Pithy Title Here

Confession: I love the NFL. It's a perfect sport... a short season where every game is meaningful, where macho players sooner or later are felled by injury or failure, where nearly every game can turn on one great play. The funny thing, though, is that football has become much better to watch at home than in the stadium. Seeing a game in person is always fun, but you're often surrounded by strange drunken louts. At home, you can be around drunken louts you know, which is always a better option. Plus, at home the food/beer is much cheaper and there's no traffic to fight. Also: TV has football covered fantastically. Every camera angle in HD makes you feel like you've got a seat in every part of the stadium. And, with DVR , you can decide when you want a reply. The problem, friends, is a great deal of the announcers just plain stink. I'm not talking about the loudmouth studio shows. It goes without saying those are a waste of your time. I mean what we have to endure d...

On Sept. 11, 2001, my train from Trenton, NJ to New York City was running early. I could barely believe it. I was in Penn Station around 8 a.m. and I walked into my office at 5 th Ave. and 26 th St. at about 8:20 a.m. When I crossed 6 th Ave. on my walk, I did my usual look down the street, my only view of the Twin Towers from Manhattan every day. It was a beautiful day. Sometime around 4 p.m., when my very-delayed train got back to Trenton, the board with the train schedule was flashing with an advisory that PATH service was suspended “due to fire at World Trade Center.” Oh, if it had only been a fire… I can remember a lot of things about that day. I remember standing on 6 th Ave. at about 9 a.m. with hundreds of others just staring in disbelief. I remember making a decision with my coworkers to leave the apartment we were in watching events unfold and walk to the Hudson River as there was nothing to blow up at the River. I remember someone announcing to a boat-full of pa...

I had been pretty psyched all week for Bumbershoot . And, for once, it was something that lived up to the hype. Now, I've been to my share of outdoor concert festivals. But this one was different. First, most don't take place around a well-known landmark. Bumbershoot is set up in the Seattle Center, which, to all of you from outside the Puget Sound area, means the Space Needle. From many of the event's stages, you have a full view of the Space Needle. Which is cool. A few other things that make this unique: Re-entry privileges. I watched two bands this afternoon (more on that in a bit), got my ticket and hand stamped, and went home. Where I ate my food and drank my beer. Granted, if I didn't live a stone's throw from the Seattle Center, I couldn't have done this, but it made a gigantic difference. Instead of spending a day on my feet eating overpriced greasy food, I was able to go home and sit on a real couch in between bands I wanted to see. You can bring stu...

No surprise here but in the six months I've had my Kindle, I hear the occasional argument of "Oh, well, I read real books," as though there is an intellectual preference to do so. You and I might both read Anna Karenina , in other words, but since you read a "real" book and I read it on my Kindle, somehow, your experience is superior to mine. This sort of thing has to stop. Unless Tolstoy intended for you to be taken by the sheer weight of the volume (dear lord, it is a bit long, no?), who cares how you read it? And fine, you read a "real" book. Let me go find someone who read a "real" copy of the book. In Cyrillic. Then, where are you, huh? The point is nowadays we all have different ways of consuming media. Is one so far superior to another? This is hardly a new issue. I spent many a day in high school in ridiculous conversations that went like this: Some guy: What are you listening to? Me: Smashing Pumpkins. Some guy: What album? Me: Siam...