Filed Under: Golf Balls>The Zen of Collecting

To catch golf balls in the wild (I use 'catch' figuratively; I recommend that you wait until they are on the ground), first you have to be smarter than they are. Golf balls in the wild are wary, in tune to their environment and ruthless. Humans are, for the most part, complacent, out of touch with nature, and lazy. That is why golf balls find it so easy to avoid capture and roam free for years.

I have made it my life's goal to find these feral golf balls, capture them, clean them up and find them good homes. I can tell you that there are thousands of them out there. I know because Shirley and I have thousands of them temporarily living in our home as we try to find them loving homes.

The best place to find lost golf balls is, duhhhhhh!!!!!...the golf course. It is inadvisable, however, to capture a golf ball that is still in play. My advise is, when on the course, determine which way the tee is. Look that way and if you see little guys holding clubs or little golf carts zipping around, don't repatriate any golf balls that you find. Hide in the bushes (so as not to scare away the truly lost golf balls) until the golfers have gone past and then start your search.

Filed Under: Natural Disasters>Stormageddon 2010

Just two weeks after barely surviving the great Snowurricane of 2010, Shirley and I are, once again, huddled on the floor, watching House and shivering with fear as the elements howl outside the window. Foolishly, we ventured out earlier. We wanted one last Pizza Hut meal. We almost hit a downed tree on the Saw Mill Parkway  less than a mile from our apartment and things only got worse from there. It seemed that almost every street in Yonkers, Ardsley and Hartsdale was blocked with either downed trees or power lines. Driving down Central Avenue we heard an explosion and saw a shower of sparks falling from a pole. Either lightning had just struck or the wire exploded, we don't know which and we don't care. We got the hell out of there. No sense calling 911. We tried several times and it was always busy.

Our advice: order Dominos and have them deliver. Stay home, don't go out. Watch any old movies you have and pray that Snowmageddon blows itself out overnight.

Filed Under: Day 2>SOS

Report 2 from the maw of the snowurricane.

We run low on food....low on water...we can communicate now only with grunts and groans through parched lips and swollen tongues. When will help come? Before the battery of our iPhone died, we managed to spend a last plea for help to the Fusconnors.

When will they come? Dios mio! When will they come?

At least we still have our parking spot...

Filed Under: Natural Disasters>Snowurricane of 2010

Greetings from the bowels of the great snowurricane of 2010 (snowurricane is a registered trademark of Freshie O'Fusco and cannot be used with out her expressed consent). One thing that can be said for snowurricanes is that they give you plenty of time for comtemplative pursuits like blogging.

Snowurricanes wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for all the darned snow. It piles up everywhere. On the sidewalks, on the lawns, in the trees and especially on the streets. Snowurricanes turn that which we normally take for granted: parking spaces, into solid gold.

Shirley and I have been hunkered down with our stockpile of food and water, not daring to move. Our rifles are locked and loaded, we peer suspiciously over the window sills from time to time, not because of the dangerous weather conditions but because we are in mortal fear of losing our parking space.

It looks like we might be trapped in the house until the spring. Please send help!

Filed Under: Big Bang Theory>Avatar

First, let me say that I've got no beef with the Na'avi. The Na'avi prove that you can never be too thin, too tall or too blue. The Na'avi also make me realize how much I miss my prehensile tail. I highly recommend that everyone go see this movie on the biggest possible 3D screen (preferably IMAX).

But I do have a beef with Hollywood; Hollywood has never seen a movie that couldn't be improved with a couple dozen explosions. I guess I have been holding on to all this resentment since 2000 when I saw the movie Vertical Limit, one of the stupidest movies of all time. The central conceit of this movie is that a party of climbers have to rescue their friends who fell into a crevasse on K2. The first thing the rescuers think to bring is not rope, medical supplies or warm clothes. It's nitroglycerin. You know; the explosive liquid used for construction and demolition. This, of course, is just a cheap Hollywood excuse to blow things up in a story that has no need for explosions. Unfortunately, there are plenty of stories that don't need or benefit from explosions but Hollywood is so fixated on delivering maximum bang for the buck that they dare not skimp in the explosion department. The recent Sherlock Holmes remake with Robert Downey Jr. is a perfect example of a movie that could have benefited from a good story, good acting and no explosions. This was not to be. When Hollywood was done with this movie, all the intellectual charm of Sherlock Holmes had been thrown out the window and we were left with an action movie we have seen hundreds of times before...and plenty of explosions.

And that brings me to Avatar. This was truly an entertainment spectacle unlike anything I have seen before. And the shoot-em-up second half of the movie was just as visually enthralling as the first, but it was the first half of the movie, before they started blowing things up, that really wowed me.

Filed Under: Sleep Deprivation>Caffeine

I have a very bad relationship with sleep. I fall asleep like someone knocked me on the noggin with a coconut, but then around 3:30 AM, I'm up and its hard for me to get back to sleep. (Uh-oh I hear my wife rustling around in bed, as soon as she discovers me gone she is gonna yell). I've practiced sleeping all my life and still I suck at it. Maybe one of those delicious Starbucks Frappuccinos in the refrigerator will help. That reminds me of the app I am supposed to be building. In order to make my first million, I plan on building an app for the iPhone that worked something like this: it would look, on the phone, like the top of a Starbucks Frappuccino cap. With your finger you could rotate it or double click it. When the user rotated the cap, it would scroll through a list of nearby locations beneath the cap. After making a full rotation it would make that satisfying 'snap' that the cap makes when it releases the vacuum inside the bottle. If the user double clicked on the cap, it would take the user to the website of the currently selected Starbuck's store. And every time the user pushed on the cap, it would make that satisfying sound that the cap makes every time you push in the top...like a clicker.

Its a brilliant plan and would make me a lot of buck-age but it is not as easy as it seems. My first road block is that Apple wants me to pay $100 for the privilege of getting to develop apps for the iPhone. I don't think so. So I switched to the Android, the software for cell phones by Google, which is free to develop for and they give you all the tools for free. Its really cool to use. When you run the 'emulator' it pops up a virtual cell phone on your computer screen. So far all I can do is send text messages to my virtual cell phone, but at least its a start!

Filed Under: Pandemics>Spread the Word

I missed a day of blogging yesterday, so I woke up at 4:30 AM today to make up for it. Just kidding. Really, I have a hacking cough left over from the dregs of a cold which would have kept Shirley and me up if I remained in bed so I have banished myself to the living room to muse on life and write this post which I will pretend was posted yesterday. Wow! I guess 2010 is going to be a good decade for run-on sentences.

Of course, early in the New Year is all about resolutions and probably 90% of all resolutions are about losing weight. Mine are no different. The difference, I am serious! I'm going sailing with the Fuscos in a couple of weeks in the Caribbean and I have to look good in my speedo. Just kidding again, I wouldn't be caught dead in a speedo.

Only 2 more hours before I have to get up for work. Boy am I going to be cranky today. Actually I find that, although I am prone to crankiness, one night of extremely limited sleep does not affect my mood. I can still be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Quick question: does anyone know how to be a better web-surfer? I am actually terrible at it. I have my two sites: HuffingtonPost and NYTimes and after I have read them through I am at a loss. The problem is; I hate having too many choices. I never could go into a library, even if I wanted to read something. Bookstores are no better, too many choices. I hate Blockbuster. How is one supposed to chose? Supermarkets give me the heebie-jeebies. I prefer going to a bodega even though I know I will pay twice as much. And the internet is the worst offender of all! Talk about an over-whelming number of choices.

Still two more hours before I have to wake up. Boy, time sure does creep along in its petty pace. Well, I'd better go practice my surfing skills.

Posted Under: Top Of The Heap>Francophobia

Those of you who followed me religiously during 2009 are aware of my obsession with seizing the top spot of the Google rankings such that, if anyone googles 'David Merle', my information will come up first. Nyeh! Ha! Ha! Ha! You can image my surprise and dismay to wake up on New Year's Day and find that I was number 2 on Google. And who, you may well wonder, is number 1 in the Google search rankings? My nemesis David Merle, that's who!

Please realize that I didn't always want to usurp the David Merle's of the world. First I tried to unite them. At one point it was my goal to Facebook friend all the David Merles of the world so that we would form one large benevolent society, perhaps called the David Merle Society. I quickly found out what a huge mistake this was. My Facebook News Feeds started to become dominated by the doings and sayings of David Merle, none of which were me!

The other problem with the David Merle Society is that all the other David Merles in the world are French and I don't speak French or particularly like the French. The French David Merles really do think that their sh#@t don't stink (I suspect; since I can't read any of there postings).

So now, I want to capture the top spot on Google search. It is only right, if America is going to retain its top spot in the world, then I must show America the way by besting the French David Merles.

If you love America I encourage you to google David Merle as often as you can in the new year. But be careful! Make sure you don't click on my arch-enemy David Merle.

Filed Under: New Decade>Progress Report

So far so good in the new decade...as long as one does not believe in omens. For example, in the last decade I had a very robust immune system. I very rarely got sick and even when I did, the effects were minor and short-lived. And yet I greet the new decade while under the influence of some flu-like bug. This could be a bad omen...or just a coincidence.

Another omen/coincidence is that I have already been hung over in the New Decade. It wouldn't be either an omen or a coincidence if I was regularly hung-over, but I'm Irish! I can handle my liquor. Then again I normally don't drink a bottle of bourbon (I had help) that was given to me by my favorite older brother, Paul. Will I be an alcoholic in the 'tens'. Let's wait and see.

I do have so much hope for the world in general. Please observe that for millennia one had to work all the time...hunting and gathering and what not. Then Christians and Jews decided to rest on Sunday because God did. Then in the 1920s the auto unions invented the two day weekend and the world saw this and they said 'this is good' and voila!, the modern weekend was invented. Something like this could happen again, in our lifetime...I'm not talking about a three day weekend, but something else so profoundly different that it effects everyone. I guess you could argue that the internet is already doing this, but it would be great if world connectedness via the internet lead to world peace.

Filed Under:The Apocolypse>Coming Soon?

2010 is here so I should probably review the last decade. Except for 8 years of the Bush administration, not bad. I started out the decade as a Fed Ex Ground 'contractor' (aka 'slave'), but made my move into IT. The strange thing is that in the year 2000 I literally did not know how to turn on a computer. I had to be taught where the power button on a PC is, had to have help to set up a Yahoo email account and had to learn how to 'google'.  But I got inspired, took programming courses and now I am no longer a knuckle-dragging, cultural Neanderthal. I now have a digital camera, web site, blog, Facebook account and Skype phone. Switching jobs worked out very well for me, but not for my waist line. A typical day at Fed Ex Ground involved moving several tons of packages to and from the truck, walking briskly several miles while carrying said packages and jumping up and down at least 100 times from the driver's seat of the truck.

I forgot to mention I have a Kindle which is a Christmas gift from my wife. It was one of those things which I wasn't sure was going to work out (for example, I bought Shirley an iPod several years ago which has probably been used less than a dozen times), however, I love it! I have bought about 30 classic books so far (the only kind I read) and have spent a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents. I plan to take it on my sailing trip in the Caribbean (January 27th) and even if we are captured by pirates and marooned on a deserted island, I will easily have enough material to read for several months (or until the batteries run out) while the others gather food and build shelter.

Also in the last decade I started my side business as a used golf ball distributor. I really must think up a catchy name for this business in the new decade (suggestions are welcome...and the if your suggestion is chosen, you will receive a free gift). The business is booming (right now I am sitting on a stock pile of over 2000 golf balls, waiting for return of the spring), so much so that I kept my shipping manager; Shirley Merle, hopping during last season. I'm very bullish on the coming golf season. If Tiger Woods in any indication, the typical golfer should be shanking even more balls into the woods next year.

I managed to get married in this decade, which came as a surprise to everyone, including myself. So far, I would say, the whole marriage thing is working out fantastically well.

My most fervent political wish for the coming decade is for Sarah Palin to run for president in 2012 with Carrie Prejean as her running mate and for Rush Limbaugh to get caught soliciting sex in a men's bathroom.

A special new-decade shout-out to my most avid fans...you know who you are!