thoughts from The Bar

So last night (Thursday) I had a chance to raise a couple of glasses with initialed innovators cW and PB. cW is just back in town from da West Coast, and PB was just getting out of the house after spending the last few days holed up in his apartment, a "victim" of the transit strike. His boss had allowed him to work from home, so he'd been reporting the news from his couch with his albondigas hanging out of his pajama-hole.

Good to see these two fine men. We ate some mediocre food, we had a couple of beers, and we even made it to 7B for a quick round. I had a lot of fun and I was home by 9:40 pm.

Since you couldn't be there, here are a few of the subjects we discussed:

1) The transit strike. PB kept wondering how many assholes Toussaint would have during his next public appearance. "The union's gonna rip him one, the judge is gonna rip him one, the mayor's gonna rip him one," etc. We all agreed on this being a near-total defeat for the union. Others are not so sure.

2) Stealing Music: A Historical Perspective from Napster to Audiogalaxy to Kazaa to Bit Torrent. We reached a consensus that the glory days of AG were as glorious as it'll ever get. PB and cW fondly remembered crashing the CBSnews server by moving all their MP3's onto it. I lamented the fact that of the maybe 1000 songs I've stolen, only 20 remain after two of my hard drives went up in smoke. PB proudly announced that he has managed to hang onto his entire collection. We all admitted that we don't really understand how to use bit torrent, and PB added that he has no interest in trying something with a stupid name like "bit torrent."

3) The irrational shame of reading a book with the Oprah endorsement on it. PB was nice enough to lend me his Oprahfied copy of "A Million Little Pieces." cW felt inclined to point out that he read the book when it was in its hardcover, pre-Oprah phase.

4) Johnny Damon's throwing arm; specifically as it relates to Bernie Williams' throwing arm. PB thinks Damon will lead the Yanks to a championship next year, and says his arm is much better than Bernie's. I say Damon throws like a little old lady coming off Tommy John surgery. I brought up how excited I am about Farnsworth, not just because he throws 100 mph but because he is a lunatic and will probably beat somebody's head in at some point. We haven't had somebody like that in a while, maybe since Don Zimmer. I guarantee you will love watching Farnsworth, even if he has a crappy year.

5) The Mets. Pete basically said, don't sleep on the Mets. In the end, I kind of feel the same way about the Mets as I do about the killer bees. You hear a lot about 'em, some of it's probably true, but I'm not gonna waste any time worrying about it until they're here.

6) We had the inevitable website conversation. We discussed ways to make PBdotC and verbungle.com profitable. We wondered if we could create some combination supersite along with Joe M. and Crsmal and the boys and make a billion dollars off of it. Then we remembered that our combined readership is like 19 people. We discussed selling ads as an experiment. cW commented that he has really been digging crsmal's blog, citing crsmal's writing and also the specificity of his subject matter. It seems that crsmal has correctly guessed that non-handies might be interested in handy-man talk if it's made interesting and easy to understand. I think of all the blogs I've been reading every day, crsmal's has the most commercial potential.

7) We told a couple of old drinking stories. Like the time PB and cW almost got their asses beat in by fascists at Continental. And the time PB thumb-gouged me at Galapagos.

8) We discussed the Elia Rant and the elusive Earl Weaver Manager's Corner Tirade. (neither SFW)

9) We briefly discussed the NBA. They asked me about this Knicks team and I had to comment that I could not care less about them. They suck and they are disorganized. They're a mess. We talked about the Wizznutzz website, which we all agreed is an inspired bit of insanity. That guy's a trip.

10) We talked about how PB needs to get a new digital camera, even though his phone pics are charming.

11) We spilled a couple of drops over what we all perceived as the death of humor in hip hop. We all agreed that either 50 Cent sucks or we're getting old.

I have Xmas with the family this weekend in BKN, then it's off to Cali for sunshine, Jamba Juice and missed jump shots. Maybe a tour of an aircraft carrier courtesy of Navy Davy before he deploys. Unfortunately I think I'm getting sick. I hope I didn't catch SARS from cW. Bastard.

If I don't see ya or talk to ya before then, have a great holiday and remember to drink plenty of red and green Gatorade.

Today's lyricdat word (actually I'll give you three because they're the same as the first three):

if I had

So what we have so far is:

if I had
if I had

Let's do it.