Procrastinet

Samuel Gompers

filed under: Idle Chatter

Dan and I scored a boys' night on Wednesday (thanks, girls), and ended up at his local bar/restaurant. It was, it turned out, Trivia Night. We had played trivia nights before, and done okay. And we were doing okay with this one, taking the lead with 12 points (2nd place had 11 and 3rd place had 9) at the break.

We had moved to the bar to hear better, but the sound system was terrible everywhere and the host was barely audible. When he began the recap, the guy sitting next to us started grumbling about the noise. He was a gigantic fellow with a pony tail who looked just like wrestling's Chris Jericho:

So the host is re-capping and this guy is grumbling, in one of those rock-grinder kind of voices. "What the hell is this guy talking about?" he's saying, to anyone who will listen. Finally, I leaned past Dan to explain what was going on. "Oh," says Chris Jericho, and lapses into a sullen silence.

Round Four starts, and it's a Potpourri round. The third question is "Who founded the American Federation of Labor, also known as the AFL?"

Dan and I, obviously, have no idea at all. Chris Jericho starts mumbling something. Dan says "what's that?"

And Chris Jericho leans over, puts one hand next to his mouth, and says "Samuel Gompers."

He was right. It was, in fact, Samuel Gompers. We flipped out.

So Chris Jericho (I don't *think* it was actually Chris Jericho, for the record) becomes an honorary member of Team Omar, and also correctly identifies the purchase price of Atlantic in Monopoly ($260, for those playing at home). Very nice, very bright guy, not into TV so no help in naming the members of the A-Team. Ah, well, everybody has their specialities. Apparently, Chris Jericho's is the early American labor movement.

Anyway, this is what happened, thanks to our oddball team of three:

SO proud.

I Has A Tornadoz

filed under: Idle Chatter

This morning Max pottered into the room at around 4 a.m. and tried to get me to get up and play with him. I was only half awake, and didn't notice that he was only half awake, which he proved by peeing half into the toilet and half on my toes. While I was likewise relieving myself (with, hopefully, better aim), he trudged into the living room and flopped on the couch. I went and lay down with him, and after a few minutes he decided the couch was too crowded and lay down on the floor instead. Fine by me. And we both knocked out cold again.

Around 5:45am I was awakened by a truly stupendous clap of thunder, which sounded like it was extremely nearby. You know how thunder in the distance is all rumbly and bass-heavy, whereas thunder up close is more like a crack? Yeah, like that. It sounded like God's front window just got a baseball through it. There were more to follow, strobing through the windows and shaking the panes with more thunder.

Huh, I thought, and went back to sleep. Max slept through it.

Turns out, there was either an actual tornado or at least "tornado-like winds" within a couple dozen blocks of us. Knocked over trees, ripped off some roofs, and dropped 3.5 inches of rain in a half hour, thereby flooding not only our basement (predictable, really) but the entire New York City subway system.

[photo ganked from Flickr user tmbg37]

Lisa, who left for work before I was even awake again, called to report that the F train was not running. I debated various ways to get to work, and eventually decided to walk. It's a five mile walk, but I've just been reading Bill Bryson's A Walk In The Woods so that seemed like nothing special.

I wasn't the only one with that idea:

I brought a change of clothes, which is good, because the heat was climbing towards 90 with 100% humidity, so I might as well have been taking a schvitz and my t-shirt was soon soaked through.

After an hour of walking, somewhere around the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, I started to feel the distance. Here's where I was headed, which looked very far away:

I made it in 80 minutes total, door-to-door (deducting 10 minutes for Max's drop off at daycare and requisite bagel stop at the Perch Cafe), which amounts to five 16-minute miles. With nothing to compare it against, I've decided that's not too shabby.

Not a bad way to break up the routine of the work week, all in all, but there's still something unsettling about a surprise dawn tornado-spewing thunderstorm cropping up over Brooklyn.