THOMnottom

I really wanted to write about Scott getting dumped. Really, I did. How could I not be excited about losing that complete waste from the competition. Sure, we’ve still got the white boy and the robot up there, but I can at least tolerate (or sleep through) their performances. Anyway, it’s that (belated) time again…
Continue reading “American Idol – Top Four”

I had a fairly nice weekend, despite the viciousness of my allergies. Unfortunately, I returned home to find a rather confused cable modem. I’ve been pretty happy with Comcast’s service up until this point. The guy who installed everything did a great job, and the few problems I’ve had were cleared up quickly, but now this.

The first tech tells me that it’s a cable modem problem. Okay, no biggie, I’ve still got spares from my Cablevision days. So I give them the info and pop another one on the line. They seem to be having some problems and then… click… click… “If you’d like to make a call…” Great. So now I have to call back and see if I can get this process started with minimal retelling of steps taken. The next tech is helpful and tries to get me up and running as fast as possible. But then he figures out the real problem. It’s an issue with the line. They’ve got to send someone out. There’s an opening on Thursday.

Thursday.

That’s real helpful. Especially considering we can’t even take that one and have to settl for an appointment Friday morning. That mean I have no Internet access at home until the end of the week. I really don’t care that they’ll refund me the money for this week, it’s outrageous that cable companies still operate on this BS “We’ll get a tech out there sometime this month” mentality.

In other words, I’m not very happy.

And neither are my sinuses.

I forgot to mention that I’ll be down in Philly tomorrow participating in the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation‘s Race for the Cure. Lisa and I will be walking the 5K with my family in honor of my sister. I’m looking forward to spending the time with them, and taking a stroll around Philly for a good cause. Hopefull I’ll get some nice photos to share, too.

If you are interested in donating, you can do so directly for our team, Lisa’s Lot.

There comes a time in everybody’s life when their parents finally say, “When the hell are you getting all of your old crap out of our house?” Well, maybe not quite like that, but those of us who have bounced around from rental to rental live our lives in fear of both losing our precious possessions and having to store them ourselves. That time has come for Lisa.

Tonight she came hom with 4 large Rubbermaid tubs filled with “Teen Beat” and “Bop” magazines, tour books from assorted concerts, old newspaper clippings, postcards, letters, photos, Smurfs, bracelets, and Garbage Pail Kids. It’s a veritable cornucopia of the precious nothings one collects over the course of a lifetime – in particular the part of one’s lifetime when one believes everything is worth collecting. I have smaller treasure troves myself, but the masculine side of me has prevented the overwhelming attachment to all things cute and barely memorable that has developed in Lisa.

Of course I would not dare dream of making her part with these vestiges of a life gone past. They will, however, most likely find their way to a storage facility. But there is a certain line that must be drawn. a-Ha and Duran Duran world tour books? Let’s pack ’em away. College newspapers and notes from old friends? Sure, why not? Souvenir junk from past trips? As long as they fit in a box, the more the merrier. A rubber bracelet that her hamster chew threw? Alrighty, I think we may have found where that line gets drawn…

But the real fun is in sorting through all of these snippets of yesteryear. It’s a way of briefly reliving the days when life seemed so far ahead of you. And being able to share it with someone you love who missed it the first time around, well, that’s priceless. Especially when it involves photos taken in the eighties…

Amidst all of the cute pigtailed little girls and young college co-ed pictures in which you’d swear she hadn’t aged a day since, I found the most precious photo of Lisa. Her immediate response was to deny, and then to protest that she was supposed to get a haircut that day. Quickly she scrambled for others to distract my attention, or to at least point out that it normally was that… extreme. And under penalty of death and dismemberment I will probably never be able to share that photo with you. But I swear, we’re talking at least 3.5 inches of added height, and not just by the bangs. The entire top swoops up as if Moses himself were commanding, and rises to such tremendous heights that I questioned her ability to walk through doorways.

Perhaps I will be able to share some of the adorable little girl shots, or the tame ones of her from high school in which she looks exactly the same as today! But the true prize will remain hidden, as I do not wish to relocate myself to the couch. Then again… such commanding heights… it would almost be worth it…

That’s right, my stupid commentary is back be popular demand. What can I say, none of us seem to have real lives to compete with our real TV. You know the drill…
Continue reading “American Idol – Top Five”

I’m sitting here, finally watching Sideways, a movie I was meant to see in the theaters. It is brilliant, of course, but it leaves me with one major sad note in my life. I will never be able to appreciate wine to the extent of Miles, Maya, or even Stephanie for one simple reason: I have a terrible nose. My sense of smell is severely lacking and, while I can appreciate great food and wine, I will never have the ability to differentiate and dissect the intricate complexities of the… of the really good shit.

That’s ok, I will merely retain my title of wino and continue to enjoy the $10-$12 bottles with which I typically stock “my cellar.”

But I’m definitely enjoying this film. One line in particular really sruck me. Virginia Madsen asks Paul Giamatti why he’s waiting to open a great bottle of wine, to which he replies he was waiting for a special occasion. She points out, however, that the day you open that bottle is a special occasion. I’m thinking I need to make a special occasion someday soon with my 2000 Chaddsford Merican. Why let a good thing go to waste?

Hmmm, if anybody’s interested, maybe I can make it a special occasion with a few different bottles…

I used to love books. Okay, I still love books. But these days is that I mainly just buy books and never actually bother reading them. There was a time when I would read a dozen books or so in the course of a summer. Unfortunately that time is long since past. Over the last few years I’ve created an ever expanding library of books I want to read, but “don’t have the time.” Because somehow in my mind watching that episode of “Seinfeld” with the caddy and the bra lady who’s the heiress to the O’Henry fortune for the 10th time is a much better way to end my evenings.

Yeah, right.

Last month I decided to push myself to pick up one of the many books I’d started reading and finally finish it. And so I read the last half of American Gods by Neil Gaiman. And you know what? It felt really good. And so afterward I picked up a novella (Coraline) by the same author, and knocked that off in a few days. Quite invigorating! Now I’m suddenly 50 pages into Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby and thoroughly enjoying my re-found intellect.

I’ve come to the realization that I really did miss reading. What a wonderful activity. And so I’ve decided to set a goal. Nothing too lofty. But I’m going to push myself to read at least 6 more books this year. That will barely make a dent in my reading list, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Besides, if I’m able to hit that total in a shorter time than I planned, I’ll just bump it up.

This feeling has been greatly encouraged by two other factors. Number one would be Lisa. Since I’ve started reading again, she’s decided she would, too. She’s taking books from my shelves, and putting all of that time commuting on the train to good use. Plus it’s nice to be able to discuss novels that we’ve both read, rather than just debating about “American Idol” all of the time!

The second factor would be the discovery of the Montclair Book Center. While wandering around town the other night looking for food, we happened open its store front. Holy crap, what a great find. The setup is incredible – long lines of shelves filled with an assortment of new and used material loosely organized by genres and names. The kind of system that leads to patrons losing themselves among the titles, forgetting what they even came in there for in the first place. But in the end, uncovering totally unexpected finds is far more interesting than merely picking up a copy of a recent release you can find at any chain (although the fact that they discount all books certainly helps in either case). I mean, where else am I going to find a $5 copy of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris without George Clooney’s mug on it?

Whether or not this leads to book reviews remains to be seen. But at the very least I will begin to chip away at my rather lengthy backlog of a reading list.

Alrighty, I’m too tired/lazy to mince words. This Sunday is the semi-annual Hoboken Art & Music Festival – the spring version. Lisa and I shall be in attendance, but for the first time in years we are completely lacking a home base. Obviously we no longer have an apartment there, but on top of that, the Rodeo/Ristra no longer exists as it once did (I believe the space is now called Tazo). Since neither Artkore nor Hoboken Rocks have anything on the schedule, we shall be left to our own devices to come and go as we please.

I encourage all who can to come out and enjoy all of the sights and sounds in the sun. If you want to meet up, give me a call because I’m not sure where we’ll be. My guess is we’ll try to see BuzzUniverse on the Sixth Street Stage at 1pm (and maybe Raphael Cruz at 4pm), but the rest of the day is up in the air.

If you are going to tell me to fill out a form online and print it out, would you at least give me the courtesy of making it fit on a page. Okay, it doesn’t have to fit on one page, but please don’t have it spill one or two stupid lines of copyright info onto an extra, completely useless piece of paper. It’s not like the information is so varying on these forms that you can’t predict how long it will be. They’ll be the same length everytime. So now the 5 or 6 rebates I filled out yesterday and today resulted in several of these complete wastes of paper.

Even sites like MapQuest and Amazon with dynamically generated printouts that vary greatly in total lines could clean up their act. It wouldn’t take a whole lot to code the excess site info a tad neater and STOP WASTING MY PAPER!

Oh yeah, and all of you little indie bands that I’m trying to listen to and get into, you want me to remember who you are, right? So how about naming your mp3s to actually reflect your band’s name and the song title, hunh? And… I don’t know… maybe you could use the builtin tagging system that’s been around since the beginning of the format so I don’t have to search through bookmarks to figure out who the hell wrote a song I liked.

That’s all for now…

I have to remember this one:

“I have a biology question. What’s scarrier, a clown-sized spider or a spider-sized clown?”
– Fred (the funny guy from “Life on a Stick”)