We are so spoiled nowadays.  Not only do satellite radios display the name and artist of a song playing, but most modern car radios also have that basic functionality.  One morning a relatively new song began playing nonstop in my head out of the blue and I had no idea who sang it or what the name of the song was.  I knew I’d have to listen to certain stations on XM knowing that I’d for sure find it faster there than on terrestrial radio.  

I waited a day in case there were people who didn’t see it Sunday night but I thought the final Sopranos episode was fantastic and a fitting end to a classic show.  Listening to radio on Monday was so predictable with people unhappy with the ending.  For those unsatisfied people I have this to say – have you not learned from the previous five seasons that David Chase does NOT provide closure for a lot of story arcs?  There was never resolution to Dr. Melfi’s rape, we never found out what happened to the Russian in the Pine Barrens episode, and now we simply don’t know if Tony survived or not.  If you haven’t figured out by now that certain plo ...

I try not to succumb to most marketing schemes but food descriptions sometimes really get to me, especially when hungry.  This is why, as a general rule, I don’t go to the grocery store on an empty stomach, otherwise I’ll come home with stuff I would normally never eat.  Sure, Rachel Ray on the cover of a rosemary-and-olive-oil Wheat Thin box might be intriguing to buy when your stomach is growling but when you actually bite into one of those salt-on-top-of-salt-deerlicks you wonder to yourself “I wouldn’t eat this even if I were drunk”.

&a ...

Let’s begin this exercise in declaring that I’m all for hygiene.  Being clean is a good thing.  Showers and baths are the cornerstone of our modern society.  Oral hygiene -- also good and absolutely necessary.  For those who have the discipline, it’s probably good to brush after meals instead of just at morning and night.  A slight kink comes into this plan when it involves the workday though. 

Having had my video iPod for almost a year now, I’ve come to some conclusions about certain iTunes pricing practices.  First, the 99 cents per song marketing strategy was one of the better things to come to fruition for the consumer in the past decade.  Yes we could go on another tangent in how artists seems to get less money with this distribution method but that is more a fault of the crooked record companies and not because of the iTunes business model.

We had an afternoon party last Friday at a coworker’s house that was company-sponsored.  Not only was the place perfect for entertaining (pool in the backyard, ping pong table, pool table, darts, card table) but the room that had the pool table had a bunch of characters from the Dr. Seuss books mounted on the wall as though they were hunting trophies.

There isn’t a year that goes by without hearing a story of how police nabbed wanted felons with the lure of free season tickets or some other get-something-for-nothing scheme.  I thought of this as I was at Comp USA for the third time in the past month.  They are closing all their stores in Georgia and the one by my work seems to be where they’re dumping all the other stores’ merchandise.

Why does TV continue to fight the DVR?  Thankfully most DVR are able to adjust to the fucktastic practice that most networks use in primetime to stretch their shows a few minutes before or after their allotted times.  But they just won’t give up when it comes to trying to outsmart the DVR user like me who refuses to watch commercials for previously recorded shows.  Additional commercial breaks have seeped into most shows now.  In fact, some hour-long dramas now have 6 commercial breaks dispersed throughout.  The total amount of advertising time is still the same (about 16 mi ...

I’m actually writing 3 ½ years after the fact, but I just finished reading the journal of a friend from college who completed the Appalachian Trail in 2003.  Jim Dirlam, a Brooklyn boy through and through, has always been the outdoorsy, adventury kind of guy.  Prior to this, he had done several multi-state bike rides (Idaho to Colorado, the New England states…) so I was pretty sure if anyone could pull it off, ...