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California Wildfires

ca-wildfires
Maybe we should think about moving?

By: Billy BeerSlugger

It’s hard for me to get worked up about California wildfires.  First of all, this happens every year, there’s some massive widespread fire that threatens thousands of houses in California and always seems to happen at the close of summer ostensibly after the brush has dried up and is more susceptible to going up like a tinder box.

Not that I don’t feel for the people that have or may lose their house in these fires but seriously why don’t you just move out of harms way once and for all.  Granted you might be a little farther away from L.A. than you want but you may not have to deal with wildfires every September.

For as much shit as Californian’s and everyone else who slurps the state talks about how beautiful it is there you really don’t hear a peep from those people during the borderline natural disasters that happen every year. Between wildfires and earthquakes every year the mass media has me trying to feel bad for all these people and their Million Dollar homes who pretend to be better than me for living in California under the sun and surf…. and wildfires. Instead of focusing on the people who lost their house can I get a story about some smart people who actually moved away from wildfire alley?

You know how there’s Hurricane season?  Well this is Wildfire season for California, lets not pretend like this is a surprise development newscasters.  You knew this was coming.  Come up with some sort of early warning system for the poor souls who still desire to live next to acres of kindling so they can spray their houses down with some sort of anti-flamatory resin and get the fuck out of Dodge.

Besides, Wildfires are a part of natures cycle in that region, in fact Fire is an essential part of most wildland ecosystems.  Things become overgrown, there’s lightening or some other event that sparks a fire, shit goes up in flames and begins a rebirth period, removing dead organic material from the area and releasing nutrients from mature plants back into the soil so that new plants may take up root.

The only things that is not natural in this process is that man has taken up residence in these areas and is trying to delay the inevitable.

Or maybe nature is colluding against us like in the M. Night Shyamalan movie The Happening. Man what a terrible movie.  Talk about a guy who peaked too early.  The guys career looks like the second half of a Bell Curve.  But I still got love for you Shyamalan.  Keep making shitty movies in the Philadelphia area.

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Cell Phones and Brain Tumors

cell phone-2By: Billy BeerSlugger

The cell phone has become a necessity rather than a luxury in the last decade. I remember at the turn of the century when I thought me getting a pager was “selling out”.  I never wanted to be that plugged in or accessible to people.  Then times changed, I eventually buckled and got a cell phone then buckled again about a year ago to get the all important email/internet on the phone.

Like many of you BeerSlugger’s out there I can’t really imagine life without the cell phone now.   Telephone technology that used to be affixed to a wall has been available in your pocket now for about 15 or so years commercially.  Some 4 billion people are now or have used cell phones.

I remember when my mom got a cell phone for car emergencies in 1996 or so, back then using a cell as your main communication line was very cost prohibitive. I also remember reading a warning that came with the cell phone that stated the possible effects of the radiation emitted from the cellphone could cause, number one obviously involving the brain since you effectively hold your phone up to it.

Fast forward to today and I’ve just read a report that has me slightly concerned and has renewed an old fear about cell phones and their radiation.

A quote from the report:

Lloyd Morgan, lead author and member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society says, “Exposure to cellphone radiation is the largest human health experiment ever undertaken, without informed consent, and has some 4 billion participants enrolled. Science has shown increased risk of brain tumors from use of cellphones, as well as increased risk of eye cancer, salivary gland tumors, testicular cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and leukemia. The public must be informed.”

Sounds like pretty serious stuff.  The report also states that the Telecommunications funded studies of Cell Phone use and it’s risk of Brain Tumors was greatly underestimated.  It is said that the telecom studies left out several types of brain tumors, did not interview people who had died or who were too sick to be interviewed as well as children and young adults who seem to be at a greater risk.   That’s a complete shocker being that like most corporations, the health of their bottom line is valued more than the health of their clients. Plus, corporations misleading the general public about the safety of their product is nothing new in the U.S. or anywhere else, just ask the Pharmaceutical industry.

The report also had special warnings about the radiation given out by iPhone users so you guys better watch out.

Reading something like this, whether true or untrue, really puts things into perspective in terms of what politicians are fighting over today and what they should be fighting over.  I for one would love the government to throw a couple million towards a tried and true cell phone safety study, though that’s not going to happen when the corporations own Washington.  I’m sure the mass media will touch briefly on this story and go back to covering who the father of Michael Jacksons’ kids are or who’s going to be the contestants on Dancing with the Stars.

I try to use the speakerphone feature as much as possible on cell phones and have noticed some cell phones give me a headache or ringing in my head when placing them up to my ear. I wonder if this is somehow related to the radiation.

With this being said and dropping all this science knowledge on you, I think it is now safe to blame all the times I got really wasted and couldn’t get it up on my cell phone being in my pants too close to my gigglebits. I reserve to use this excuse in the future if I so desire even if I don’t have my phone on me. Listen sweetheart, it’s science.

ps: I made up the thing about the special warning for iPhone users in that report. You also believed it because you didn’t read the report.  Admit you cringed at the thought having to make a decision over good health or still using your iPhone.  I think most would still pick the iPhone.

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Blogging about Blogging?

By: Billy BeerSlugger

You know I love sites like LifeHacker.com that kind of scour the internet for you and present you with the best stuff.  LifeHacker specifically resides on my iGoogle page and i check out the site pretty much daily to find out a lot of (Do it Yourself) DIY type stuff or how to save money on this and general other “How to”‘s.

Now to be fair LifeHacker does come out with a lot of original content, however, most of their daily posted content seems to be of the “check out what this website wrote about” variety. So essentially LifeHacker and many other sites like it are “Blogging about Blogging”. Seems a little redundant but also seems to be working for some people/companies.

Of course it’s kind of ironic that in this post I’m blogging about blogging about blogging but we’ll try and put that aside for a minute and focus in Blogging2.

So sites like LifeHacker do serve a great purpose and provide their audience with a condensed snapshot of interesting and useful posts from other blogs thus providing you possibly with things you didn’t know about or allowing you to skip the search part of the internet experience trying to find information on a topic.

Either way though, it’s a symbiotic relationship between the blogger and the blogging. The blog with the original post is provided with traffic they wouldn’t have had through the ancillary post linking to their website. The blog that is linking to the original post is receiving search engine consideration for the post and thus expanding their internet exposure all while not really writing any original content. There’s not a loser in this equation.

However, there is something to be said about your “bread and butter” being other people’s content. Contributing a paragraph or two along with an endorsement and reaping all the rewards. Kind of like in college if your roommate got a keg and had a great party you were somehow glorified as well just for living there. You did none of the leg work but do get credit.

Anyway, I know a lot of you BeerSlugger’s out there may not be into these subjects as much as I am but it’s stuff I think about.  I feel like I’m cheating a little when I post a Youtube video because it’s not my video so I guess there’s content copying all over the blogging realm. I’m not losing sleep over it though it’s easy to go to sleep after 10 beers.

BTW: This is BeerSlugger.com’s 200th post. I’m getting drunk to celebrate.

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Shuffleboard on a Table? Dominant!

240By: Billy BeerSlugger

I recently spent the better part of a week in the Pocono’s with 11 friends to prepare for and draft my Fantasy Football squad (and get super wasted). My league has been renting out a house now since 2005 and is far and away the best way to draft your team.  Well really it’s just good to get your friends and yourself away from your girlfriends/wives for a weekend and have some good old unadulterated fun.

We have had 5 houses and this one was by far the best.  Not because it was nicer, not because it was closer to the golf course but because it had a shuffleboard table!  I cannot even begin to describe to you how dominant this game is.  No wonder old people love shuffleboard.  It is easily the best social drinking skill game out there.  Better than Darts, better than Billiards, better than (dare I say) Foosball.  It requires no athletic ability and you can play for as long as you can stand upright.

The intricacies of the game are many.  Besides sliding a disc like object down the runway and having it sit in a scoring area, there are many things you need to take into account.  Playing defense would consist of knocking your opponents disc off of a scoring area and hopefully landing in a scoring area yourself.  Defense can also be played by positioning a disc in front of another disc that you placed in a scoring area so as to obstruct it from your opponents attempts at knocking it off the board.

I was up money, I was down money but overall I had a great time and the tournaments we had got really intense.  A member of my FF league, and avid BeerSlugger.com reader, went to West Chester University and is a veteran of shuffleboard due to his tenure as a drunkard at Jake’s Bar.  This is the only bar I have run across that carries a Shuffleboard table or “Quades” as it is the nomenclature in West Chester.

Overall, a completely dominant game and something you BeerSlugger’s out there should be looking to play.

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Center City Restaurant Week

By: Billy BeerSlugger

You know this thing seems like a great idea in theory much like a lot of other ideas seem good in theory like Communism  or a Utopian society.  However, like a lot of these great ideas, when put into practice disappoint mightily.

I’m not saying that Center City Restaurant Week is a completely bad endeavor but I think on the whole you don’t get the full experience of the restaurant that you go to during that week.  The price is right $35 per person for a 3 course meal but the portions are usually much smaller than normal and there’s more of a rush to get you in and out during the predetermined seating times.   What you thought was going to be a great evening taking your significant other to a nice romantic dinner in center City for a few less bucks than you would normally spend turns into a quasi-diner experience.

You’ll see all the cheap “tourists” from the surrounding counties and Philly locals who would not normally dine in Center City strewn about the Center City Streets not knowing where they’re going.  Usually it a woman nagging their boyfriend/husband to Center City during this week with the pretense of, “You never take me anywhere”.

So here we are “tourists” in my city streets, “tourists” in restaurants and bars I frequent, smaller portions, rushed dining, inattentive service because there’s a billion people in the place and probably a pissed off server who just got $5 on a $115 check.

Trust me, I’ve worked a few Restaurant Weeks in my time and it is great in theory bad in practice.  Now that’s not to say you can’t have a good time of it.  You may be happy just hanging out eating and drinking in Philly and enjoying the ambiance and swankiness of a Steven Starr restaurant, if that’s the case so be it.  All I’m saying is wait an extra week, spend the extra $30 and get the real experience of the restaurant you want to go to because it’s not the same during  Tourist Restaurant Week.

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guidessay.com

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Anne Heche – The BeerSlugger Take

By: Billy BeerSlugger

So I didn’t actually see Anne Heche on Letterman when she bashed her ex-husband but I think it’s kind of funny.  As you’ll see in the video, she berates her ex-husband for essentially not doing anything with his life or being a Soccer coach or something.  Apparently he still wants her to hang out together with him and  or their child which I see as a mildly admirable thing to do but then again I wasn’t in the relationship and I have no idea what went on there.

I’m a little on the fence about Anne Heche, she was OK in a couple movies, then she started eating Ellen Degeneres’ box for awhile, then she went from vagitarian back to a hearty meat diet as evidenced by her marriage to the guy she’s talking about.  I’m going to guess she was on Letterman to promote Hung which is probably my favorite  show of the summer and hopefully keeps going.

Anyway, I don’t know who would go on national TV to say ill of the father of their child but apparently Anne had no problem doing it.  At the end of the video Letterman asks Anne what her ex-husband does and Heche replies something to the effect of going to the mailbox and open up checks that she sends him.

I always think it’s rather amusing when women have to pony up the palimony (the opposite of alimony).  A successful woman having to send the ex-husband checks instead of the of the husband having to send the ex-wife checks. Women are always so gung ho about “getting half” and getting “their money” that it seems ironic when it works the other way.

So Anne Heche plays a bitch ex-wife in the HBO series Hung and it seems she may be a bitch in real life as well but I think the moral of this story is to watch Thomas Jane as a gigolo and some brief female nudity during sex scenes.

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Subjectivity On Infidelity

By: Billy BeerSlugger

Now there have been countless stories in the news about this guy cheating on his wife with that girl.  Stories of infidelity about politicians, sports stars, coaches, teachers, CEO’s and every other walk of life. Lately I’ve been following the Rick Pitino sex scandal from afar. All I know is that he admitted on cheating on his wife with a woman and she was allegedly trying to blackmail him.  But that’s neither here nor there.

You look at the lot of these cases whether in court or portrayed in the media and 99% of them paint the guy in a negative light.  Donald Trump, Frank Gifford, Peter Cook/Kristy Brinkley, Bill Clinton, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Rudy Giuliani, Senator Larry Craig, Jim McGreevy, Eliot Spitzer, Hugh Grant, Jude Law, Usher, Kobe Bryant and the list goes on and on and on. I think one thing is for sure that men (and women) will continue to cheat on their significant others.

That being said, there’s two oddly peculiar cases surrounding cheating that women rarely scoff at. David Beckham and Brad Pitt are two people who (allegedly) cheated on their spouses yet received little to no harm to their careers because of it.  Brad Pitt broke it off with wife Jennifer Aniston to get with Angelina Jolie and David Beckham seems to have been in the news a couple of times for banging random girls.

I’m not sure if these two stars just have great PR teams and were able to quell the backlash or if women generally just did not care that these two guys cheated.  Not to say that the stories were not covered but not in the negativity and public outcry of say a Bill Clinton, Peter Cook or Eliot Spitzer.  Granted some of the political figures involved in sex scandals are makers of public policy and should be held to a higher standard but are not they all human.

Now I’m not advocating cheating or anything of the like, all I’m saying is that it’s weird that if you talk to a girl about Peter Cook who cheated on Kristie Brinkley most will say they hate the guy and think he’s an asshole for cheating on his wife but if you ask the ask the same girl about Brad Pitt they’ll say he’s the hottest man alive and leave out the part that he (allegedly) cheated on Jennifer Anniston.  Is Brad Pitt or David Beckham or any other so called “sexiest man alive” held to a lower standard on the fidelity part of their relationships than the rest of us mortal men?  Does being insanely hot get you a pass in some instances?  I know hot women get passes all the time but does this happen for men too?  I’ll bring this point up to women and some say they don’t care if he cheated that they still love Brad Pitt.

I’d like to hear some comments from men and women on this matter.  Given the same level of marital indiscretion from two men, one being average looking and the other being or Brad Pitt status, does the average looking one receive more heat than the really good looking one? From a mass media standpoint and from a woman’s opinion standpoint?

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Breast Tattoo’s: Just Stop It

breast-tattoos-0708-lgBy: Billy BeerSlugger

I’ve been a fan of the female breast all my life.  From the time I was an infant to this very second, there has not been a day gone by that I have not thought about the abundant beauty that a woman’s opulent chubbies can bring.

It is in men’s DNA to find these womanly chest appendages appealing in nature. Large breasts are supposed to note a higher fertility rate and thus a reason why we men (as animals) are so attracted to them even subconsciously.

Now I’m all for art and it should be taught in schools and all that and I’m all for a womans right to do what they will with their bodies whether it’s abortion or prostitution.  However, do we really need to deface one of the greatest parts of the female body with a tattoo?

I’m not really anti-tattoo even though I myself probably will never get one but can’t women just stick to the tramp-stamp on the back or the shoulder tattoo?  I really don’t care where the tattoo is as long as it’s not on your breast.

The tattoo may seem like a great idea at the time but breasts do tend to sag as you get older.  That rose you got on your left breast may turn into a really really long-stem rose by the time you’re 40, and no one wants to see that.

I’m walking down Chestnut St. today getting lunch and I see a early to mid 30’s lady wearing business attire walking toward me and I’m checking her out then as I get closer she’s got the Eve paw print tattoo on both breasts and I am immediately turned off.  Just another example of perfectly good breasts being ruined by a naive 20 something trying to piss off her dad or trying to show some individuality.  Congratulations, you’ve succeeded in your efforts to look like a skank.

So this is my public service announcement for breast tattoo’s, just don’t do it.

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Zach Galifinakis

By: Billy BeerSlugger

Zach Galifinakis has been on my radar for awhile, ever since the movie Out Cold though I’m a real fan of his deadpan standup routines with or without the piano.  He has a penchant for audience interaction and a really unorthodox routine but I think it’s part of his uniqueness that makes him funny.  You may have seen him in The Hangover which was pretty much the best roadtrip/bachelor party movie ever.

I wish I could spout out some more bullshit to blow your skirt up about this guy but I and get you to Youtube like 20 video’s to laugh your ass of to but I’ll give you one and you can take it from there.

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You’re a Douche Bag: There’s an App for That!

A-man-with-a-Carling-iPin-002
Hey everyone, look how much of a d-bag I can be!

By: Billy BeerSlugger

There are some people who just went absolutely crazy for the iPhone when it came out, waiting in line and camping out at Apple Stores like they were releasing the newest installment of the Star Wars franchise.  I get some of the hype over the I Phone, from what I gather it’s one of the better Smart phones released to date and like many other smart phones it keeps you in touch with your email and microblogging apps like Twitter.

However, I feel like it’s a real shame to waste all that shiny new motion sensing, finger sliding, file sharing technology on various degrees of douchebaggery.  It’s not particularly the iPhone I have a problem but the kind of hop-on-the-bandwagon, non trendsetting, generally generic jerk off that i see abusing the technology at bars and other functions.

There’s something about a guy at a bar fake chugging a beer from his iPhone Carling iPint App or two douchebag iPhone buddies simulating light saber fighting with that App that makes me want to grab these grand trinkets of technology and super smash them on the floor, finishing with a Jim Belushi “Sorry” from Animal House.

Seriously, there’s already enough ways that technology is moving human interaction more toward the digital/internet side, we don’t need the topic of conversation at the bar to be what you can do on your iPhone or the iFart or SimStapler Apps you just downloaded.  What ever happened to good old conversation about shit that matters; shit that doesn’t involve your iPhone or iApps because guess what, I don’t give a fuck what bullshit you can pull of besides making a phone call. It just makes you look like a retard for substituting activities and conversation with your iPhone rather than general human interaction.

Here’s my latest and greatest invention, the new iFuck App.  It’s an application which allows promiscuous Men and Women to make sexual advances via a fingerswipe at the bar.  One finger flick and your Fake Name, phone number and a picture of your genitals are sent over to that girl you’ve got your eyes on across the bar.  She can either accept your invitation to go home and iFuck you or deny your invitation which takes the embarrassment of actually having to walk up to a girl to and have a conversation before getting shot down. I think it will be bigger than the CowToss App.

But seriously, I saw a Spiderman movie once and some old guy said with great power comes great responsibility.  Don’t be a d-bag and use your powerful iPhone to drink fake beer, make fart noises or fake staple something, be responsible and stick to productivity enhancing Apps.

BTW: I can down a pint of real beer faster than you can drink your iPint. How do you like those iApples fucko?