Looking Back: part two

28 Aug

Continuing my look back at the top five most memorable moments from my first year of blogging, here’s number four.

From September 30: “People Are Stupid“
It’s a classic commuting irony — you leave for work early, but it doesn’t make any difference because of a stupid T mishap. That’s what happened this day. But this posting wasn’t significant simply because of my commute. Rather, it was because the day I posted it, my traffic shot up and I gained a whole new audience, largely thanks to Adam Gaffin and his Universal Hub web site. Adam provided a link to my post and people were clicking on it in droves — or at least what felt like droves considering the minimal audience I was getting up till then. But what was more exciting than that was that Adam included this post in one of his “Blog Log” columns for the Sunday Boston Globe. It was the first time of many that my blog was quoted in the Globe over the course of the year. You can read my posting here.

Yesterday: number 5

Like Crap, I’d Imagine

28 Aug

How does it feel to have the entire city give up on you and leave you for dead? Just ask the Red Sox. They’ve apparently quit on us, and it’s not just Bostonians who have noticed. (And by the way, the image below is from Boston Dirt Dogs.com.)

Looking Back: part one

27 Aug

Believe it or not, Friday marks my one year anniversary of keeping a blog, so I thought I’d celebrate by counting down the top five most memorable posts so far. Today, number 5 …

From June 11: “At Least I Got an Umbrella“
I wasn’t particularly excited about my 10-year college reunion, but I went anyway because I really had no good reason not to and, well, I needed a new umbrella. Needless to say, the event lived up to my expectations. But it wasn’t until I posted about it on my blog that the real fun began. You can read the post — and the comments, which are the real reason why this was such a memorable entry on the blog — right here.

Weekend Winners and Losers

27 Aug

Winner: The Office, for winning the Emmy for Best Comedy Series, and My Name Is Earl, for winning awards for writing and directing
Loser: The rest of the show. Aside from Conan’s opening, it was a snooze.

Loser: Ari Gold
Winner: Jeremy Piven

Loser: The Red Sox. Still. They should just stop playing. I mean actually stop playing. It was painful last weekend, but now it’s just an agonizingly slow crawl to October.
Winner: Me, because I didn’t watch any of it

Winner: Saturday’s weather
Loser: Sunday’s weather

Winner: My eyes. I had an opthamologist appointment on Saturday and got some new glasses.
Loser: Rims. My new glasses have none.

Loser: Snakes on a Plane. Why isn’t anyone seeing this movie??
Winner: Everyone who did see Snakes on a Plane. I still say I’d pay to see it again.

Winner: The weekend. It was relaxing and good.
Loser: The weekend. Too short, as always.

Things That Drive Me Crazy

25 Aug

Number 27: Having to flip through pages and pages and pages and pages of ads before I get to the Table of Contents in a magazine, as I do this month for the new issue of GQ. I get it that ads keep the cost of the magazine down, and I’d rather have the ads up front so they’re not interrupting the features, and yes I do work in the magazine world, and blah blah blah all that stuff, but you know that there’s a problem when the TOC doesn’t appear until page 86 and magazine feels the need to tell you on each of the three pages where you’ll find each successive page of the TOC because they’re practically buried. I say move half the ads to the back of the book. No one really looks at that many ads in a row anyway. At least I don’t.

Number 28: Buying tickets for things. I used to go to a lot of concerts, but for about a year I didn’t go to a single one, partly because it was so damned annoying and frustrating to get tickets. Even if you were a member of a fan club (which I was) and got to take advantage of a presale (which I did), the tickets available in that presale weren’t always the better ones. And on the public onsale date, even if you kept hitting “refresh” on your web browser on the Ticketmaster web site, at the minute the tickets went on sale, somehow they were either already nearly sold out or you couldn’t buy very good seats. And don’t get me started on buying on the phone. I didn’t even try to buy Red Sox tickets this year. So it made me more frustrated to see that my two recent experiences with Ticketmaster — buying tickets for Jamie Cullum and The Killers — weren’t any more pleasant. Thankfully, I got tickets to both events. But I didn’t enjoy it.

Number 29: The people who work in my building on the lower floor and can’t walk down one flight of stairs to get there. We only have one elevator working, and it’s a slow-moving one. There’s one floor below the ground floor, and it’s easily accessible, and it’s beyond me why the people who work there wait and wait for the elevator to descend when they could more easily just take the stairs. While I’m on the building subject, I also hate the people who go out for a smoke and stand right in front of the door so I have to walk through their smoke to get anywhere. Yuck.

(Alright, fine. So the list is a lot longer at this point than 29. Didn’t want you to think I was that irritable. These are just the things that are annoying me today, right now.)

Snakes in a Movie Theater!

23 Aug

Best news story I heard today:
Rattlers Freed in Snakes on a Plane Theater Prank

PHOENIX (Reuters) — Life imitating art is all very well. Unless, that is, it’s a movie about deadly snakes on the rampage.
Movie chain AMC Entertainment Inc. said pranksters at one of its Phoenix theaters released two live diamondback rattlesnakes during a showing of the film Snakes on a Plane last Friday. No one was injured…. (read the rest here)

A local video report on the story is here.

This is perhaps the only thing that could have made the movie more enjoyable for me. I love this story!

Hemhorrage

23 Aug

It’s so much easier to ignore — to forget — the Red Sox and their losing ways when they play during the day, as they did on Monday, and when they’re playing on the West coast, with nearly all games starting at 10 p.m. Boston time, as they’ll be doing until next Wednesday night.

Sigh. I can’t believe they lost again last night. At this point, I hope they never come home. Stop the bleeding! End the season now!

Dating Sucks

22 Aug

I know many of you enjoyed my recent post about the fake web site supposedly created by a woman whose husband had cheated on her. Well, here’s another good read.

Apparently — and this one is real, folks — some guy in New York named Darren met a woman named Joanne on JDate back in June. (If you don’t know, JDate is a dating site for members of the tribe.) They went out, she led him on, said she’d go out with him again, so he paid for the entire date. Well, guess what? She had no interest in going out with this guy again. So what did he do? He emailed and called and tried to get her to pay for her half of the date ($50). When she didn’t respond, he kept calling and emailing. And when she did email, it only encouraged him to call and email more.

Suffice it to say, you can read all the emails and hear — yes, hear — all the voice mails right here.

According to Snopes.com, which reports on web hoaxes, this isn’t the first time such a thing has happened or been passed around the internet. But this Darren guy is apparently very real, as the blog GonzoRangers has discovered. I won’t link to his company’s web site or to news stories that quote him, but you can find them very easily if you want to. And for further proof, check out this story from the New York Daily News. Or, you can check out Confessions of a Drama Duchess not only to read excerpts from Darren’s JDate profile, but also to see his picture. Continue reading →

I Surrender

21 Aug

And how is your ass today? Man, did we ever get spanked this weekend. And boy, does it ever hurt. Waking up on a Monday morning hasn’t been this rough in some time.

When did it all go wrong? Wasn’t everything going so well? Weren’t we in first place by three games just a few weeks ago? I’m utterly baffled. And now I definitely don’t feel as naïve as I was about the Sox’s chances for the rest of the season.

Then again, what season? This one is over. Finito. Over. Dunzo. Dead. Wait till next year.

It’s time to throw in the towel. Wave the white flag. Surrender. Root for the Patriots. As far as I’m concerned, the 2006 Red Sox season officially ended at 1:30 a.m. last night. I mean, this morning. Just a few short hours ago. What a bitch. But more importantly, what a bummer.

It’s been a long, dragging morning already, and I’m happy the game today — you mean they’re playing again?? — is during the afternoon so I don’t have to get suckered into watching like I was last night.

Happy fall, everyone. See you next spring.

That’s Enough

20 Aug

To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson in Snakes on a Plane:

“I’ve had it with these mother fucking Yankees winning in our mother fucking stadium!”

I mean, really. This has been a ridiculous weekend. But I still say, it’s not over yet.

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