Saturday, December 28, 2002 at 12:30:45 (EST)
We're back! But leave me alone. We made it back from Paris, despite the efforts of the Montreal Gestapo to keep up bagless, flightless, and knitting-needleless. A full report will follow, but I'm too jet-lagged to do anything but lie around and talk to the cats. For now: Paris rocks but it ain't no Brooklyn! Posted By Jimmy Legs
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	Friday, December 20, 2002 at 10:36:27 (EST)
There but for the grace of blog go I This may be my last post for a while. We are about to depart to the airport on our holiday to Paris. I'm not taking my laptop, nor am I to stop at any cyber cafes while in the historic city. B has this nutty idea I spend too much time behind computers. Huh. B, by the way, is doing better. She visited the hospital, but found that her insurance would not cover the injury treatment because, get this, it wasn't her fault. That's right, only if she had willingly flung her body at the car could she receive affordable (barely) medical care. So she went home. Apparently directly after leaving the hospital, she felt much better. Cure enough. However, we're pushing on with our plan and our nonrefundable tickets. Last night we dined at A Table with A, S, B, and Jimmy-J, who actually get his own name here because I know too many other guys named J. I had the Gigot D'Agneau, which I had never had before. I've had lamb, I guess, in gyros, but who really knows what that big slab o'meat is? We had a lively discussion about whether believing in god is a waste of time or not, which was in some ways more an etymology debate (does 'without' mean 'lacking' or 'outside of'?) I'm still an atheist, although I realized I became one because I thought it would mean I'd never have to have this god discussion again. But it seems it only spurs the agnostics on further. Then we retired to A&S's place where we were forced by Jimmy-J to reenact the tradition he started when he still lived here: the Song Club. Each of us had to take the guitar and play a 'new' song for everybody else. S and A played totally new songs, while the rest of us wimped out and played stuff previously written. S is the master at this. I don't think anybody is better at throwing together some chords and some on-the-spot lyrics that actually work. We gotta find a way to get him to do that more often. Au revoir mes chouettes! With any luck, Bush will flip out and start a war while we're gone, so we'll have to be sequestered at the American Embassy and I won't have to go back to work. Posted By Jimmy Legs
	The ghost town of about.com weighs in on atheism
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	Thursday, December 19, 2002 at 11:02:27 (EST)
To Pairs! If we don't kill ourselves first We're going to Paris, but we're both doing our best to make the trip as difficult as possible. We got cheap-ass Priceline tickets to Paris for the next week, and even rented an apartment for the duration so we don't have to blow money at overpriced hotels or suffer in squalid curfew-laden hostels. We've borrowed a bunch of books about Paris, as well as phrasebooks and dictionaries, so we're sort of ready to communicate with the populace. I've been cruising travel newsgroups to see how best not to annoy the French. We've been eating in French restaurants to get used to the cuisine; we've eaten snails twice in the last few weeks. We're totally ready. The trip is pristine. But we keep fucking ourselves up. As you may recall, I got wasted over the weekend and have since been experiencing a mild yet persistent stomach distress that whispers You screwed up your guts forever! in my ear. I have this feeling that if I eat anything mildly dubious, I will hurl with all the fury of a cross Lizze Grubman. And last night ... B got hit by a car. This one's a doozy. She was walking near Ashland Place when she was grazed by a tight-turning late-model automobile. She pleads shock and adrenaline as the reasons she did not get the license plate or indeed, stop walking. She was mere blocks form her home at the time, but continued on to her destination, a bar in the Lower East Side. She managed to make it there and proceeded to booze it up to quell the pain a bit. I'm not really sure how long you can keep claiming 'shock' in a matter like this. Everybody's first reaction to this has been "Why the hell didn't you go to the hospital?!" This remains a mystery to me as well. B's reluctance to see a doctor might be related to last time she went to the doctor, after I (accidentally and not on purpose) dropped a big fence post on her foot. We sat around for hours and then they took x-rays and prodded her foot a lot, only to conclude that nothing was broken, so nothing could be done. They didn't even give her any codeine. So B's plan now is to wait until we get to Paris, and then see a doctor there. Thanks to the beauty (and logic and common sense and basic compassion for human beings on this planet) of socialized medicine, she can get a professional opinion on the injury. If this isn't an argument for the US the get off its ass on public healthcare, I don't know what is. There's also probably a lesson in here about the proper steps when you do get hit by a car, but B's already getting enough lecturing about this. So we're going to Paris: Barfy & Limpy. Wait til the French find out I'm a Jew, too. They're gonna love us! Posted By Jimmy Legs
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	Tuesday, December 17, 2002 at 11:10:56 (EST)
I'm just a page of hyperlinks They played the episode of Seinfeld the other night called "The Money." I was reminded that it's this episode that spawned the name of this site. This is fascinating I'm sure to all of you. But I has recently come to my attention that there is, indeed, a difference between a 'blog' and an 'eDiary'. Apparently, half the stuff I've been putting up here does not pass muster for some blogiticians, as the content is too 'inward'. They claim that the first blogs were specifically supposed to be lists of links to interesting websites, and nothing more. If that's the case, then, I started my first blog in 1995. There's no way a list of links could become a phenomenon. From the get-go, Internet 'experts' were telling everyone, "Build a web page but for god's sake, don't just make it a list of links to other sites! Content! Content! Content!" Anyway, we know the deal. Even a page of links needs a little commentary to give things context. But I have been feeling that I'm not providing enough linkage to the other sites. So expect to see more links to stuff. Which reminds me, I should probably put a list of blogs I read often up here. What's the protocol there? Should I ask permission or should I just do it? I'll probably just do it; my blog is but a small tide pool in the vast sea that is the Internet. Posted By Jimmy Legs
	Read the script to the episode that started this all
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	Monday, December 16, 2002 at 13:02:44 (EST)
In which I am disappointed and hungover So no strike, eh? Most people are outwardly glad, I'm sure, but I believe beneath it, everybody kinda wanted the strike to happen. Just a little bit. Chaos is fun, for a while. But as usual, the more boring option won out. With three minutes to go, they invalidated the whole "Strike Countdown" clock and yet they still haven't called off the possibility of a strike. Now everybody who's in an office is vaguely wondering if they'll be able to get home tonight. But they will. There's not gonna be a strike. I wanna find out how much money has been blown by the City and private companies in preparation for the strike. All the shuttle buses, extra ferries, and carpooling, not to mention bizarre parking and traffic laws ... all gone to waste. And will the companies tapped for service in the event of a strike get their promised payment? I gottta assume they will. I wonder if there won't be further lawsuits to try to recoup some of the dough. On a more personal note, I couldn't update this site yesterday, as I was flat-out-fucked hungover from J's holiday party. I thought it was his birthday so I baked cookie burgers, the cookie recipe I've been making since I was in elementary school. J had made this punch that he described as "Like a Cosmo, but with some ginger ale." I didn't know many people at the party, so I jumped in with both feet. What the hell was I thinking? I had been at A's house previously, finishing off his Jim Beam. If I had stuck to Beam at the party I would have been fine, probably. The weird thing was I only drank two glasses of punch, and then something else (here my memory gets a little cloudy). I made it home, traversing two train lines, with no problems. I got my contacts out with little difficulty, and went to bed. Sometime during the night the sugar-laced alcohol in my system did what it always does: makes me sick as a sick fucking dog. My body, when in panic mode, becomes quite irrational. It starts throwing up everything it can get its hands on. Even when there was nothing but stomach acid (note to body: this is SUPPOSED to be there) in my gullet, it was throwing that up, too. Barf, barf, barf. For a while there, my body would warn me when I was about to hurl by sending a volley of hiccups up before the ralphing ensued (B claimed at this point she was ready to kill me if only to get a few minutes of peace from my wretchedness). The good news is that I had absolutely no other symptoms, just the nausea/barfing thing. So it wasn't as bad as my Worst Hangover Ever, which was brought on by a night of blender drinks, also heavy on the sugar dosage. But dammit, those drinks go down so easy! I finally figured out that if I could time a barfing session right, I could fall asleep and maybe give my body some time to get its act together. Around 5:30 PM I was successful. When I woke up an hour later, I was basically fine, except for a slight headache, no doubt due to dehydration. Go figure. The point is, if you ever see me at a social function, and I look like I might even remotely be thinking about imbibing some alcoholic drink that has any sugar in it whatsoever, for god's sake, slap me upside the head and give me some whiskey. Posted By Jimmy Legs
	Here's some good advice
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