, who can you trust? Next thing you'll tell me is that Kobe Bryant isn't as nice as he seems.
  
• Lost has me completely lost.
  
• I've pretty much given up on Heroes, but I hear rumors that it's actually watchable again... true?
  
• For some reason I'm actually excited about the G.I. Joe movie. Yo Joe!
  
• I do not feel the same way about the Watchmen movie though.
  
• Watchamals are too cool. Too cool!
  
• Did you know that guitars can dehydrate and start to collapse and crack? I learned this the hard way. Proper humidity is key, guitar owners of the world.
  
• If I was in Hawaii and a magical talking sea turtle swam up to me and told me a bad joke that really wasn't that funny, I'd still pretend to laugh. Just FYI.
  
• Yes, I'm blogging again after a 3 month hiatus. Why? Well, I never really meant to stop. The real world just got the better of me. So I'm back, people. I'm sure none of you really care. But I care. So there. Nyeah.
  

Chris Brown. And Black. And Blue.

As you've probably heard by now, singer Chris Brown has been accused of assaulting his girlfriend and fellow superstar, Rihanna this past weekend. Pretty big allegations that could land Brown in the slammer for 9 solid years.

The thing I wonder the most is this... was Ne-Yo licking his chops when he heard the news? Not that he wasn't sad for Rihanna, because domestic violence is a terrible, terrible thing. But in a small way, don't you think a little part of him was jumping for joy because he knows he gets to move up a rung on the R&B/Soul ladder?

I always felt like his fame got derailed by the emergence of Brown. They're basically the same dude in terms of type of song and general danciness (probably not a word, but I'm sticking with it). But poor Ne-Yo got brushed aside once Chris Brown hit puberty. Well, not so fast, music fans. There's a new sheriff in town. One that doesn't beat his gal pals (at least not that we know of).

Best PR of the Year

The best PR move of 2009 so far was pulled off by none other than... the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation? Yes indeed, by sponsoring the "Best Job in the World" contest, Australia's most lovable province has bought more attention than any advertising money could have ever provided.

For those of you who didn't see the contest, the job consists of living on an island in Australia for 6 months in a million dollar home, swimming in the Great Barrier Reef, soaking in the Australian sun, and blogging about it from time to time. That's it.

The site generated tens of millions of views, enough to bring the server crashing down for much of the first couple weeks after the announcement. The promotion also led to tons of radio and TV interviews from stations all around the world. Not bad for the cost of letting one freeloader lounge around on the beach for 6 months.

Tourism in general has declined in Australia, so they needed a way to bring people to the island in an innovative way, given limited advertising dollars. Well, kudos, my friends... you did it! Now, if there was only a way I could land this job myself...

It's Just Miley, Being Miley

From TMZ.com

Yet more people putting pee pee in your coke. Miley Cyrus (she's dead center in the pic, the 16 year-old girl who's sitting on her 20 year-old boyfriend's lap... but that's another issue altogether) is showing us how cool being racist is. OMG! Racism... *hugs*!

That one kid next to Miley has really got the look down, by the way. I mean the slant eyes on that kid are dead on. What's that? He is actually asian? Not just looking slant eyed for the sheer mockery of it? Oh. Right. Do you think he even knows what's going on around him in this photo? Actually do any of these kids? They all look pretty blitzed, and again, Miley is only 16 years old, so that's a pretty early age to get oh so wasted.

Eh, whatever. Billy Ray probably doesn't care, as long as the checks keep coming in from his little cash cow. Moo.