It puts the seeds on both sides of the bagel or it gets the hose again

There are some things in life that seem so amazingly simple to me that I trick myself into believing that no one could possibly mess them up. Oh what a naive moron I am. People are so incompetent that they will always find a way to fuck up things that should be completely nonfuckupable. What is worse is that the majority of the time they don't even believe that they are making a mistake. Instead they will justify their jackassery by saying that they are "doing it their way" or "making it their own." Sorry friend, you are wrong. When you make a bagel with the toppings on one side it is because you are an incompetent fool.

Growing up in Cali we frequented a bagel joint called Phil A Bagel. It was the greatest. The bagels were soft and had toppings on both sides. They were like heaven. I never knew that there could be such a thing as a bad bagel. Then I moved to Morris, IL and my world was rocked, there were no bagels. None. Sure, I was probably wrong for thinking that a rural town in the midwest would have the delicious breakfast treat of the Chosen. As far as I know there was only one Jewish family in Morris and for some selfish reason they didn't run a bagel shop. Jerks. It was a bad situation and I was forced into accepting mediocrity or worse when it came to bagels. 

When I lived in Chicago I found, with some help, a couple of places that made good bagels. Sadly all of these places were a pain in the ass to get to and Einstein Bros and Dunkin Donuts were so much closer. For years I would justify eating sub standard bagels by mumbling "better than no bagel." In retrospect it was sad how I compromised one of my core values; that bagels should be delicious. 

No longer will I compromise. As I sat here in Jersey City sipping an iced coffee (with ice cubes made of coffee! Holy shit!) and munching on the most delicious everything bagel that has ever been made on this Earth I came to the epiphany that I can't live the way I've been living. I will never settle again. I will only dine on the bagels of superior quality for the rest of my days. When I go out with a real estate agent who rambles on about the schools I will tell them to shut up and give me the lowdown on the bagel scene. When I venture back into the midwest and crave a bagel I will tell my stomach to pull it's head out of it's ass and order biscuits and gravy. And then I will wonder if my stomach has a head and an ass. 

From this day forward all of my bagels will have seeds on both sides. On this day I shall liberate myself from the tyranny and oppression of hard bagels with minimal toppings. I am going to scream out to the world that I will not go quietly into the night! I will not vanish without a fight! I'm going to live on! I'm going to survive! Today I celebrate my Independence Day (from bad bagels)!

A video game review that is only 23 years late

For the last two weeks I have been spending the majority of my nights crashing at the places of friends gracious enough to have me. While I fully appreciate that they are doing me quite a favor it is only natural for me to critique each domicile I spend some time in. For example:

Place A has a dog that I am allergic to while Place B has a cat I'm allergic to.

Place A is roughly 200 steps from a Dunkin Donuts while Place B is at least twice as far away.

Place A has a glorious bathroom with soap that makes me want to eat my hands while Place B as the most poorly designed toilet placement I have ever seen forcing me to sit "side saddle" while taking a shit.

Yet there is one factor where Place B shines that is making me consider staying forever and ever. Place B has a working NES.

So it is only natural that I have spent most of my free time over the last two days playing the Lord's finest invention Tecmo Bowl. Tecmo Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl cause me to experience such intense feelings of adoration and love that I guarantee no human will ever be able to replicate them. Yet as I cozied up to Tecmo Bowl for the first time in years I was shocked to learn that all I could see were it's flaws. As much as I loved weaving up and down the screen as Walter Payton scored yet another touchdown it irritated me that such an idiotic tactic worked. Even more annoying than that was that there were D lineman closing in on Payton 50 yards down field. Now, I don't want to besmirch the late Payton but I'm pretty damn sure that the small handicap of death wouldn't slow him down enough to let a D lineman catch him from behind. From this point there was a bit of a snowball effect as I found every little part of the game to be flawed.

One particularly egregious flaw has to do with the cut scenes included after touchdowns. I get it, it was the 80's and they couldn't put in a special little dance for each player. Yet as I watch the two players high five each other I can't help but cringe at the fact that they are white. Look, I'm not saying that the game needed to show the attention to detail to have different cut scenes depending on the race of the player involved. It just seems so jarring that the guys are white because it's damn near impossible to score with a white player in the game. Unless you are using Steve Largent (and who the hell would pick Seattle?) chances are that the player scoring the TD is black. The only other notable exceptions would be when a quarterback runs it in or if, God  forbid, you stopped using Walter Payton and spread the ball around to Cap Boso. As a quick aside about Boso, his wikipedia page references a play in Tecmo Bowl that allows you to easily score with him. Way to go champ! I digress. If the cut scene was two black players instead of two white ones it wouldn't have become the butt of many ill thought out jokes. 

I became even more infuriated when the computer went into "F You" mode against me. F You mode has become a common thing in video games over the years. If you play the computer and beat up on them for long enough it will eventually have enough. It's sort of like when Skynet becomes self aware. At this point the game will seemingly cheat in order to finally beat you. This happened while I was 10-0 with Chicago (I'd call them the Bears but Tecmo didn't get the rights from the NFL so they are just Chicago, kind of like when Old Style would release the "Chicago Football Can" w/ the Bears schedule on it) and hoping to go undefeated on the season. For those not in the know when you are on defense you attempt to guess the play of your opponent. If you guess successfully all of your players are unblocked and the play is almost always a loss of yards. The computer did this to me not once, not twice but twelve times in a row. I was even doing stupid things like calling a run when it was 4th and 25, something no actual football team would ever do. Yet the computer guessed it because it would not let me win. This of course led to me turning off the game and going to bed furious. I even ended up dreaming about Tecmo Bowl and the same damn thing happened. It was awful.

The last little flaw I want to bring up is really just silly, I don't even think I'm that angry about it. When a team is kicking a field goal it is possible to tackle the holder. . . and the kicker will still make the field goal. Earlier today I kicked a field goal with the holder and a defensive player lying on the ground no where near the kicker. I giggled and spit out a little Mountain Dew because of it. Actually this flaw is pretty rad. I withdraw my complaint.

All in all it was nice to be reunited with Tecmo Bowl. Sure, the old girl put on some pounds and has a few more wrinkles now than she did years ago but I know that I'm no spring chicken myself. More importantly she still allowed Bo Jackson and Walter Payton to run roughshod all over the place and I shall always love her for that. That is until she goes into F You mode again. 

The lunacy of breaking up in modern times

About two weeks ago the special lady and I decided to call it quits. Rest assured this blog isn't going to become a pity party as I post thousands of posts a month about how sad I am. Hell, I think I still have a livejournal that I can do that on if I feel so inclined. I just wanted to take a post to explain that technology has once again reared its ugly head to make something that was already a horrible ordeal exponentially worse. I am of course alluding to the changing of one's Facebook relationship status.

Breaking up is shitty, everyone knows this. You know what's shittier? Having to talk about it. Back in the day I was able to have my heart broken and then spend the next couple of weeks curled up in a ball on my floor listening to The Cure and no one was the wiser. Then we entered this brand new age where we share every goddamn detail about ourselves with our "friends." I say this because let's be honest, no one is really friends with everyone they are friends with on Facebook. Some people you only met a couple of times, some people you knew at one point but haven't seen in years, some "people" are actually bands from Scandinavia. When you are posting that a certain song is your jam for the day or a picture of the chorizo burrito you are about to inhale this isn't that big of a deal. When you are just starting a relationship it's really not a big deal to want to flaunt that either. You're happy and infatuated and have all sorts of butterflies and other insects crawling around in your belly. More importantly you want the world to know that if you aren't calling them back it's probably because you are having mindblowing sex since that's what people in relationships do 24 hours a day, am I right?

Yet when your relationship ends you don't necessarily want that information to get out immediately. People are going to want to hear the story. People are going to want to comfort you. People are going to want to immediately talk shit about the other person in an act of solidarity*. If they are good people they are going to want to buy you a drink. Mutual friends are going to feel obligated to take sides, or worse, try really hard to act like they aren't taking sides when they really are. With each friend you are going to want to handle the unveiling of the situation a little bit differently and at different times. Some friends should know before others. It's a delicate frickin' thing.

Facebook has fucked up all of that. It begs you to get on your soap box and exclaim to the world, "HEY! I'M SINGLE NOW!" I liken the experience to when Egon has to turn off the power grid in Ghostbusters. Once that sucker is up I became inundated with people asking what happened and if I was all right. Which is great. I'm not trying to be ungrateful for having so many awesome and wonderful people who care about me, don't get me wrong. What I'm saying is that it fucking sucks to have to deal with all of it at once. It's mentally draining to talk about that shit. In my particular situation (I need to find somewhere new to live) it's especially draining to discuss because I honestly have no clue what my next step is. Therefore I get more anxious each time I am reminded of that. I feel that I can have about 1 conversation per day about the whole kerfuffle, yet there is no way to make my Facebook friends take a number and wait until their turn to talk to me about it. 

If this was the only real issue I could let it go. But no. . . this is just the tip of the iceberg. What if my ex changes her status a day before I do? Now everyone thinks that I'm super pathetic for holding on to my broken dreams for an extra day. What if I change mine and the ex doesn't? Now I look like some sort of prick who was so chickenshit that I couldn't actually break up with the person; instead I just changed my relationship status and hoped that this would "fix the glitch". Luckily I was able to avoid both of these issues because we handled it like the launching of a nuclear missile, we made sure we both turned the key at the same time. Once we did it I took a deep breath and prepared myself for the shitstorm of feelings that I argued about before. Yet before I could do that Facebook dealt me a deathblow that I didn't see coming. The first thing on my timeline was the following:

"Mrs. Irrational Anger has changed their relationship status to single."

Really? This is what has to top my page right now? I'M PRETTY FUCKING POSITIVE I ALREADY KNEW THIS BIT OF INFORMATION! THANK YOU FOR POURING AN ENTIRE SHAKER OF SALT INTO THE WOUND MR. ZUCKERBERG! I sure hope that this information is still my top story in a few hours. Oh, goodie, it was. Thank you for letting me know that the demise of my relationship was more important than one of my friend's mom's posting a picture of a duck.

Technology continues to find new and innovative ways to make me feel like shit. Suddenly that bedroom floor and The Cure seems really appealing to me. 

*Unless you have definitive proof that the person was cheated on this is incredibly stupid. You know why I'm sad? Because I was in love with that person and thought the world of them and it ended. An hour ago. I don't need to hear about how you thought they were catty or that they had a weird nose. All you are doing by trying to cheer me up by saying they aren't worth my time is making me pissed off at you. 

This song sucks, Pussycat. WOAH WOOOOOAH!

For reasons that are completely inexplicable I have been forced to listen to Tom Jones' ode to bestiality multiple times in the last week or two. It is a completely irrefutable fact that this is the worst song ever created. There are many factors that make a bad song: bad music, inept lyrics and poor performance. Usually hitting one out of three will make a song unbearable. Tom Jones manages to knock it out of the park and fail at all three factor on this beauty. This song is so horrible that I'm not really that angry about it. Frankly I'm impressed.

The song starts off right away with Jones caterwauling like an ass being castrated. Whenever he sings the refrain "What's new Pussycat? Woooooooah wooooooah" an angel loses it's wings. It seems to be completely out of time with the rest of the music which makes it even worse. When Jones isn't screaming like a banshee during the chorus he is uttering some of the most inane bullshit I have ever heard. Let's take a second to look at some of these choice lyrics, shall we?

"Pussycat, pussycat I've got hours. And lots of flowers. To spend on you. So go and powder your pussycat nose."

Seriously. Now, I'd like to think that this is a reference to doing cocaine. Sure, it would be the lamest drug reference in the history of drugs, but still. I can cut some slack for a drug reference, if the lyrics are supposed to be taken literally they are a whole new kind of awful. And since the song was written in 1965 I'm afraid that it's more than likely not a drug thing. . . but wait, it gets worse.

"Pussycat, pussycat I love you. Yes I do! You and your pussycat face!"

Good Christ, really? I swear that 90% of this horrific opus is just the word pussycat over and over again. The song is creepy before all of the references to different pussycat body parts. The references to pussycat noses and faces is offputting enough, then we get to this doozie.

"You and your pussycat lips!"

Here's the thing. Cats don't have lips. Really, think about it. Go harass your pet by staring deep into it's mouth. No lips. None. For a while I thought it was just a dumb little song lyric and nothing else. Then I got thinking a little bit dirtier. OH GOD NO. It's a vagina reference. So subtle. . . except that it's not subtle at all. It's just in such crummy taste that you would never even think that it was talking about that, except that it is. ARGH.

Look, I'm no prude. I own a 2 Live Crew album. I like my sexual references explicit and direct. I don't want some Welshman screaming and making tongue in cheek references to vaginas. That seems far dirtier and makes me feel sceezy.

I pray that you never have to listen to this atrocity ever again. Well, after you watch this video of Tom Jones singing it. Look at how big the backing band is! I can't stomach that this many people enabled such a vile act against humanity.

Hiatus

If Sam Elliot was narrating my life I imagine that I would be wearing jelly slippers and a robe while browsing Da Jewel's as he said, "Charlie was a lazy man, the laziest in all of Cook County. Which certainly puts him in the running for laziest worldwide."  

I've forsaken the blog. The blog is my baby and I have been Antonio Cromartie as a father lately. I'm going to make it up, I promise! I've just been really busy, some shit has been going down personally and professionally and I've been lazy. And it's been hot. So damn hot. All I want to do is stand in front of the freezer with the door open. 

Let's forget all of that though. Let's put this hiatus in the past. I'm back! I'm ready to rock n roll and bitch and moan like I've never done before. Unless something shiny distracts me for a while. . . just kidding. I'm back for good.

Ignorance (of bus arrival times) is Bliss

A couple of years back when the CTA rolled out the bus tracker I was ecstatic. I thought it was the greatest invention since the beer coozie. Remember back in the day when you would just stand at a bus stop for hours on end hoping that the bus wasn't done for the day? While the buses have a fixed schedule that they follow on a day to day basis for some perverse reason the CTA has to be vague as hell about when service ends for the day. The Irving Park bus runs until "Mid-Evening." WHEN THE HELL IS THAT? I could make a valid argument for mid evening being any time between 7 and 11. Why not just have each sign say when the last bus will be by? It was an incredibly frustrating system and I was filled with hope when I heard that Bus Tracker was coming along to save the day. All of my bus related problems would be solved by this glorious little invention, right?

Wrong. In fact the knowledge of when buses are expected has actually ratcheted up my stress level exponentially. I'm willing to say that we were far better off without it. We like lists on this here corner of the interwebs so allow me to list every way that the CTA Bus Tracker has made me want to cover myself in honey and lay at the base of a hill of fireants. 

• I live 4 minutes away from my bus stop, 3 if my fat ass hustles. I cannot tell you how many times I have left the house with 5 minutes left on the bus tracker only to see the Irving bus fly by seconds into my walk.
• Whenever the above happens it is at least 18 minutes until another bus comes by. Although I have to admit sometimes this is a good thing, if I'm going out for the night it gives me time to stop at Merica's favorite dive bar, The Peek Inn.
• Every time I impatiently refresh the page on Bus Tracker it actually delays the bus by an extra minute. I do not know how I obtained this power but I apologize to everyone I have inconvenienced because of it.
• Once in a while there is a phantom bus. I'll watch the countdown until I'm told the bus is approaching. As I stare down the street there will be no bus in sight. It will have vanished in thin air never to appear again.
• On Sundays and Holidays Bus Tracker give you cold hard evidence of how shitty CTA service is by letting you know that there isn't another bus expected for 40 minutes after you have failed to run down the one you were trying to catch.
• Bus Tracker also gives you evidence as to how bunched up buses get. Today while waiting for the Western bus I was informed that there would be a bus coming in 27 minutes. And then another in 28 minutes. Followed by 2 more buses expected in 31 minutes.

The last two on the list are what drives me absolutely bonkers. There is nothing more disheartening than waiting a lengthy time for a bus only to see one or more buses directly behind it. I can't understate how furious I get when I witness this. If I had the power to do so I would get on the bus and force the driver to go 55 mph and not make any stops for a couple of miles just to even things out, I could care less if we fly by my stop, I'm doing this for the good of mankind.

The only thing that makes me angrier than seeing a bunch of buses bunched up is having an entire half hour to sit and brood about the fact that all the goddamn buses are bunched together as I breathe in the fumes of Western Ave. I was frothing at the mouth with anger by the time the first of the four buses finally showed up. Back in the day I wouldn't have been able to work up to that rage. No, it was a more innocent time before Bus Tracker. I would just stare down the street and quietly hope for a bus to how up sometime before the ice cream I bought melted. Yet Bus Tracker has taken the hope that used to sustain me and smashed it into oblivion. 

The only solution is to erase it from my phone. Well, I guess the CTA could start running their buses in an efficient manner so as to alleviate my problems. . . HAHAHAHAHA. I'm not insane, this is Chicago. We have 8 dollars in the budget and it's going to an Alderman's son's stay at home job instead of something useful. Yep, I'm going to have to erase it from my phone and willingly go back to the old days. 

Oh wait, hold on, Bus Tracker just told me a bus is coming in 5 minutes followed by 7 buses in a day and a half, I gotta run!

A Serious Moment

Hey friends. I haven't posted on the blog for a long time for a myriad of reasons, the strongest being extreme laziness. I actually wrote a post about this earlier this morning but I'm not going to post it until tomorrow (or more than likely Monday) because I really want to discuss the events of the last 24 hours. Also, consider this your warning that this post is going to be a bit more serious and a lot more political than my usual "WHY CAN'T I GET TACOS AT 7 AM?!!!" style rants.

By now everyone has heard about the tragedy that happened in Aurora, Colorado. During a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises a lunatic walked in and started shooting people indiscriminately with a shotgun, an assault rifle and some pistols. 12 people were killed and 59 were injured as of the last time I looked at the news, the actual numbers have been fluctuating all day long. It is horrifying to think about.

In this day and age the first thing anybody does when they hear news is to head to their Facebook, blog, Twitter, MyFace or whatever the hell they use for social media and weigh in on the issue. Obviously I am doing this so I don't want to cast too much aspersion on people for doing so. That being said I have no trouble taking down people based on their opinion. There was one opinion that I saw expressed multiple places that infuriates me so much that it makes me see red and want to hulk out. People are arguing that if people were allowed to carry concealed firearms tragedies like this would not happen.

I'm going to repeat it one more time so that you can think about it for a second and let it sink in:  People are arguing that if people were allowed to carry concealed firearms tragedies like this would not happen.


Allow me to retort with a counter point: FUCK YOU.


How is making that argument any different than arguing that a woman got raped because she "was asking for it" by the way she was dressed? It's not. Bringing up the issue of concealed weapons in a situation such as this is basically stating that if you get shot it's your fault for not arming yourself. Who the hell would want to live in a society like that? Isn't basic safety and escaping a life based on violence the reason that people got together and created governments and society?


I understand that gun control is always a hot topic and people like to take any incident they can to argue their point but give me a fucking break. To politicize the issue hours after such a tragedy is remarkably classless in itself. Yet there is something even more revolting about taking a tragedy caused by guns and using it to argue for the further proliferation of guns. 


I don't want to get on my soapbox and argue against guns, that's not the point I'm trying to make. Sure, I believe that we should have insanely tight gun control laws and that the most important part of the Second Amendment is the first part stating that guns are necessary in order to maintain a well regulated militia (a notion that is past it's time since we have a full time military). The point I am trying to make is that it is callous and inhumane to take a tragedy like what happened in Aurora and to boil it down to a talking point in arguing for the legality of concealed firearms. It comes across as blaming every victim for failing to defend themselves. It's easy to blame a whole spectrum of things for the tragedy: lax gun laws on assault weapons, a society that glorifies violence, poor parenting, a failure to identify mental issues and provide treatment for them, etc. I have already read all of those today and I'm sure that I will read many more over the coming weeks and I'm willing to have a thoughtful discussion about each and every one of them. 


The one group that I absolutely will not blame are the victims for failing to have their own guns to defend themselves. If we have reached a point in this society where you should be expected to be packing heat to attend a movie then we have truly lost everything and should just give up.

My thoughts go out to all of the victims in Aurora and all of their family and friends.