where do i live?

i live on west 108th street and amsterdam, what part of the city is this?

i mean, to say this is the upper west side is stretching it a bit, although where does the upper west side end? 96th? 100th? 103rd? i think i'd say 100th.

it's definitely not harlem and i wouldn't call it morningside heights either.

technically, i think it is manhattan valley. but certainly many a conversation like this will ensue if i start reference the m.v.:

random person: where do you live?
me: manhattan valley
random person: where's that?

am i forever (or at least until my lease runs out) banished to living in a unnamed neighborhood?

i have to say, though, i do like my neighborhood. the rest of the city is pretty accessible from here and there are restaurants, stores, bars, etc. it's quite a mix of people in a close area, too. if you start on 108th and broadway on my block and walk a block east you'd see a thai restaurant, an indian restaurant, some hair salon, then a doorman building, then two schools (one on either side of the street) then a bunch of guys playing handball, a few baby-mommies and maybe a crack dealer or two.

every once in a while someone gets robbed and/or shot. the guy across the hall with me got robbed at gunpoint. down the block on 108th and central park west, this guy robbed some girl in her apt. and her fiance came home and he robbed him too, then he was just standing there and the fiancee goes, "what are you gonna do? shoot me?" and the robber is like, "oh, you're real smart, huh? well, yea" and then he shot him - eeeeeeee.

ron artest really is crazy

ron artest is dope, he plays mad hard and is a great defender as well as a very good offensive player, but man is he crazy. this is from espn.com (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/writers/pete_mcentegart/05/23/ten.spot/):

"Though Ron Artest wasn't on the floor in the Pacers-Pistons series, Detroit players still saw more of the suspended Artest than they likely had hoped. According to the Detroit News, the Pistons' team bus was about to leave the parking lot at Indianapolis's Conseco Fieldhouse at around midnight last Thursday after the Pistons won Game 6 and the series. Then a dark Escalade screamed into the loading dock, nearly hitting several people. Out jumped Artest, who according to several Pistons was wearing a quite short pair of shorts and no shoes. Upon getting out, Artest tore off his T-shirt. But he never made a motion toward the Pistons' bus, where team security officials likely had their hearts beating out of their chests, and instead strolled into the building wearing just the short-shorts. Of course, this might not even count as strange behavior on the Artest scale."

say it ain't so, bill frist

it was definitely a good thing that the senate found a compromise and didn't 'go nuclear'.
the senate is supposed to be a moderating force, and the filibuster encourages that by having to build more of a majority.
this whole judge fight and pretty much the fissure in american politics really just goes back to the whole abortion fight. the democratics really need to stress that they are not pro-obortion, rather pro-not -forcing women to have a baby if they don't want to.

uno, dos, tres, NUEVE! (to be said in a bono voice to the tune of the i-pod commercial song)

it's been a tough few months as a regular rider on the IRT. mad delays. when the A train broke and the MTA wasn't trying to fix it (which was one of the most absurd things ever - five years!), it got really bad. two and three 1/9s would pass and you couldn't even get on.
this afternoon, however, was almost poetic.
i take the 2/3 from wall up to 96th and transfer the to the 1/9 up to 110th street - usually that's where things get all fucked up. (in case you are not familiar with the new york city subway system, here's a map: http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/maps/submap.htm.)* today, however, the 3 train came pretty quick and then at 96th the 1 was just pulling up. it was dope. i was home in thirty-five minutes, a-mazing.
it brings me a fleeting but nonetheless real moment of joy when i catch the transfer train right away. conversely, there is a real but not quite as fleeting moment of despair when you're pulling up and your connecting train is just pulling away. sometimes, if i'm late, it's like a slow motion scene - "noooo" (to be said in deep slow-motion voice).
by the way, if they would put digital clock or something telling you how long until the next rain came it would make the wait much less taxing. how much could that cost? certainly less than the $200 million dollars that MTA felt they could afford when they sold the rights to the railyards to woody johnson for half price.


*in this sentence should the period go inside or outside of the parentheses? or is it just so grammatically wrong to have an entire sentence in parentheses that it doesn't matter?

W.M.Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzzzzznnnuuuuuttttttssssssssss

as matt mentioned on his blog earlier today, how are more people not pointing out the irony of dubya & co. bitching about newseek?....what did newsweek do again? oh yea, they compromised american lives unnecessarily because they jumped to a wrong conclusion based on poor evidence. how could anyone be so irresponsible?

i'm luke james, bitch!

it was good to hear that dave chappelle isn't crazy and smoking crack, he's just stressed out. it is, i suppose, a bit unprofessional to sign a contract and then disappear on a mental health vacation but then again most people don't dress up like rick james at work either.
so newsweek took back the quran flushing incident story. it's kind of corny to run something like that and then just pull a roseanne rosanadana and say neverrrrminddddd (anyone, anyone, bueller?, bueller?) but does anyone find it that hard to believe? i mean, i wouldn't be shocked if they were wiping their asses with it first.
what's kind of fucked up, though, is that i was watching fox news (a guilty pleasure) and they were coming pretty close to saying if a story is bad for the u.s. you shouldn't run it. they were putting it more like saying you shouldn't use unnamed sources (or at least more than one and, admittedly, i don't know what the protocol on that is) - especially - when it's bad for the u.s.
i think the 'right' media just would as soon never print anything bad about the war in iraq. i mean, fox is just absurdly biased to the point where it's not even really journalism, and they're constantly railing about the 'left wing press' or the 'elite' media's bias to the left. cbs, npr, pbs those are wildly unreliable and biased but fox news is fair and ballanced - especially that HANNITY & colmes.

The McPaper

i was in a hotel in lebanon , nj (off all places) and i got a complimentary 'usa today'.
who actually reads this? they should leave the pictures as just outlines of the people and give out crayons so you can color them in.
i was reading a front page story about tom ridge and the color alert system and i finished the column and was ready to continue the story. i was like where's the little line that tells you what page to turn to, then i realized it wasn't there b/c that was it. what? you'd think a national newspaper would have a bit more to say about a former adminisitration official who was in charge of homeland security that was saying the administration was overusing the terror warning. nope, two paragraphs, that about sums it up.
and the ridge, thing, i guess no one's really shocked about bush overusing the terror warning - it did seem to go up and convenient times for dubya during the election and all. i'm interested to learn more b/c i don't know shit b/c i read about it in the sesame street times.

bob dylan is the man

about 7 or 8 months ago i got on what proved to be a prolonged bob dylan kick along with my roomate, chris.
i had always, of course, knew who the guy was and liked the songs i knew but since i've started listening to him frequently i'm astounded by just how great his music is. there are a ton of songs i just know from a mix cd that chris has made or random compilations (did i spell that wrong?) like 'if not for you', 'quinn the eskimo', 'don't think twice it's alright' and many more.
blonde on blonde is a masterpiece, there isn't a bad song on the album and 'visions of johanna is beautiful'.
highway 61 revisited, though, is possibly my favorite album of all time. at the very least it's up there with abbey road or any other beatle album and kind of blue (miles davis). the first verse of 'highway 61 revisited' is hilarious with the conversation between God and abraham. by the way, for any dylan fans, i was reading this interview with the drummer on that album - whatever his name is - and he was saying that the party-whistle thing in 'highway 61 revisited' (those of you that know the song/album know what i'm talking about) was something he wore on his neck and blew everytime he saw someone doing drugs in the studio during the recording of the album (which, by the way, took a grand total of two days). i never get tired of 'just like tom thumbs blues'.
i think my current top three artists (group or individual) would read like this:

1. the beatles
2. bob dylan
3. led zeppelin

the beatles are still safely in the number one spot, but dylan is not counted out yet.

man, people from outside of ny get pissed off

i was out tonight with people from outside of ny and i said livng out of nyc would be terrible and all these people got mad pissed...i'm sure other parts of the country could be very cool, but people from outside of manhattan/nyc seem to get very defensive if you hate on non-manattanhites...whatsup with that? i mean, isn't manhattan the best place in the world to live? am i wrong?

congratulations to the newly betroathed

congratulations to the brian patrick and his new fiancee, meghan.
their kids will be taller than mine and probably get better grades.
meghan and brian have been dating for about 15 years now, which is about half the time that his older brother and his fiancee dated before officially committing to take the plunge sometime in the unspecified future. incidentally matt's kids will also get better grades than mine and be 5'10" and diesel.

why are we still fighting the drug war?

i was just reading an article about the state of the drug war (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/colombia_us_drug_war_woes) and, putting it mildly, it is not going well. soldiers are being caught smuggling cocaine back to the u.s. and selling arms to rebels. also, despite "massive aerial fumigation" coca crops actually increased this past year.
when are we going to get it? people like to get high and will pay good money to do so. because of that it is incredibly profitable to sell drugs, so people will take risks because the payoff is so, well, high. i mean, even if you were able to cut the heroin market in half by arrests and fumigation and whatever, that would just make the price double and certainly someone will risk going to jail in order to become a multimillionaire.
meanwhile, we're locking people up for like fucking marijuana possession. who gives a shit if someone smokes weed? if someone is stoned they are probably less of a threat to society - what are they going to do, terrorize the world with their cheeto-breath? drive really really slow?
with all the monetary problems are country has it mind boggling to me that we spend BILLIONS of dollars on something most reasonable people know has about a zero percent chance of working.

capitalizing sucks

one thing you'll notice is that i hate capitalizing in emails, i dont know why - i mean its just moving your pinkie like two centimeters down but i find it to be an annoyance. even in business emails i dont do it sometimes if i sort of know the person.....is this uncommon?
punctuation is optional. sometime's i'll use that apostrophe, sometimes i won't. commas, however, are dope. i think i overuse them, maybe, not?
i generally don't fuck with the semicolons, what do they do anyway?

shit

i just started a blog and i have writer's block.