New York governor Eliot "The Hooker Booker" Spitzer has resigned his post amid a scandal that involves him paying thousands of dollars to several prostitutes for their services. Spitzer claims he didn't inhale.
Lieutenant governor David Paterson will become the state's first black governor and only the third in the nation since Reconstruction. He is legally blind. So much for a vision for the future.
More to come...
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
How I Bought My Ticket to Hell
I have a few theories about exactly when and where I actually bought my ticket to Hell. Any reasonable and sound person who believes in the supernatural could point to a wide array of things I’ve done in my life to explain my eventual, assured, eternal damnation.
I wasn’t the kind of kid that pulled the legs off spiders or burned ants with magnifying glasses. And I’m not the kind of adult who practices patently criminal pastimes outside the occasional traffic infraction, as evidenced by the summons recently found in my mailbox which featured a few snapshots of my Toyota Prius driving through what was seemingly a red traffic signal. The evidence, including close-ups of my license plate and an actual DNA sample left at the scene, made it difficult for me to argue it wasn’t me driving. Damn revolutionary imaging technology. But the $70 I spent to make that indiscretion go away is nothing compared to what I have to look forward to.
It’s not that I really went out of my way to assure myself a blistering infinity. My life has simply been filled with decisions that needed to be made and hunger that needed to be addressed. Who could blame someone for being decisive and sticking to their guns?
The first such instance was when I became newly-minted intern for iconic local rock station WBAB on Long Island – the youngest on the roster, in fact. I was proud of my unpaid position and saw it as the perfect excuse to leave my family behind on Rosh Hashana, the biggest of the varied Jewish holidays where families gather to feast on bland food and celebrate collective self-loathing and misery.
As it happened, legendary Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was scheduled to visit WBAB that very day. It’s not so much that I wanted to meet Sambora, but he was my meal ticket to teenage popularity and possible sex with a really hot girl.
Weeks prior to the Sambora Incident, after years of what can only be classified as passive stalking, I finally summoned the courage to convince my friend Brian Clermont to ask out the hot girl from the music booth at the Commack Flea Market for me. When she said yes, I knew I needed to impress. This was, after all, the most sought after girl in all of Commack. Her mane of tall, stiff 80s hair represented the Holy Grail for all male flea market shoppers within a 10-mile radius. Long story short, I told her I was a bigwig with a local music outfit known as the biggest rock radio station on Long Island and promised I’d bring her to meet then next rock star that came through the doors. How can I help it if Sambora was a Goy with no respect for my predicament or my religion? What choice did I have?
More recently, I’ve become acutely aware of my religious heritage. I’m relatively certain that in my beloved town of Loganville, there are more people who have ridden in an actual space shuttle than have drawn a shamus across a line of Hebrew text in a Torah. Now, I define this next issue more as self-preservation than denial of heritage, but eight months into my Bible Belt residency none of my neighbors knows that I’m Jewish yet. Not that I’ve given them any real clues.
For instance, I would bet the house (the one I risked my life to wrap in Christmas lights) that I was the only Jew in town climbing across the roof to ensure that Santa could easily locate us when it came time to pony up with the presents. But that was only after I went with the family to a tree farm, saw in hand, to physically cut down the perfect pine tree so we could put it in our living room and decorate it with all sorts of non-Jewish bric-a-brac.
But the worst of all offenses may be when I attended a pig roast one Yom Kippur, the holiest of all High days in the Jewish faith. Yom Kippur is the Jewish equivalent of confession, only you don’t actually confess your sins to anyone; instead you atone through the majesty of starvation while sitting in a crowded temple all day with a bunch of other starving Semites. When the hunger hallucinations begin, the Rabbi might begin to take the shape of a raw porterhouse steak with legs, like on Tom and Jerry. In the hours before sundown, when you are legally allowed to eat again, delirium has set in, making matzo seem like a viable food option. But I digress….
One fateful year, when I was about 20 years old, my friend Tony was attending college and invited me to the aforementioned pig roast at a frat house. Being a passive zealot, I failed to realize that the day of that particular non-kosher pig’s reckoning happened to be the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Considering I had already paid my $20 (non-refundable for those of you keeping score), there was no way I wasn’t going to attend. So as my family wallowed in self-loathing after paying ten times as much for temple tickets, I ate pork directly off a swine carcass on a spit.
At this point it’s all academic for me. If sex, drugs and rock and roll aren’t enough to make me Mr. Applegate’s new Lola, turning a blind eye toward my religion is sure to do the trick.
But religion has a funny way of getting even. Case in point: the flea market girl never answered my calls again after Richie Sambora outed me as an unpaid member of the hangers-on club of Long Island; it wasn’t until after the Christmas lights were hung that I realized only about half the strands worked; and I got food poisoning from the undercooked fraternity pig.
So maybe Hell is really delivered in small doses immediately following religious infractions. Not that it matters. In my eight months here the only religious practice I’ve followed is yelling “Jesus Christ” and flipping the bird to what have to collectively be the worst drivers in the world.
I wasn’t the kind of kid that pulled the legs off spiders or burned ants with magnifying glasses. And I’m not the kind of adult who practices patently criminal pastimes outside the occasional traffic infraction, as evidenced by the summons recently found in my mailbox which featured a few snapshots of my Toyota Prius driving through what was seemingly a red traffic signal. The evidence, including close-ups of my license plate and an actual DNA sample left at the scene, made it difficult for me to argue it wasn’t me driving. Damn revolutionary imaging technology. But the $70 I spent to make that indiscretion go away is nothing compared to what I have to look forward to.
It’s not that I really went out of my way to assure myself a blistering infinity. My life has simply been filled with decisions that needed to be made and hunger that needed to be addressed. Who could blame someone for being decisive and sticking to their guns?
The first such instance was when I became newly-minted intern for iconic local rock station WBAB on Long Island – the youngest on the roster, in fact. I was proud of my unpaid position and saw it as the perfect excuse to leave my family behind on Rosh Hashana, the biggest of the varied Jewish holidays where families gather to feast on bland food and celebrate collective self-loathing and misery.
As it happened, legendary Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was scheduled to visit WBAB that very day. It’s not so much that I wanted to meet Sambora, but he was my meal ticket to teenage popularity and possible sex with a really hot girl.
Weeks prior to the Sambora Incident, after years of what can only be classified as passive stalking, I finally summoned the courage to convince my friend Brian Clermont to ask out the hot girl from the music booth at the Commack Flea Market for me. When she said yes, I knew I needed to impress. This was, after all, the most sought after girl in all of Commack. Her mane of tall, stiff 80s hair represented the Holy Grail for all male flea market shoppers within a 10-mile radius. Long story short, I told her I was a bigwig with a local music outfit known as the biggest rock radio station on Long Island and promised I’d bring her to meet then next rock star that came through the doors. How can I help it if Sambora was a Goy with no respect for my predicament or my religion? What choice did I have?
More recently, I’ve become acutely aware of my religious heritage. I’m relatively certain that in my beloved town of Loganville, there are more people who have ridden in an actual space shuttle than have drawn a shamus across a line of Hebrew text in a Torah. Now, I define this next issue more as self-preservation than denial of heritage, but eight months into my Bible Belt residency none of my neighbors knows that I’m Jewish yet. Not that I’ve given them any real clues.
For instance, I would bet the house (the one I risked my life to wrap in Christmas lights) that I was the only Jew in town climbing across the roof to ensure that Santa could easily locate us when it came time to pony up with the presents. But that was only after I went with the family to a tree farm, saw in hand, to physically cut down the perfect pine tree so we could put it in our living room and decorate it with all sorts of non-Jewish bric-a-brac.
But the worst of all offenses may be when I attended a pig roast one Yom Kippur, the holiest of all High days in the Jewish faith. Yom Kippur is the Jewish equivalent of confession, only you don’t actually confess your sins to anyone; instead you atone through the majesty of starvation while sitting in a crowded temple all day with a bunch of other starving Semites. When the hunger hallucinations begin, the Rabbi might begin to take the shape of a raw porterhouse steak with legs, like on Tom and Jerry. In the hours before sundown, when you are legally allowed to eat again, delirium has set in, making matzo seem like a viable food option. But I digress….
One fateful year, when I was about 20 years old, my friend Tony was attending college and invited me to the aforementioned pig roast at a frat house. Being a passive zealot, I failed to realize that the day of that particular non-kosher pig’s reckoning happened to be the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Considering I had already paid my $20 (non-refundable for those of you keeping score), there was no way I wasn’t going to attend. So as my family wallowed in self-loathing after paying ten times as much for temple tickets, I ate pork directly off a swine carcass on a spit.
At this point it’s all academic for me. If sex, drugs and rock and roll aren’t enough to make me Mr. Applegate’s new Lola, turning a blind eye toward my religion is sure to do the trick.
But religion has a funny way of getting even. Case in point: the flea market girl never answered my calls again after Richie Sambora outed me as an unpaid member of the hangers-on club of Long Island; it wasn’t until after the Christmas lights were hung that I realized only about half the strands worked; and I got food poisoning from the undercooked fraternity pig.
So maybe Hell is really delivered in small doses immediately following religious infractions. Not that it matters. In my eight months here the only religious practice I’ve followed is yelling “Jesus Christ” and flipping the bird to what have to collectively be the worst drivers in the world.
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