Watch a football game at the Meadowlands... check.

In a random turn of events, I ended up scoring a ticket to Sunday's Sheagles vs. Giants game at the Meadowlands.

All I had to do was be the designated driver, which suited me fine since a bottle of beer went for $7.75 in the stadium, which is insane. I just drank during the tailgate and not during the game and the post-game tailgate. The first tailgate was lunch, and the second one was dinner.

The folks I was with take their tailgating seriously.


We weren't the only ones who brought supplies, and pictured above is the full backyard grill, a case or two of beer, 15 bottles of wine and a veritable smorgasboard of all kinds of food that we brought.

And yes, that's snow on the truck (In Pennsylvania near Trenton, N.J.). There wasn't too much snow at the Meadowlands though... but I assure you it was freezing (literally) and there were some snow flurries. I'm still waiting for some real snow to hit the city, though some are forecasting for some real snow here later this week.

Being outside from about 10 a.m. until the evening, I got my fair share of freezing cold, and stinging winds.

Some folks were wandering the parking lot selling gloves and Giants stocking caps (and probably making a mint). Though the Giants (and Sheagles) gear they were selling was totally unlicensed, so one of the nearby salesfolk actually got taken away and cuffed by security. Don't mess with NFL infringement rights... apparently they take that shit seriously, word.

Despite the freezing and the game technically being in New Jersey and the Giants playing some fugly looking football (we lost 20-14), it was a lot of fun.

On a fun side note, each week the tickets to the games feature a picture of a different Giants star, and in a wonderful coincidence the tickets for this week's game all had last week's proud titleholder NFL's "Thug of the Week" - Plaxico Burress! Unfortunately, it can be a fairly competitive title to earn...

So while his recent trouble with the law and his accidentally shooting himself in the leg kept him from joining the Giants in their ugly on-field performance, at least he was there in spirit.

Here's a fun (and sad) team-by-team look at the widespread criminal issues that have been ongoing in the NFL since 2000. That might make for a fun blog to keep up... Hmmm...

Apparently, the MTA wants my opinion...

Earlier this week on the way to work, a Metropolitan Transit Authority worker handed me an official MTA report card to fill out regarding the A train.

They asked all kinds of fun questions about things like delays, cleanliness and security and you rate them from unsatisfactory to excellent.


Apparently you can fill it out online like pictured above, but I filled out my paper one and mailed it (pre-paid postage) to the MTA folks... though the actual mailing address was some contractor/consultant in Maryland, since apparently New York City and state have nobody who can analyze surveys.

I'm sure some school, and we have plenty around here, would love to analyze the info for the MTA at a rock bottom price. I wonder how much they're paying for the surveys to be analyzed in Maryland, especially since the MTA is apparently beyond broke (facing a 2009 budget deficit of around $1.2 billion). It looks like they're going to be raising fares, making a lot of service cuts and adding some new tolls and such in the near future. Awesome...

As for the survey, it conveniently avoided any of the topics that are the biggest issues with the A train, like constant service changes and disruptions on the weekend and unreliability late at night.

Seriously, nearly every weekend the line is always whacked out, especially seemingly always having to take a shuttle bus instead of the train for part of the route (and the buses rarely show up). One time, we had been waiting a good while (and some angry other people had already been waiting a while when we got there) at the stop near my apartment, and the shuttle bus stopped a little before us and the driver got a hot dog from a vendor and just chilled there... 15 minutes later another shuttle bus came and stopped at the same hot dog vendor and had a little pow-wow with the other driver. The second bus eventually came and picked us up. It was a special kind of ridiculous.

The paper version of the survey was obviously not going through a scantron or anything, so I made sure to write my thoughts, in depth, on those issues in any white space I could find on the form... who knows, maybe I'll go ahead and write a letter about them to the MTA folks. Customer letters are always fun.

Also, one of the recent news stories around here is like a little taste of home - a teacher allegedly slept with her student somewhere in Jersey.

I know that teacher-student sex scandals happen everywhere (heck, I covered part of the trial for one that happened in a town of like 2,000), but the Tampa Bay area does seem to have more than its fair share. The Tampa Tribune has a fun little special section on the issue... though sadly I'm sure there are many, many incidents not listed...


We're just proud as punch...

And for the heck of it... some Overheard in New York from the A train:

Chick #1: What is your middle name?
Chick #2: I don't want to tell you.
Chick #1: Why won't you tell me what your middle name is? I showed you a picture of me naked!
Chick #2: That is so not the same. Your naked picture is on the Internet. Anyone can see it!
Mid-30s guy two seats away: I'm sorry, but what's the address of that website?

--A train

Conductor: This is West Fourth Street. Transfer is available to the A, C, E, F, and V trains.
Four-year-old girl: Mommy, he doesn't sing his ABCs right.
Mom: That's because he didn't go to college.

--A train

Karma's a bitch... you win this round New Jersey...

I do, on occasion, make a joke or two at New Jersey's expense. It's true.

Like, you all may not have noticed, but when I make seemingly innocuous words into links, like New Jersey and France, they're actually links to goofy (more often than not, not-too-nice) things.

Like the last time I did it for Jersey? It was a link to a picture of Oscar the Grouch in is garbage can. France? A YouTube clip of Cheap Trick's classic, "Surrender."

I guess I've made fun of New Jersey so much, it decided to get back at me.

When I first started working here, I applied for a free subway pass for the commute to and from work. The government offers this as a way to help keep more cars off the road, limit traffic, be more environmentally friendly, etc... and it would help my finances out in an amazing way. I spent approximately $80 a month right now to get to and from work.

So it takes a while for all the paperwork and stuff to go through and I finally got notified I can pick up my subway passes for the next couple months. Great!

I go and they're not subway passes, they basically look like traveler's cheques, but that say they're for mass transit. They were definitely not what I was supposed to be getting. So the lady explains that yeah it was a mess up, but I can just take those to the subway station and basically use them to buy what I was supposed to get in the first place... which isn't so bad.

So I go to the train station, and they tell me my normal station can't help me and I have to go basically over to the station by Ground Zero. Weak... so I wander over to that station and wait in line...

I get to the teller, and he says it's been years since my "cheques" could be used for the NYC subway system.

He said what I got was only good for the PATH Train. Jiggawha?

That's New Jersey's "subway" system that takes Jersey folk into the Manhattan for those who are confused. It has stops at prime destinations like Journal Square... me and JS go way back.

I was so pissed. I'm going to have a "conversation" with the person who messed up my paperwork tomorrow... it will probably be another month or two, which is a very weak, very expensive screw up. Oh well, worse things can happen, right?

As for the frugality experiment? I failed, miserably... but it was for a good cause. A friend from D.C. was in town so I went drinking with him and another from in the city. It was a lot of fun. I didn't spend too much though, so it wasn't so bad.

My undoing was when a buddy of mine kindly ordered me a triple bourbon... which the bartender opted to make more like a quadruple. We'll just say I got served in more ways than one. Again... lots of fun.

Also neat, despite the city having millions of people in it, I happened to bump into a friend of Lisa's girlfriend who I met in June. I was transferring to a different train and bumped into her at the platform... so that was random. We exchanged out contact info and hopefully we can hang out sometime. She was a lot of fun (and no, she's not single as I'm sure I'll get asked by plenty of folk).

Well, I didn't get too much sleep at all last night, so I gotta hit the hay...

Libraries, jogging and the Olympics are all free

Another day, zero cents spent. Heck, I'm making money. I found a dime on the ground on the way home from the library.

It was an interesting little library. About a quarter of the books were in Spanish, which makes sense I suppose. There was also a little section of Russian-language books... there was an old lady checking it out, so I guess it sees use.

Come to think of it, we must have some Ruskies around here. There is a little Russian grocery store a few blocks down the street... as a bonus, they have a rack with their potatoes for sale out on the sidewalk... 49 cents a pound, word?

If only Ivan Drago could read, maybe I'd bump into him in my library. He was too busy getting served to learn how to read though I guess.

The selection at the library was pretty random... they actually didn't have Pride and Prejudice, but it may have been checked out and I couldn't use their electronic card catalogue so I couldn't check.

I did see Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, which is actually a good read. I thought about picking it up and reading it again.

One of the interesting parts in that one is when they tell about Lee's failed attempt to pitch his sex-themed comic strip to Playboy... it was deemed to weird and creepy. Believe me, it was. And no, that's not something I randomly made up either... and yes, it was weird.

I ended up getting The Gangs of New York, as in the book that inspired the movie. Apparently it was written in the 1920's... who knew?

I haven't seen the movie, so it will all be new to me.

So far it is just giving a history of the area where the book is set, which is really cool... since it is giving a history of basically where my office building is. My work subway stop is like a block from what it describes as "Negroes' burying ground....on the outskirts of town."

That probably made for a gross time when putting in the subway routes...

He also makes reference to the when "the present Times Square theatrical district was a howling wilderness where the savage Indian prowled." I'll have to picture next time I'm there and surrounded by the sea of neon commercialism.

After the library, I went jogging... to New Jersey.

I walked to the George Washington Bridge and jogged across the Hudson River (to where it becomes the the Jersey Turnpike) and back... about a two-mile trip total.

They have a little walking/biking trail set up, and if you look to the south, you can see the city's skyline... which is a pretty cool sight as your jogging along. It kind of reminded me of the jogging scene in Punch-Out!!...


Technically though, I guess Little Mac is actually jogging in either
Brooklyn or New Jersey in order to have that awesome view.
Side note:Some of the best video game music, ever.

Not surprisingly, once I got on solid ground in Jersey, there was actually a noticeable, not too pleasant, smell. Go figure.

I spent most of the rest of the day watching the Olympics and cooking with my gas stove... and gas oven. I was quite surprised to look under the oven where I stored my baking trays to see a ginormous blue flame right on top of them... I think I'll move those to somewhere less like a fireplace.

As for the Olympics, we totally dominated fencing.

That's right, gold, silver and bronze. Word.
I also watched, like, the most ridiculous pommel horse routine ever. All the other Americans basically took it easy on the horse and just tried not to mess up, but not Alexander Artemev. I couldn't get a clip of him in Beijing, but here's what looks like the same routine at a different recent competition.

I'm in NYC now, plus some little things...

First, in the interest of full disclosure, I just got in from a fun night on the town... So let's begin :)

I made it to New York City and am ready to start getting settled in.

One administrative note: "Princeton" made fun of his name and said it was generic and not creative enough. So from here on out he will be "Lisa." There is no real reason for this, but I figure if he wants something more "creative," he can have a girl's name. Word.

So anyway... I am in New York at my temporary quarters hotel I found where I'll be staying until I find an apartment... which is still kind of up in the air. So I am officially in the city now... just still looking for somewhere to actually live.

So I flew into D.C. from Alabama and then drove to Lisa's place in New Jersey to meet with him and figure out a place to leave my car and then we headed into Manhattan.

Those of you who know me best know I have an innate ability to get lost no matter where I am or where I am going.

I ended up lost on the beltway around Trenton, NJ, today. No, Trenton was not even close to on the way to Lisa's place. Not even by a longshot. Ridiculous... driving around the "Garden State" and praying... I have no idea how I ended up in Trenton, and I kind of don't want to know.

So on a more positive note, Lisa and I found a Scottish bar called St. Andrews. According to the bartender, they had about 295 kinds of single malt scotch available there. Awesome, to say the least. They even had Penderyn, the lone Welsh Whisky in the world. I have always wanted to try it, and this place had it. It was alright, a little harsh. They served it neat. It reminded me of something between a Highland tasting scotch and an Orkney scotch.

Oh yeah... I'd like to offer a not-so-sincere apology to my friend Big T to the C for all the trash I've talked about Staten Island. Apparently her family is from there. She always smelled nice at work, so how could I have known? Oh well, she probably won't ever see this anyway.

Well, I'm going to do some apartment hunting Sunday, so we'll see what happens with that... then Monday is my first day of work... so that should be neat. I'll probably offer up a much more sober/awake entry tomorrow.

Well, g'night!

More apartment hunting fun...

Well, work was pretty slow today... to say the least. I was able to take care of some things for my upcoming move, make more copies than Rob Schneider could have ever dreamed of and even fiddled around Facebook for a while.

It's probably for the best though. It gave me time to continue my apartment hunt. I'm already starting to weed out some of the apartments that are clearly scams. Sure, I'd love to send about a thousand bucks to you over in West Africa, so that you can then mail me keys to your too good to be true apartment. Sounds brilliant to me.

There's another one that seems vaguely promising... but it's Craigslist posting was flagged and removed when I went back... so I'll keep that in mind as I continue to e-mail back and forth with the potential landlord. The price is almost too good to be true... but it's in the neighborhood lovingly known as Hell's Kitchen, so I figure that might be impacting the price...

It's just a name, right? Like "monster island," which is actually a peninsula... I think the name is out of date and is a throwback to the time of gangsters and the far scarier threat to society, prohibition, but I'll definitely have to do some serious scoping out of the area.

I've actually gotten a lot of vague support for considering the Staten Island apartment, which is surprising since half the island is pretty much a landfill. Maybe you all just have it out for me and would all love to be able to tease me about living on an earthen garbage barge, who knows?

I couldn't tell if one friend was pro-Staten Island or not, he put something on my Facebook wall about the ferries... some sort of ethnic slur against both British and Japanese people I think. I'm pretty sure it was pro-ferries though, but I'm not really sure.

I'm also looking at a couple of apartments in the Journal Square area of Jersey City... some of you may already know that Journal Square and I have a little bit of a history. We're totally BFF. Its PATH station is officially the strangest place I have ever confusedly/unscheduledly (real words are lame) woken up after a night on the town. Sorry friend's bathroom floor in Avalon in college, you've been replaced (but not forgotten), in case you didn't get the memo.

I hopped off at the wrong station and fell asleep on the bench waiting for my friend to get off the train. However, he was not dumb enough to get off the train two stops early... partially because he had fallen asleep.

It seemed like a nice enough area, but I didn't wander too far away from the station and was more focused on getting home rather than casing the joint.

So we'll see if that night was a sign that Journal Square is just where the fates want me to end up... yeah... we'll see...

I figure these are always fun, so I'll leave you all with a fun "Overheard in New York" quote I found from the aforementioned Hell's Kitchen:

Chick: He's either retarded... or from the Bronx.