A Halloween gallimaufry

First, I just watched the Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series, their second Series win in the team's 126-year existence. I was rooting for the Phillies, because they never win, and I just have a soft spot for them. (Let's say it's no coincidence that the year I declared the Phillies as my "National League Team" was the same year that they won the World Series. I piss excellence, in everything I do and in every decision that I make.)

In a way related to what PatentlyJersey described in his most recent post, I'm even more excited because the Phillies are the only Philly team I can stand. I'm hoping that this good karma will spill over, causing the Eagles to finish 6-10.

Finally, I grew up exactly one hour from NYC and one hour, 40 minutes from Philly. However, I can't think of anybody from my home town who rooted for Philadelphia (although my mom's new next-door neighbors inexplicably have a Red Sox sticker in their bedroom window). This always surprised me. Even though Philadelphia sports fans are traditionally miserable, self-loathing, and foul-smelling, you'd think SOMEBODY would want to be that... anyway, we'll see if this changes, what with front-running and all.

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Halloween, which is always a fun time to watch drunk 20-year-old girls parade around in glorified G-strings, is upon us. This time of year, I like to think back on Halloween costumes of yore. There was middle school, where I successfully pulled off the costume equivalent of back-to-back-to-back home runs (or, if you're not a sports fan, the Ph.D., M.D., and M.B.A. degrees. ::snort::).

In sixth grade, I dressed as Judge Lance Ito. In seventh grade, I was a fundamentalist Arab terrorist* (*NOTE: As I mentioned in my last post, 1996 was a different and more innocent time. Can you imagine what a horrible idea it would be for somebody to try this now? They'd be shot in the street. What a little shit I was.) In eighth grade, I dressed as a pimp, and somehow convinced the two biggest guys in the school to dress as my prostitutes (they were my friends, and I was a conniving little bastard even then).

Then in high school and college, I thought I was too cool for school and didn't dress up very much for Halloween. (My bad.) However, I've had a Renaissance of late, in many ways but most importantly with regard to Halloween costumes. Who could forget my 2006 Han Solo? My Academy award-winning 2007 "Zombie businessman" performance? This year, I dressed as a member of the "Blue Barracudas," one of the teams from the early 1990's Nickelodeon game show "Legends of the Hidden Temple".

The show involved physical challenges, trivia, a stone Aztec god named Olmec, and a kick-ass temple filled with guards that would take your pendants if you were unlucky enough to encounter one of them. It was generally awesome in every way, and I actually like to wear my "Blue Barracudas" shirt around campus, even on non-Halloween days. It's kind of an inside joke; if you know the show, you really get the reference. If not, you're kind of dull.

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The Damaged, Inc. team recently visited Atlantic City for a night of gambling, merriment, and mirth. I took the casino for $215 in blackjack winnings, most of the time sitting with PatentlyJersey and sometimes with Brainpan. My play was solid; I was rewarded on 2 or 3 double-downs, I made good decisions playing second-base most of the time, and I was lucky enough to encounter a good dealer or two along the way.

I don't understand why gambling has to involve far-out-of-the-way places. For example, Atlantic City is (to my knowledge) the most accessible gambling locale on the East Coast. Even as such, it takes at least 60-90 minutes of frustrating, two-lane slow driving to get to AC from any major city. (On weekends as well as on weekdays, lots of old people with nothing to do hit up AC.) And don't get me started on Foxwoods/Mohegan Sun. Those casinos are located in areas which resemble the middle of South Jersey, which is even worse than the South Jersey coast.

In its own sort of dilapidated, weird way, however, the trip to Atlantic City is a lot of fun. There's a lot of banter, a lot of getting pumped up. Every so often, "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor comes on. For the right type of competitive person (e.g., a gambling addict), nothing comes close to AC excitement. Let's go back some time.

Stay classy.

The Al Bundy Theorem... More Dangerous than Murphy's Law

If you grew up in the 90's chances are you saw that wonderful anti-show called Married With Children that mocked, belittled and showed the pointlessness of the typical show on air at the time. It starred Ed O'Neill as Al Bundy, a man who had everything going for him until one day in high school he admitted that he was having good luck. He went from being an all start football player to being married to an obnoxious woman, having money grubbing children and pretty much the most degrading job a 40+ year old man can have, a women's shoe salesman. Needless to say that this theorem dictates that if an individual were to admit to having good luck he would immediately incur a greater amount of bad luck, enough to break his spirit ten times over.

Today as I sat in class I had an epiphany. Many good things have been happening to me in the last week; I didn't have to give my oral argument (which I was totally under prepared for), got to make a trip to AC with all my co-bloggers (where instead of sleeping I played black jack all night, with Red Bull being introduced to my system intravenously, and I doubled my money), I went into school on Saturday to study in the library to discover that there was an open house and I got paid/fed to give a tour of the building and Sunday my team totally dominated in the annual flag football tournament. Seriously, we won all of our games by at least 3 touchdowns. Our reward, besides bragging rights for the next year, which we have already started on, is an open bar event in a few weeks. Oh I almost forgot the best, I had been trying to warn an Ex of mine that she was not taking the LSAT (law school admission test) way to lightly and that she should take one of those unbelievably over priced classes. She insisted that she was super smart, I won't deny she is smart but you can't just take 1 practice exam and think you're the grand master of LSAT, and this week she told me that she totally bombed the test, so badly that she won't tell me her score. So now I have an "I told you so" in my pocket.

I refuse to admit this has anything to do with luck because god may strike me down with lightning, as he did Al Bundy. I prefer to think of it as payment due. I like to think that I have always been the nice guy and have done nice things just because, knowing full well no reward or pat on the back was coming but this seems to be a welcomed down payment. If this streak should continue into exams I would consider the debt paid in full... please??!?? If I were to admit to having luck, as opposed to finally cashing in on some long overdue IOU's, a plane heading for Newark airport would most likely crash into my apt while i am at school destroying everything I own, I'd graduate law school only to never pass the bar and a plethora of other horribly frustrating, demoralizing things would happen to me. However, I would at least not have to worry about my health, because you see in a situation such as this the suffering is meant to be inflicted over the longest period possible.

Fred buys a new car

When the economy began to go to shit last month, I started to think about buying a new car. My reasons for this were threefold. First, I believe in saving when lots of people are spending, and spending when lots of people are saving. (I'm like a poor man's Warren Buffett.) Second, I knew that my credit was solid, and I thought I could get a good deal. Third, my sensible 2001 Santa Fe (pictured, left) was approaching 120,000 miles and another New England winter might have been too much for it.

I brought my mom with me to go car shopping, because she's a tough negotiator and because I figured that any car salesman with a shred of decency would hesitate before blatantly screwing a kid sitting there with his mommy. I also wrote down the MSRP and invoice prices for the three cars I knew I could live with: the Hyundai Elantra, Toyota Corolla, and Honda Civic. (Yes, I know, three super-cool choices.) I'd done enough research to know that car dealers always give people a horrible price first, and I needed a benchmark value to compare their horseshit with. And then I went out.

My first stop was the Hyundai dealer. The Elantra was rated as Consumer Reports' 2009 best small sedan, and as a return Hyundai customer I figured I'd get a good deal. To be honest, I was pretty certain this place would be my only stop. The problem was, the credit crunch hit me here -- hard. Like, 7.5% interest rate hard. There was no way I was buying an Elantra at those numbers, and I walked out the door before I received my second offer from the salesman.

Like you, I'd heard dozens of those annoying Toyota ads on TV over the past month. You know, "Saved by zero..." I thought I could live with driving a Corolla, even though it's not exactly sleek-looking and has the engine of a sub-compact. I started talking myself into the Corolla as I drove to the Toyota dealership next, as if it were the ugly girl at the bar. "It gets 31 mpg overall," I said to myself. "It goes over bumps in the road really well. It's actually HANDSOME in white!" I almost bought it, and if the salesmen at the Toyota dealer weren't huge douchenozzles, I probably would have.

My mom and I spent two hours at the Toyota dealer, haggling, negotiating, turning down offers left and right. I was throwing heat at the salesmen and the sales manager, and they kept fouling me off. Neither of us were budging, and we ended up walking out after being screamed at (believe me, I screamed back), tired and hungry. I just knew I didn't want that Corolla; I knew it didn't make sense to me.

So how did I end up with the sexy car pictured below and to the right? First, let's take a step back to 1996. The era of grunge music was in its death throes, AOL disks were everywhere, and "Independence Day" ushered in a new era of CGI (and scary-ass TV commercials). In the market for a new car that year, my mom visited the local Honda dealership on her lunch break. She ended up being chased out by a frenzied salesman, scared to death. Needless to say, it was not easy convincing my mom to go back to that same Honda dealership, but we did and everything turned out... surprisingly OK.

No, seriously. I got a fair offer -- $250 above invoice -- and excellent financing. I'll be paying off this car until the end of time, but even that's OK (since, once I get my Ph.D., I'll immediately trade up to the Acura TL). The car is a coupe, black, has a spoiler and better-than-average acceleration. It sips fuel. I can make it from NJ to Boston on a half tank of gas. I look good in it (or so I'm told). All is right with the world, and I don't even mind the impending New England winter.

Stay classy.

Every time I see an attractive professional woman, I can't help but think how much more money she would've made if she'd just become a stripper. Just throwing that out there.

Facebook Party Fouls

Note to readers: I should be writing a grant proposal, but I'm writing this instead. I'm hoping that this exercise will motivate me to eventually write the proposal. That's the risky thing about spending a Saturday night at home, determined to get work done; there are other things that you could be doing, and if you don't actually get any work done, you feel doubly pissed. So here's hoping that -- in addition to this lovely blog post you're about to read -- I get some serious work done on my grant proposal tonight. On to the post...

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I like to distract myself at work, mainly because I'm a mediocre scholar and cannot focus on science for longer than 45 minutes at a clip. I like to read Deadspin, and the New York Times, and -- like most people I know -- I'm on Facebook 4 or 5 times a day (never for more than a few minutes), checking what my friends are up to. With my friends scattered across the country, and everyone so damned busy with their own lives that it's difficult to catch up in any meaningful way, I keep myself "in the loop" through Facebook. This has dozens of implications about lots of things, and I'll leave it to some reputable journalist to describe them.

What I want to focus on instead is how Facebook illustrates personality differences, particularly in the sense of some people being really fucking annoying. This is a touchy blog post to write, because (1) I'm sure I do some things that are really annoying, and other people are kind enough not to call me out on it (thanks, btw), and (2) I'm going to make some people uncomfortable because they're my Facebook friend and maybe I'm writing about them. Well, relax. Even if you were annoying me, it's not a big deal. And you're probably not annoying me. Or, maybe you are. Whatever.

Anyway, here goes...

Facebook Party Foul #1: Too much information. As a rule, if it's not something you don't want everyone who knows you, everyone who's ever known you, or everyone who's going to know you to know... don't post it on the Internet. It's amazing how often this rule is violated. People post all the time about their love life, their health problems... let's not even get into menstrual cycles. To make this point perfectly clear, the world will NEVER progress to a place where it is socially appropriate to scream on a crowded street about what your vomit looks like. So please don't write this shit on Facebook.

Facebook Party Foul #2: Friending everybody in the world. This point is somewhat controversial, because I've heard stories of people getting new jobs, etc., straight off of a social network that was huge. I understand this, and it's cool, but the bigger problem with having 1,349 Facebook friends is that there's no possible way you can know all of them. It's true; even the most talented social networkers have difficulty maintaining relationships with more than 150 people. And when one of these 1,349 "friends" of yours gets put on the Megan's Law list, you're going to be directly linked to a sexual predator on Facebook. Congratulations, enjoy the company that you keep.

This is why I don't accept friend requests from people I don't know well, and why I keep my friend list reasonably small. (It may also be because I know very, very few people, in general.) If I barely know someone, I don't really care how they're doing. Given this, what's the point of adding them on Facebook?

Facebook Party Foul #3: Questionable pictures. When I was an undergrad, I remember being asked by my boss (a 50+ year old male professor) to work with another, female student on a project. As if he were enticing me to take on the project, he told me to take a look at her "modeling" pictures on Facebook. Because I'm a jerk, of course I took a look at them... and these were no "modeling" pictures, my friend. No, these pictures were straight-up erotica. This was a moment of great moral change in my life (and the moment that I realized I was getting old), because I thought the professor was a scumbag and the girl was an idiot. And also, kinda hot.

But my point is that the girl was an idiot BECAUSE professors (and people in general) can be scumbags. If you wouldn't want your mother looking at a photo, get it off Facebook.

Facebook Party Foul #4: Updates up the ass. Try to keep your updates to, at maximum, 2-3 times a week. If I wanted to know how you felt each and every day of your life, you'd be one of my best friends or my girlfriend. The more frequently you post updates, the more frequently they show up on the homepages of people who really don't care about you. And then they get pissed off, and really want to give you something to complain about. >:-)

Facebook Party Foul #5: Sending lots of requests to people, asking them to join groups/pick flowers/save the whales/etc. My girlfriend works with people who send stupid chain letters to her. Some of these chain letters are patently ridiculous -- e.g., "Send this E-mail to 27 people by the end of today or you will DIE OF AIDS, and your left arm will fall off too!" -- and she tolerates this stupidity because she's a far nicer person than I will ever be. I'd reply back with a scathing E-mail that would invent new ways to call somebody retarded.

But that's not my point. My point is that, while Facebook add-ons and applications do often "reward" people for sending invitations to all their friends, these rewards are meaningless. This is because Facebook is not real, it's a technological-social convention. As a consequence, it's stupid to care about these "rewards", because in addition to the reward not helping you in any meaningful way, you're pissing off your Facebook friends by being just like that dipshit in your office who sends everyone a chain letter about getting AIDS. You see that dipshit? You know that dipshit? Don't *be* that dipshit.

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I close with a question to the Damaged, Inc., Universe. What grinds your gears about Facebook? "Being friends with Fred" is totally acceptable. Give 'em hell, and stay classy.