Damn my soft, flabby heart...

Some of you may know about my intense hatred for Canada geese. Anyone who's ever spent any time with me during the winter on the Fordham Rose Hill campus has probably seen me trying to kick, throw things at, or at least hurl insults at the flock of geese who settle down there every year. I think they do this because they think -in their dim goosey way- that the pond that existed where the Walsh Library now stands way back in the days of St. John's College (ahem - the 1830's) is still there. And every year, when they get to the campus and are surprised and amazed to find a library instead of a pond, they honk and dither about for a while, and then settle in for an entire winter of digging up the lawns, eating the brown grass beneath the snow, and shitting everywhere.

They just suck as animals. They're dumb, they're dirty, they're loud, and they're all over the damn place, and I've always said we should start having open goose hunting season in New York to keep them under control.

But then, I read this: NYC to Gas 2,000 Geese In Bid to Protect Aircraft, and I started feeling a little squeamish.

Because there have been so many plane crashes and run-ins and technical difficulties recently with geese "colliding" with aircrafts, and one majorly over-hyped case of a plane landing in the Hudson when this happened, the city is authorizing the trapping and GAS execution of 2,000 birds this year during molting season, when the birds can't fly in order to escape.

Don't get me wrong, my somewhat-blackened little wannabe-evil heart is trying really hard to rejoice at this news, because geese are my sworn enemies. And I do try to be a credit to the forces of evil to do Maleficent proud.

But, I mean, trapping them while they're unable to escape and then turning the GAS on them? Doesn't that sound awfully World War II Germany? Doesn't that sound cruel and unusual and awful? Trapping and gassing (gasing?) just seems downright... well... evil. Sure, they're obnoxious and loud and would probably taste delicious with a little cranberry sauce and some mashed potatoes on the side, but do we have to be so sneaky and mean about it?God knows we have enough trigger happy outdoorsmen frustrated by their lives in the city - couldn't we give some of them permits to hunt the airport flocks while they're more upwardly mobile to give them a fighting chance? PETA is gonna have a hell of a time with this one...

Moon explody and other ridiculous bullshit...

I'm having trouble figuring out how to start this post. My Ridiculous Bullshit-O-Meter is way up past the top of its Bullshit Measuring capacities, and I'm just so... I dunno, disappointed? Apalled? Amused? Terrified?

Here's the thing. This - NASA'S Mission to Bomb the Moon - is a real headline. As are all the others like it. As is the actual mission. I haven't exhaustively researched the entire plan beyond reading a bunch of articles online, so I suppose there's a chance (please, God, please) that this is a hoax, but I just can't bring myself to really look too far into this. It's just too ridiculous.

Here's the idea: NASA is hoping to put people on the moon again in 2018, to establish a base there as a launch pad for explorations to Mars and so on and so forth. Which I suppose is a commendable enough goal, albeit one that there are major political and practical reasons to hesitate before supporting. Before they send some of our red white and blue brothers up there, though, they want to check out what kinds of possible natural resources they might have available to them when they get there. They're hoping, mainly, to find some water, which they think might possibly be hidden at the north and/or south poles of the moon, left over from icy comets and such that have left giant craters there in the cold and the dark.

So, in order to determine if there's water at or near the surface, NASA is going to send up a spacecraft to orbit the moon for a few months - for the purposes of look for an exact target for the Centaur rocket that they will then fire. At the moon. At the speed of a bullet.

They're expecting the resultant cloud of debris sent up from the impact to fan out for considerable miles from the moon's surface - they're thinking it will be visible from earth - and then they're going to send in a "shepherding spacecraft [which] will follow close behind, taking pictures and analysing the ejected debris as it looks for evidence of water," very much in the style of, oh, I don't know, a Star Wars video game where you have to fly through a field of debris in your little spaceship.

Yes. That's the plan. We're going to bomb. The MOON. In the name of science! And nationalism! And showing those Communists who's got the best bombs and space program! ...oh, wait, we're NOT in the Cold War anymore? The Russians aren't communists? Well, shit... Um... I guess we can show the North Koreans, right? We're still not into them, right? Sure, yeah, let's do it! Show that Kim Jong Sick guy what's what, huh? Show him the moon BELONGS to US! Cause we said so!

I'll give you guys three guesses as to who signed this one into action. That's right, kiddies, it was none other than our favorite former president, George W. "You Had Me At Bomb" Bush. I'm not sure if he was in on the actual planning of the bombing portion of this operation, but my gut instincts tell me he was at least gung-ho into it when he heard explosions were involved.

While I do have to admit that the idea of looking up into the night sky and seeing a bomb going off on the moon is pretty damn cool, I also just... I can't... It's so ridiculous! I mean, can you really honestly tell me that this is the most efficient and responsible way to go about this? Can someone from NASA please explain to me, in a calm and steady voice and not while panting with little-boy enthusiasm over sending a bomb into the cosmos, why this blatant show of overzealous Hollywood weapons-mongering was chosen as the best course of action to determine whether there might be water on the moon? It's going to take a lot of convincing for me to believe that this wasn't just a bunch of adolescent males playing video games late at night after drinking way too much Mountain Dew and going, "Dude, you know what would be so cool to do?"

Sure, I can see how not actually having to set anything down on the moon's surface in a responsible, non-pyrotechnic way could be more difficult and expensive than using a bomb, but really, think about this. Here's NASA, a group of scientists with a huge budget who like sending large white phallic things into space using huge amounts of energy and taxpayer money, basically showing off as much as possible, making plans to colonize the moon. Not that that's not a worthy goal, especially if we're looking to branch out to study other planets, and especially if someday we might have to use other planets to survive. But, here's the hangup I have:

I saw a man, an American man, on the train yesterday, with a copy of a newspaper article on a sign board about how he'd been burned by acid. I couldn't understand what he was saying, because he basically had no lips or tongue left. His ears were little misshapen buds on either side of his head, his nose was a little nubbin holding up his sunglasses, which I'm assuming were there to hide the disfigurement of his eyes. His hands and arms were horribly mangled. He was asking everyone to spare some change to help him pay for his medical expenses and reconstructive surgery (I think, anyway - again, I couldn't hear him well, but he might have just been begging for change because I'm sure he can't get much of a job looking like he does).

Let me be perfectly clear: this man was burned so horribly by acid that he has to wear sunglasses to keep from upsetting people. He has no LIPS. He is an American. He cannot afford to pay his medical bills and apparently nobody will HELP him except for strangers on the subway.

And yet, we can bomb the moon to look for water. Now do you see why I just can't get behind this?

Oh you've got terrorists? We've got dead pilots...

Woah, you guys, have you seen this? There is a Boeing 777 with 247 passengers on board, about to land at Newark Internationl Airport any moment now, coming in from Brussels, with a dead pilot on board. The guy, who's been working for Continental Airlines for over 20 years, was 62 years old, and the flight crew reports that he just up and died in mid-flight "of natural causes." Everything appears to be fine as far as the actual flight goes, since there are two first officers aboard who took control of the jet quite commendably while the rest of the flight crew carried the dead body out of the cockpit and into the crew rest area after it had been declared dead by a medical doctor who happened to be on board.

This. Is. SO. Awesome.

I mean, let's just take a look at the multiple ways in which this news story is making my disgustingly soggy and dreary Thursday morning less crappy through osmosis, shall we?

1) I'm reading the book "Stiff" by Mary Roach right now, and just last night I finished the chapter about how cadavers can and cannot be used to determine the causes of plane crashes. The chapter basically went in depth about the multiple ways in which one can die on an airplane when something goes wrong. So I was feeling pretty nervous about the prospect of flying there for a good 12 hours or so, after reading that your best chance of surviving a crash lies in either a) being male (so you can push people out of your way), or b) flying first class. Neither of these were looking like options to me. But then, I got to work today, and voila! Fears dissolved! If I fly on Continental, which I OBVIOUSLY will from now on, my pilot can literally croak during my flight OVER THE OCEAN and I can be safe. I'm feeling pretty good about this.

2) Did I mention that the guy died? Mid-flight? I find this hilarious because, well, I know there are lots of ways in which people can just suddenly keel over with little or no warning, but doesn't it seem like somebody should've maybe taken a good look at him before he got behind the controls of a 777, for God's sake, and said, "Hey, Mr. Pilot, you're not looking oh so very healthy right now. Maybe you should call out today and get another pilot to do your international, trans-continental, ocean-crossing flight"? Doesn't that seem like a reasonable expectation? But, oh well, he died, everybody else is fine, and according to a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, "this is not an issue for us."

3) And, hey, I agree with that guy. Everybody who reads this, I would hope, has probably seen or heard the Lewis Black standup routine about how he thinks that to really scare the crap out of the terrorists, we should vote a dead president back into office. Reagan, perhaps, because that would convince them that we're crazier than they are and they should probably back the hell up. I totally agree - when the crazy get guns, one has to get crazier, I always say. And what better way to send a message to any possible plane hijacking terrorists than this? I think we should media-frenzy the crap out of this one. "Oh, yeah, you want to come on board and kill our pilot and terrorize our passengers? Yeah, well we don't CARE. This is NOT AN ISSUE FOR US. We fly around with dead pilots all the TIME. You do not scare us. In fact, now that our pilot's dead body is hanging out with the flight attendants and they've drawn some funny stuff on his face with Sharpies, let's dress him up as a stewardess and tie him to the beverage cart, just for a laugh." I can get behind this kind of mentality. Terrorists, schmerrorists.

4) And let's not forget - let's NOT FORGET - that a medical doctor who happened to be aboard the plane declared the pilot deceased. This means that, on this flight, one of the flight crew had to step out of the cockpit and say: "Is there a doctor aboard the plane today?" Or, maybe, for kitsch value, "Is there a doctor in the house?" It's like a cheesy movie. It's like Airplane. It's like Snakes on a Plane. It's like... awesome. Just awesome.

I made it!

I feel like the number 100 is indicative, generally, of some sort of victory. If you've made it to 100 years old, you are no longer a creepy old person but a venerable piece of living history who garners respect from everyone. If you're a TV show, you've made it through a few seasons and are offically "A Success," possibly even "A Hit." And if you're a blog, and you've made it to 100 posts without garnering a big following, getting a book deal, or giving up entirely, you're either persistent or dumb or masochistic. I'm going to go with persistent, becuase this is my 100th post, this blog has gotten me nowhere really, but I'm still totally into it!
According to the NY Times, "only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Well, I'm still here and I'm still blogging and the blog may have looped around a few times and changed themes and such, but I'm hanging in there! I'm a trooper! A centurion, if you will! Hehehe.

But seriously, folks, this is an important blog not just to me (because it makes me keep my brain working and myself writing), but also to the world, whether it knows it or not yet. People need a source for a little laughter at the expense of the weirdos and weirdness of New York (as in the very lost and very unintelligible Albanian woman who was probably close to 60 years old and wearing a clubbing outfit who I met last night in Astoria. She was trying to get to the L train but had no idea where she was going, and decided that she needed to regale me with tales of her life in Yugoslavia until she moved here 10 years ago... and still somehow didn't know the subway lines...).

And people need someone to look out for them, to be willing to shout warnings from the mountaintops about things that are easily mislabeled as 'cool' rather than insidious examples of human stupidity, like these little gems about 120,000 year old (or older) microbes that scientists from my very own Penn State University have dug out from the Greenland glacier and, after months of careful and loving incubation, have finally succeeded in culturing. They have a few mysterious colonies going of "very small purple-brown ... ultramicrobacteria," and they're super excited because they think these hardy little guys could provide hints as to how living things could survive harsh conditions, possibly on other planets. I guess I can't blame them for being excited - getting a living thing re-started after hundreds of thousands of years is quite an accomplishment. But what worries me is this quote: '"H glaciei isn't a pathogen and is not harmful to humans", Dr Loveland-Curtze added, "but it can pass through a 0.2 micron filter, which is the filter pore size commonly used in sterilization of fluids in laboratories and hospitals.' ...once again, science at its finest, people.

Let's just do some quick, slightly paranoid but nonetheless self-preservative thinking here, folks. I'm sure that scientists who study microbiology can be pretty well certain when things are or are not pathogens, but given that they've admitted to not having ANY IDEA how old these things are ("...at least 120,000 years and possibly much longer") or how they normally behaved before being frozen and slowing down their metabolic processes way back whenever it was, how can we expect to know how these things will respond to being brought back up to speed? And given they're so tiny they can easily escape normal filtration systems, how can we be sure they won't break free and start some form of insidious mind-boggling-ly fast reproduction cycle that will cover half the planet in possibly methan-emitting global-warming-causing disgusting purple mold in like, ten minutes? Come on, people. A little caution, please?

Where would you guys be without me to point out the dangers and idiocy inherent in these 'scientific' schemes? Or the absolute horror of modern culture, as presented in this article about a 15 year old girl from Iowa winning 50 G's at the National Texting Championship on Tuesday. 50. Grand. For texting. This girl has a habit of 500 texts a day, 290-page cell phone bills, and using expressions like "IDK," "lyk," and "2ce." What's even scarier than the fact that texting has taken such a hold over our youth, however, is that it's also taking over our news media, which might not be the finest upstanding institution of cultural excellence, but which should at least hold itself up to the standards of using REAL ENGLISH. But no, no, in the article I've linked to above, they do a TEXT INTERVIEW with the winner of the 50 grand.

People, we need to fight these things. With paranoia, fear, violent uprisings when necessary, and even more violent mockery of things like text interviews. And that's why, even if this blog never makes me rich or famous, I know it's important. I know the world needs me. I'm at 100 posts and I'm not stopping.

A majestically moustachio'd musical evening...

Friday evening was a beautiful one; despite the daytime mugginess and rain, by 6:00 the sky had cleared and the sun was shining on a temperate, perfect evening. I walked up to the SummerStage at 69th on the East side to get in the long, long line for the free Josh Ritter show right after work. The line stretched for about 2 blocks' worth of park trails when I got there, and by the time they let us in to the venue I couldn't even see the end of it anymore, and that certainly makes sense. Josh Ritter and his rockin' band of folk music superstars were playing a show backed up by the New York Pops orchestra! For FREE! Outdoors! Even if you don't know his music, that sounds fun, right? And if you DO know his music you'll understand why the line was so long.
The concert was spectacularly fun, despite the odd aggressiveness of the fans at the front (I say odd because Josh Ritter is not exactly the aggressive type and it's strange to see people responding to wanting to see him that way instead of with unadulterated joy) and some really, really annoying girls who popped up right next to/in front of us at the beginning of the show and seemed to think that since they were holding a really nice camera, it would be fine for them to run around drunkenly and shout to each other while blocking people's views in order to get good photos. They annoyed me heartily until the music started, at which point I forgot what "annoyed" meant.
Ah, the joys of Josh Ritter. It's amazing how one man can smile so much and not hurt his face. And the orchestra! And he had a poet read his poem with the orchestra playing, and he played Thin Blue Flame with Hilary Hahn on violin, and he did a duet with some dude named Hanser that the crowd went BANANAS over, although I cannot for the life of me figure out who he is. It was magical. And of course, Zack Hickman, Josh's loyal and amazing bassist, was there as always with his 'million miles of moustache' - this guy's moustache is... well...

All in all, it was a fantastic evening.
On the way home, Connor and I stopped to get some pizza and we were so excited and food coma-ed that we got on the 4 and weren't paying attention and ended up, once again, at Yankee Stadium instead of 3rd Ave-149th St. No big deal, we thought, until we noticed that the downtown platform was completely packed, and I mean completely packed as in every inch of available space being taken up, with people in Yankees AND METS outfits.
This meant that a subway series game had just let out. This meant that no matter what we did when we got off the train, the environment outside would be complete insanity. Oh my.
Well, we decided to try a bus to get home rather than fight the crowd on the subway platform, and after about ten minutes of walking through crowds and yelling groups of fans and arguments and grand statements about the superiority of the Yankees (who apparently won because of a fluke missed catch, making the Mets fans particularly ready to get into fights), we managed to board the single most crowded bus I have ever been on. It was so tightly packed that a man pushing his way by me as I desperately held on to an overhead bar tapped me on the shoulder, pointed to my bag, and suggested I keep it closer to me because I might get robbed.
When we got going, I noticed that the... woman... sitting right in front of me was sporting a moustache. Like, a MOUSTACHE. I don't mean a bit of fuzz on her upper lip. I mean a long, thick, wiry-haired, dark, comb-able moustache. The kind that she probably wakes up in the morning and combs and then twiddles with over the course of the day. A very real, very serious moustache.
I was flabbergasted. I mean, I know plenty of women and see plenty of women around who have a bit of hair right there, some of whom decide to remove it and some don't. But this... this was the kind of thing you might see on a woman who's going through hormone therapy pre-getting-a-penis-operation. And perhaps she was in the process of becoming a man, although nothing else about her appearance suggested it.
When we got off the bus, I immediately started yelling "Wow! Wow! Oh my god, WOW! Did you SEE that thing? WHY wouldn't she SHAVE it? Or get electrolysis? Or WAX it? That's just... WOW!"
Connor laughed but pointed out that maybe, in our PC day and age, moustachio-ed women are the last frontier for civil rights. Maybe they're an under-represented sublcass of humanity that gets way too much flack for its natural tendency to grow facial hair.
Which made me pause. I WAS being awfully judgmental. Maybe she loves her moustache, and is proud to have it. And if that's the case, then by all means, grow those whiskers, lady, and more power to you! Way to fly in the face of societal norms and even biology. I salute you, and your moustache.