A new year means new bills and a new date to put on checks...

I just received the 19th txt message of the day wishing me happy new year. Sure, its sweet, until you realize it was a mass txt which is almost as touching as the penis enlargement pill emails in my spam box. Why is this even a trend? What compels you to congratulate everyone on the fact that they were able to successfully count off another 365 days and file them away as memories? Don't get me wrong, I enjoy celebrating things, I'm not trying to be negative, and I suppose successfully hurling through the solar system without smashing into the sun another year is indeed something worth celebrating, but why spam about it? What about the people that pay for individual txt messages? Why must they pay for your novel stupidity and the fact that you realized your Razr has the ability to send a txt message to more then one person at a time? Whats worse is that you taught your mother to send txts and I now received one from her this morning as well. I've sent and received random txts int he past too, and they were nice and sweet, but this New Years txting thing is just pointless. Just stop. Your txt messages are NOT inspirational, they are NOT cute, they are NOT touching, they are NOT original, and most impotently they are NOT worth neither the 10 cents it cost me to receive them or the 10 seconds it takes me to read them.

JUST STOP!

Sweet dreams kids.

PS. New York, your not helping with this.

This is whats wrong with the world...

I used to watch the morning news on Channel 11 all through high school when I would actually be awake that early. If you live in New York you may have seen, and possibly drooled over, the traffic girl Jill Nicolini. Even wearing the headset in the helicopter she always looked good. But that's not what we watch the news for right? We watch it because they tell us what we needed to know, like whether or not to take an umbrella, how long we'll be in traffic, and who our tax dollars are being used to bomb today. Well its been a few years since I've woken up early enough, and had the time to, catch the morning news and apparently that is not the only thing that's changed in the world. We've all watched morning shows, and I've appeared live on a few of them around the country for work, so I know they are not the most formal of news programs but these days not only does godawful music penetrate the speakers everywhere you turn, but today I'm looking through Digg like I always do and I find this gem of a video (keep watching, what you need to see is about halfway in):





So after watching the video I check the comments on Digg, like you do, and after siffting through comments from old perverts living with thier mothers having nothing good to say, I found comments from old perverst living with thier mothers who have links to Jill Nicolini's playboy pictures from before she became a new anchor. I won't post a direct link here, but if you want to google it, she did them under the name Jill Nikki.

What I'm trying to say is: even if our president doesn't inadvertently nuke us off the face of the Earth, we're still all going to hell. So in the words of my hero Tucker Max: "I hope they serve beer in hell."

Sweet dreams kids.

Update

FINALS ARE OVER!

I'll take the rest of this week off because I have work in Tribeca Saturday and in Long Island Sunday, but I promise I'll be back on Monday with bigger and better things. Expect more rants. A big picture post. And all that fun stuff throughout the next week.

Sweet dreams kids.

Snow may glow, but blow makes things flow.

The weather in NYC isn't very appealing and its that time of year again. The time when my theory on procrastination is comes to a screeching halt. Finals.

Here is my schedule of finals:
Mon. Dec. 17 -
10:00AM - English Lit.
3:30PM - Sociology
Wed. Dec. 19 -
3:30PM - Computer Information Systems
Thu. Dec 20 -
10:30AM - Microeconomics

Normally this wouldn't be bad at all, but this year, as an added bonus, I have to work 4 shows on Saturday and Sunday. English Lit. and Sociology are, without a doubt, my two hardest finals this semester and I won't even have the weekend to study for them. Add to that the fact that I already blew through my first day off (today) doing absolutely nothing, and intend on spending most of tomorrow finding somewhere to go to escape my housekeeper who likes to play 20 questions every time she comes over. Clearly Sunday night is shaping up to be an all-nighter. But what are you gonna do, its not like I go to college to be organized or do things smart. That would be too easy.

Hopefully the weekend at work won't be hard though. Last week was hectic. We had two photo shoots in one day in between two shows, and some guy from the Daily Show (no, not John Stewart) was apparently in the audience.

Yesterday someone told me they would be using one of my posts for an essay for one of their classes. Your plagiarizing off me? Really? Take as much offense as you want, but you have got to be so utterly dumb to copy my work that your child will grow up like this girl.

I'm hungry, and I lost my train of thought. If I come up with anything else I'll update. Till then...

Sweet dreams kids.

"I am an asshole but, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way. I share my adventures with the world." - Tucker Max

I just wrote a 5 page essay which I titled "A Future of Certain Melancholy" on how Salman Rushdie mocks the present and foreshadows the future in "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers". Exciting, I know. Non the less, the writing of this particular essay took so much out of me that I no longer feel able to write the blog entry I was so set on writing tonight. I was going to, instead, post a copy of my essay, but then I figured I'd rather not go through the process of explaining that it is my blog when my professor finds an exact copy of the paper I handed in on the internet with her god-forsaken plagiarism prevention tools. I never understood why plagerism is such a big problem. I mean, if somebody already wrote it, most likely better then me, then why should I bother writing something that has already been written? Its like re-inventing the wheel just to show that I can do it, pointless. But then again, that might just be the part of me talking that doesn't enjoy sitting for 4 hours in front of my laptop typing, editing, and revising.

What I'm trying to say is: you won't be getting anything interesting out of me tonight. So instead I'll give you homework. Yea, I give homework now. Its amazing what you could do with a little photoshoped header and a free acount from blogspot. So here is what you have to do:

Go to TuckerMax.com and read the few stories he has posted up on the website. Then come back soon when I'll have my review of his book "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" up. Finally, comment away, buy the book, and do cocaine. Just cause you can.

Sweet dreams kids.

P.S. If I didn't think Bud Light was one of the worse beers on the face of the earth this would be an absolutely perfect paragraph:
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"Today we salute you stressed out college student during exam week. As you sit in your lonely cubical in the library, doped up on Starbucks & Adderall, you think to yourself, am I ever going to need to know this stuff in life? The distractions are tempting and you have suddenly diagnosed yourself with ADD along with advanced delusionary schizophrenia with involuntary narcissistic rage, I'm sure by now you know exactly what everyone is doing because you have checked your buddy list 800 times. Christmas is just days away, and your prozac prescription will be in tomorrow. So crack open an ice cold bud light after that last exam, because for most of us, the winter break will be spent in rehab."
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Stolen from Jackie's away message, but she probably stole it from someone else too, so its all good.

Part I: Ruskiy Narod, Eto Ruskaya Brigada

Brighton Beach. I grew up spending more time there then in my own neighborhood. You have probably, at the very least, heard of it and in some way, shape, or form link it to the Russian Mafia.

Years ago my dad described Brighton as a chunk of Soviet Russia frozen in 1982 and dropped on to South Brooklyn. Fifteen, maybe ten, years ago that was very much the case. Brighton was thriving more than ever and just unpleasant enough to be romantic. It's hard for anyone outside the community to understand what can be romantic about a fat woman named Fanya, with a slight hint of a mustache, pushing you out of the way to reach for a $2.99 box of Ferrero Rocher knockoffs at Zolotoy Kluchik. The romanticism is even harder to fathom when you consider that Fanya, who violently pushed you out of the way, isn't just a bitchy customer trying to skip in line, she's the cashier, and quite possibly the owner of the very store you're in. Customer service? Try a different neighborhood, that's not how we work around here. Vulgarness, lack of service, and even dirt on the streets were all somehow, almost magically and most definitely nostalgically, charming. Much like you were guaranteed no service (in the modern American sense of the word) in a Russian store, it was also inevitable that among the pushing, the shoving, and the cornucopia of Russian curses circa 1982, you would run into your friend Igor, your Cousin Alex, or your Uncle Borya, who would then join you for a walk on the Boardwalk, bag of sunflower seeds in hand. And what walk on the Boardwalk would be complete without dinner at Tatyana or Volna to conclude the night, and of course provide an excuse for downing a 1.75L of Smirnoff among 3 people.

The 90's were a magical time in America, and Brighton was no different. It was a time of prosperity and a time of unity. Russians from all over the world would flock to Brighton Beach to have dinner and a show at National, Arbat, Primorski, or Odessa. Men in leather jackets and women in fur coats from Le Monti could be seen exiting anything from a 1986 Oldsmobile to a brand new S600 Benz and entering the same restaurant to enjoy caviar, escargot, and just about any other delicacy most people in America only dream of. It was all there, it was all plentiful, and it was all accessible. Brighton bought people together. One restaurant would have the Sisters Rose singing, or Mikhail Shufutinski down the block, Luba Uspenskaya across the street, and Gulko two blocks down. It was like the Vegas of Russian New York, local celebrities were known internationally, and you could smoke right under a no-smoking sign and still be handed an ashtray. Designer Italian brands, leather, and fur were the norm, and it was not unusual to see people wearing them while paying for their bread and milk with food stamps. Behind the stores, in the park by the Boardwalk, you could find tables occupied by old men gambling their food stamps away playing dominoes. (My own grandfather being one of them)

Being an American lost on Brighton was an unpleasant experience to say the least. Russian signs permeated every inch of the highly valued land under the above-ground subway and Russian, not English, was the default language. In this little part of America, knowing English did you no good. Knowing English on Brighton was as worthless as knowing Japanese in Ireland, it just wouldn't buy you a pelmeni. Many people, who had spent 20 years living on Brighton, still couldn't speak a word of English. Many still can't because they never needed too. The 90's was a time when the Russian community took care of its own in their own language. Everyone wanted to empower Brighton almost as much as they wanted to make money for themselves, and the only way to do that was to empower its people. Somewhere along the line, however, the desire to make money won out the battle, and Brighton Beach began its slow decline.

Today, the Brighton of the 90s is a lingering nostalgic thought memorialized in the Brighton that is today. You can still find the vulgarity, lack of service, and even the occasional fur coat on Brighton, but the inspired young businessmen which used to fill its streets have since moved on to newer BMWs, Lexus SUVs, and in many cases Bentleys. With the new cars came the new houses. Some relocated to Jersey, some to Staten Island, and many to new luxury condos, much like my own, all over Brooklyn. Brighton has gone from the place to thrive, to the place to go when you need homemade Russian food without having to cook. The restaurants are still there, and the show still goes on, but it is no longer the celebrity-making congregation it once was. Those who made their money have found new, more exciting, and decidedly more expensive alternatives to Brighton's, now tacky, array of identical restaurants. These people only go back for the nostalgia of sitting at a lavishly plated table with 100 of your family and friends watching the girls dancing to the same 90's music blaring through the speakers ten years later. Neither the streets of Brighton, nor the wooden panels of the boardwalk are filled with young entrepreneurial Russians in furs and minks looking for a good time, but are rather filled with elderly women going for a stroll with their home attendants or buying potatoes while their husbands wait in line outside the store to be served perogi by the same fat, mustached, woman who's attitude towards her customers has never changed. With the exception of a few choice boutiques, which cater to the "Novie Ruskiye" tourist crowd of Russian millionaires, and the local millionaires who still visit Brighton to buy a new watch or pair of glasses, most stores are filled with the elderly who simply prefer a Russian voice when shopping, even if that voice is as condescending as a prison guard at Rikers.

To be continued….

Its my birthday and I'll blog if I want to.

Yesterday, December 3rd, was my birthday so you didn't get a post. I just have too much going on and need these days to myself. Expect a long one tomorrow for sure since there is quite a bit building up that needs to be excreted upon your innocent minds.

Until then I'd like to corrupt your minds a little more by ruining "Hey There Delilah" for you. You know the song, its been overplayed worse then "Where'd You Go". I'll admit, its not a bad song, sweet even, until you listen to it again and realize its the stalker anthem of the year. Yes kids if aren't an over-obsessive freak that does research on your music and thus haven't already heard,Tom Higgenson of the Plain White T's is a stalker. Read for yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_There_Delilah#Inspiration_and_composition
and when your done with that check out the other 9 Worst Hit Songs of 2007. Make sure you read the descriptions for each one.