You know what, fuck these guys

 

“Head of Ideas.”  Check out that link.  Not a terribly long post, but so much to work with here.  It might’ve been a slightly more dignified post if it was all butthurt.  But it’s not.  It’s a fucking pathetic.  First of all, this guy actually acknowledges the job title that he’s been given: Head of Ideas.  In a supposedly creative industry, this fucking guy actually embraces the notion that he’s the grand arbiter of ideas in his shop.  “Hey, fuck the rest of you, I’m the boss of all the ideas.  The rest of you can suck it as far as ideas are concerned.”  Head of Ideas – what a colossally douchetastic title.

Second, this fuckwit is actually trying to validate the advertising industry against the motherfucking Onion.  “We don’t deserve to be called talentless.”  What a jerkoff.  Every industry on the earth is overrun with talentless fucks – why the hell should advertising be exempt of that?  If anything, advertising is probably leading the brigade.  We’re surrounded by fucking hacks.

And then he tries to formulate his argument by creating pathetic movie parodies that are neither interesting nor witty.  I don’t even know what point he’s trying to make with those examples.  I swear, whomever’s hiring his agency, fire that agency immediately.  Then fire him immediately after that.  Then fire the people who fired him because they were the probably the ones who hired him in the first place.  (Sometimes Monty Python have the right ideas for everything.)

You know what, fuck that guy.

 

 

The Ramen Burger.  Hey asshole, this is not your cronut.  And before I go any further, I just need to acknowledge this cronut bullshit.  Upon advisement from Serious Eats, I ventured to Yonkers to get what was supposed to be a pretty good knock-off of Dominique Ansel’s cronuts.  The knock-off cronut was a far more modest affair.  No cream filling, not cream ring on top.  Just a sugar coating.  And it was such a fucking letdown.  A letdown not because it was missing all that creamy goodness.  But because it tastes exactly as a cronut had been described – a buttery croissant shaped like a donut.  And because it was all buttery and fried, the thought of one of Ansel’s originals gushing with cream just fucking grossed me out.  It’s probably like 1,000 calories per cronut.  Fuck that guy and his ridiculous pastries.

But wait, back to the ramen burger.  Just look at that fucking thing.  It’s such a forced concoction of stupidity.  Ramen should not be molded into hockey pucks, asshole.  That’s not how you eat it.  You don’t see me taking a burrito and putting it in a blender to make burrito soup, do you?  Then why the fuck are you molding ramen noodles into hockey pucks?

People like ramen.  People like burgers.  I get it.  That doesn’t mean that people need to have the two together.  This is the just the most insufferable Brooklyn version of asshole food that chains like Chili’s puts out there – “Hey, people like ribs, people like cheese… let’s smother our baby back ribs with cheese!”  No, asshole, no.  There is no redeeming reason to put ramen noodles and burgers together.

You know what, fuck that guy.

 

 

AUTI5M.  That was on the Maryland license plate of a car I passed when I drove back from Baltimore this past weekend.  Before I go on, let me get this out of the way – third only to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Maryland drivers are colossal assholes.  You’ve got some work to do if want that podium spot, Connecticut.

Anyway, I was gunning the pedal trying to get the fuck out of the shithole that is Maryland when I passed some white 4×4 with “AUTI5M” on the license plate.  This wasn’t some state-issued special edition license plate like those celebrating your stupid fandom for the Yankees or something like that.  No, this was a vanity plate in which some jerkoff paid a premium so that his license plate would read a goddamn medical condition.

What the fuck does it even mean?  Presumably, this fuckwit’s trying to raise awareness of autism.  Fine, I get it, the intent is noble and warranted.  But the means?  Is that really the way to go about it?  Does the rule apply to other disease states also?  I mean, next we ought to have a car driving around with a license plate that reads C4NC3R, right?  How about HERP3S?  It doesn’t work, asshole.

You know what, fuck that guy.

 

 

Ten grand for a hubby.  So some account broad in some dopey agency in San Francisco can’t find a man and is putting up reward money?  How fucking original.  Read the self-satisfying tone in that letter.  How proud she is to have written something so “witty” and “interesting”.  Ugh, puke.  Everything about that letter screams “bullshit” and “go fuck yourself”, and not necessarily in that order.  If you claim to resemble Charlize Theron, and you live in a major metropolitan market (granted, it’s San Francisco, which means your typical choices in companionship are either “dipshit” or “smug douche”), you wanna tell me you can’t find a single asshole who’ll hook up with you?  How much of a nightmare must you be for no guy – NOT ONE! – to want to put up with your bullshit?  I tell you what, if Charlize Theron was a total bitch on toast and she wanted to go out with me (shut up, it could happen), I’d put in the effort.  You fucking bet I would.  You fucking bet YOU would.  Charlize fucking Theron, you guys!

So this dumb shit can’t meet anyone decent and she puts the burden – sorry, reward – on her idiot friends to hook her up?

You know what, go fuck yourself.

 

 

Me.  Short of blowing a shit load of cash I don’t have on a new 911, I can’t think of a more pathetic attempt at a midlife crisis than what I’m going through right now.  I bought myself a road bike (a two-wheeled equivalent to the hot convertible).  Next thing I know, I’m riding all over like I’ve got something to prove.  I’m trying to beat other riders up hills and shit.  Now all these obstacle course mud runs are all the rage, and I signed up for one.  At my fucking age, I could fucking die in one of these things – even if I did sign up for the most creampuff version of such races.  Which means I’ve now started running, too.  I fucking hate running.  I tried it once right after Hurricane Sandy and it was as stupid as it was painful.   Yet, despite my eternal loathing for running, I signed up for a creampuff running event and I’m now running on a almost a daily basis.  Because I can’t bear to show up to this event like a waddling schmuck.

The lengths I will go through to try and preserve some little youth I have left.  Like I’ve got shit to prove or something.  That’s a lot of horseshit, and I fucking hate myself for being this way.

You know what, fuck me.

 

 

It’s time to watch F1, you guys!

I’ll just come right out and say it: if you don’t watch F1 this weekend, you’re an asshole.

I can hear it already, “Blah blah blah, F1, cars driving round in circles, who gives a shit about NASCAR, whatever, boring, blah blah blah.”  And you’d be a millionth-and-one person who’s given me shit for spending far too much time with this fucking sport.

And that’s because you conveniently dismiss this sport because you have not even a vague idea of how brilliant it is.  Let’s change that, shall we.  Have an open mind, for fuck’s sake.

The thing is, F1 is for everyone.  (Hey, that rhymes, I should copyright that shit.)  Man, woman, child, dog, whomever, it’s for you.  If you have a fucking pulse, no matter how cloddish, you need to take a look at F1.

Jalopnik tried to pull together a helpful guide for F1 noobs, but I found it uninspiring and tedious.  The whole thing felt like a lot of fucking work and it told you NOTHING about F1.  So fuck it, I figure I’d give it a go.

Here’s the gist of the sport.  I’ll give you the meat-and-potatoes, and then I’ll throw in some garnish afterwards.

F1 is car racing.  All the cars look like winged rockets with wheels.  They’re not steel tanks like NASCAR because they have open wheels and open cockpits – neither is covered.  They’re also made largely of featherweight carbon fiber.  And they have big fuck-off wings that create downforce that keep the cars pressed onto the track.  They also have massive fuck-off tires.

In F1, every team has to build their own cars.  If you’re a car racing noob, it might surprise you to know that most other car racing series have teams buying their cars from suppliers, and all they need to do is tweak the car and go racing with it.  Not F1: each team needs to design and build their own chassis.  That’s part of why some of the top F1 teams have annual budgets in excess of $300 million.  In comparison, you can run a shitty NASCAR team for about $10 million.

These cars are the single-most sophisticated machines for sport, and are probably the closest thing to having a NASA space rocket mate with one of James Bond’s Q gadgets.  They’re the coolest fucking thing in the world, alright.

Inside each car is a V8 engine that generates something like 800hp and revs up to 18,000rpm.  Your average 4-door sedan probably sports a 4-cylinder engine that generates 200hp and you’d never rev it higher than 3,500rpm.  Do the math.  These engines can take these cars to over 200mph.  Try that in your shitwagon.  These engines sound like a dragon being put through a paper shredder.

Each team runs two cars – the two cars will look identical; easiest way to tell the two drivers apart is to by their helmets.  But TV commentators do that for you.

Enough about the cars.  Let’s talk about the race itself.  The race starts at 2pm Austin time.  In fact, with a few exceptions, all F1 races start at 2pm local time no matter they race in the world.  You can use that in your dinner conversation this Thanksgiving, you’re welcome.  Each race lasts between 1.5 hours (often) to 2 hours (rarely).

This is the track in which they’ll be racing in Austin: the Circuit Of The Americas.

(from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbonvouloir/)

As you can see, it’s not a goddamn oval.  Because these drivers actually need to have two key skills lacking in NASCAR drivers – knowing how to brake for corners, and turning right.

Let’s get to the drivers.  There are 24 of them.  You don’t need to know all of them.  There are dipshit drivers in the back of the pack that if you got hit by a bus tomorrow and never knew their names, you’d still have lived a full life.  Don’t waste your time trying to learn everyone’s name.  Just the ones who are worth keeping an eye out for:

• Fernando Alonso.  Drives a Ferrari (the only all-red car in the pack).  He is, by leaps and bounds, the best all-round driver of the lot.  Even if the Ferrari is not even close to being the best car out there.
• Sebastian Vettel.  Drives a Red Bull (blue car with a yellow tip – yes, the energy drink company own an F1 team).  One of the best drivers driving arguably the best car of them all – that’s a hell of a combination.
• Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button.  Both drive McLaren cars (silver cars with red wings).  Both a brilliant drivers.  Hamilton is the Barack Obama of F1.  Unfortunately, however, is a colossal douchenozzle, and you should totally watch him to hate him.  Seriously, he’s a tool.
• Kimi Raikkonen.  Drives a Lotus (black car with gold trimmings).  He’s Finnish and a raging boozehound!  And he’s fast!  That’s pretty much all you need to know.

Other drivers who might put in good showings are Kamui Kobayashi, Sergio Perez, and Nico Hulkenberg.  Fuck everyone else.  Oh, you’ll also hear Michael Schumacher’s name.  That’s because he’s old, he’s been racing forever, he’s the winningest driver, and he’s a smug, dirty, cheating bastard.

And really, those are the essentials.  There are other nuances, but if you don’t know them, it won’t make the sport unwatchable.  But just in case, here are some of them:

• Pitstops.  These cars come into the pits at least once to change tires.  That’s because a) the tires don’t last the duration of the race, and b) the rules state that they must race on two different types of tires (two compounds: one harder, one softer)
• KERS.  This is a F1’s equivalent of a hybrid.  It stands for Kinetic Energy Return System.  The cars use braking forces to charge an onboard battery.   The battery sends and extra boost of 80hp to the engine – it’s a bit like Knight Rider’s turbo boost mode without the turbo.  It’s stupid but it’s in play.
• DRS. Talk about an even stupider system.  It stands for Drag Reduction System.  When a car is trailing the car in front by 1 second or less, the trailing driver can push a button on his steering wheel that levels out the rear wing (reducing downforce) to help the car go faster to help overtake the car in front.  I have many reasons to hate this stupid system that I’m not going to go into here, but it’s in play, so fuck me.

Now, let’s talk briefly about the racing.  This isn’t like NASCAR, where you see a traffic jam going around in a circle for 4 hours, with cars overtaking each other ever 3 miliseconds.  Fuck that pointless bullshit.  No, what you’ll see mostly is a single-file of cars going around the track.  There’s definitely overtaking in F1, but because F1 racing is both an art and a science, this will happen mostly when cars dive into corners at the end of a long straight, trying to outbrake the other car.  The KERS and DRS systems help, too.

And that’s it.  That’s all you really need to know to watch F1 on Sunday.  That, and the fact that it’s on at 2pm ET (work that shit out in your own timezone), it’s on Speed Channel in the U.S. (better go find that channel now), and even though you’ll probably miss the early NFL games, you’ll have a shit ton more football the rest of Sunday to watch so stop being a pussy about it.

Now, don’t be a dick by blowing this off.  This is F1’s first race back in the U.S. after a 5-year absence.  This is F1’s only stop in the U.S.  It’s a big fucking deal.  You can afford to forgo football for a couple of hours on Sunday (your dipshit team will probably lose anyway).  You really can.

Just watch some F1 this Sunday.  Don’t be an asshole.

 

 

No, you don’t need that goddamn SUV

This is almost not worth my time.  It’s fucking ridiculous that I’m actually taking time out to rebuff some stupid article I just read.  Because the subject of SUVs is so fucking old and tired, and it’s been done to death, and it’s fucking boring.

Yet, THIS CANNOT BE A REAL ARTICLE.

Surely this is some shitty troll write-up that’s meant to rile up certain gearheads who are stupid enough to get riled up (me).  I mean, most of the time, I love Gawker – Deadspin, in particular – but holy shit, do they come up with some massively pointless articles every so often.  In fact, that’s the problem with a lot of these sites that used to be sites that just reposted someone else’s stories.  Somewhere along the way, they decided that they need to compete as content generators and not just content aggregators.  And in so doing, often they struggle to come up with some minimum amount of original content for our insatiable appetite for said content.

And that’s why we end up with such a seemingly banal yet thoroughly retarded write-up assuming to validate SUVs.

If you can’t be arsed to read the article, here’s the sum up of what the whole stupid write-up is driving at:

OMG, your mom must’ve gracefully descended from the heavens, with all her hyper intelligence and miraculous supernatural powers, to have managed the herculean task of carting your stupid ass all over town without some swollen, overpriced pretend-offroading vehicular monstrosity.  Just how DID she manage?!  What a saint!  Oh, the humanity!

With all due respect – and complete sincerity – do fuck off.

ZOMG, sedans aren’t “convenient as something with a big tailgate”!!!  WE NEED A TAILGATE!!  Everyone needs tailgates!!  And sedans can’t accommodate large car seats!!  “OMG, these soft, pudgy, fast food-fed kids are too big-boned to fit to a family sedan!!”  “We must pack lightly – the horror of not being able to cram the entire contents of my house into my car!”  “Honey, there’s no way I can’t fit little Maddie’s Barbie dream house, her pack-n-play, the bottle warmer, her DVD player, all her Baby Einstein discs, AND your mega-duty breast pump into our normal car so that we can go to the mall – WE TOTALLY NEED AN SUV!!!”

This writer’s a fucking idiot.

As a father of two, I’ll just say that anything larger than a four-door sedan is completely pointless and unnecessary.  We have comfortably survived – fuck it, thrived! – with only four-door sedans.  Imagine that: a simple sedan, four wheels, four doors, a trunk, and we’ve managed fine.  Car seats, strollers, diaper bags, toys, foldable playpens, all the shit that you *need* (:rolleyes:) when you have little kids – they all fit nicely into our humble Volkswagen sedan.  AND a little dog, too, beeyotch.  I never even had a roof rack on my car until very recently (hey, it’s not my fault that paddleboards are 12 feet long).

I know some families with one or two kids, and they all have some beastly SUV with an enormous engine in it.  They clamp on some equally enormous luggage carrier to the roof rack.  The rear of the car’s got some a massive bike rack.  And it’s got a hitch.  I have no idea if the luggage carrier on top ever has anything in it, but those bike racks are always empty, and everything’s permanently bolted to their SUVs ALL THE TIME.  Really?!  The fuck you need all that shit for?  It looks like a prop from the upcoming Mad Max movie.  It’s like they’ve just bought some monstrous car and they’ve got to further validate this purchase by attaching all these extra bits and pieces on it because “that’s why we needed the big SUV!”

I’ll tell you what this is: fucking gluttony.

So what you end up with is single-digit mpg, a heavy lumbering shit box that handles even more poorly than it already did, awful parking jobs (because, admit it, you can’t park that thing for shit), and maximum carbon monoxide for maximum earth scorching.

I speak from the perspective of having two kids.  And I get that there are many families who aren’t limited to two kids.  God, you feel like such a fucking underachiever these days when you have only two kids.  “You have only two kids?  Fuck that, we’re going for more kids than the Brangelinas, loser.”

Yet, it matters little whether someone’s got two kids or nine.  Fact is, most of you are gonna buy an SUV no matter what.  Because you want more, MORE, MORE, MORE!!!  Just don’t use your goddamn kids as the excuse.

And I’m not suggesting that anyone has to make do with less (though that’s hardly a bad thing).  I’m suggesting that maybe we can all learn to live without so much fucking excess.

 

First world problems

No free wi-fi at airports and hotels.  What’s this shit with making pay $20 a day for wi-fi in your bullshit pretentious hotel?  And I think it’s fucking criminal that neither JFK nor LaGuardia airports consistently provide free wi-fi (not you, JetBlue, we all know your terminal fucking rocks).  Airports and hotels are proper fucking ports of business.  Not just where parents who have lost the will to live are dragging their little shitbags Timmy and Tammy for a week at Disneyworld.  Timmy and Tammy are ingrates and don’t deserve wi-fi.  The rest of us, who are at airports under duress, travelling for work?  The least you bastards could do is blunt the hurt with a bit of free wi-fi.

Same shit at hotels.  Oh, you want me to pay $400 for some shitty room you painted white and hung a framed painting on the ceiling, but I’ve got to cough up another $20 so that I can send emails and post stupid Facebook updates from my room?  Dicks.

 

Paying more for gas with credit.  Why the fuck are gas stations the only establishment left on earth that can get away with charging you extra if you pay with a credit card?  No one else would fucking dare.  I buy a pack of gum at the drug store and I wanna charge it?  Same fucking price.  Even the little shitty Chinese takeout joint in my town won’t tack on superfluous charges if I wanted to charge my wonton soup.  Stop being dicks about it, gas stations.

 

“So…”  What is this verbal tic I’ve started noticing so glaringly over the past coupe of months or so?  Maybe folks have been saying it for much longer, but I’ve only just recently noticed it.  There is no fucking reason to start every sentence with that word.  “So I was watching Mad Men last night…”  “So how did you like that concert?”  “Soooo… where’re we going for dinner?”   What the fuck is that?  No, no “so”.  No fucking “so” anything.  At this point, this completely gratuitous prefix is all the signal I need to completely ignore everything that comes out of your mouth after that stupid word.  A friend recently raised it as a particularly irritating issue, and I thought I was the only one to notice this particularly grating behavior.  He lives in Vancouver.  This is a pan-continental epidemic that’s just gotta stop.  Right fucking now.

 

Bottled water.  What.  The fuck.  When the fuck did water cost more than beer?

Diaper Genies.  You can never ever get that smell outta your head.  Ever.  I’m a couple of years out from needing one in the house (for my kids, not me, you assholes), but just say “diaper genie” and that pong immediately fills my olfactory sense.  They’re a pretty awesome invention – making your own shit-filled sausages – but if they could fix the smell factor, the Diaper Genie would be greater than the iPhone 5.

 

3 Series drivers.  Why do 3 Series drivers consistently refer to their stupid little cars as “sportscars”?  Have these assholes never seen a sportscar?  How the fuck is your overpriced rear-wheeled drive Honda-equivalent a sportscar by any motherfucking stretch of the imagination.  An M3? Fine, I get that.  But none of these shitheads are driving M3s.  They’re driving little shitty 3 Series cars… and quite poorly, I might add.  Looking at the way you shitheads drive and park, you might want to chill with your delusions of grandeur there.  Your shitcart is not a sportscar.

 

Pointless rental upgrades.  I recently scored what I thought was a tasty upgrade when I rented a car in Boston.  I had booked some shitty little Chevy or what not, and when I got to the rental office, they didn’t have my car ready for me.  A bit of a Seinfeld “you-know-how-to-take-the-reservation-you-just-don’t-know-how-to-hold-the-reservation” moment.  But after a few minutes, I was told I’d been upgraded to a Mercedes.  Sweet.  Thinking it’d be some small C-class, I walk up to the lot to see a beastly, stark white GL SUV.  It’s the biggest fucking thing they made short of a tour bus.  This thing was ridiculous.  It was as big as a house, so full of driving aids I felt dumber by the minute sitting in it.  The thing had blind spot warning lights, rear camera, sensors of every sort – it was as if it was coaxing you to be as careless as you fucking want on the roads because “the car will take care of it for you.”  And it came with paddleshifts on the steering wheel.  Cool.  Except when you tug on one of the flappy paddles, it’d take about a week for the gear to engage.  What a thoroughly stupid, pointless car.

Help me, I’m stuck in a tree (hugging) house of horror

When the rain is pissing down so hard that it looks like the book of Exodus has opened at your front door, that’s the best time in the world to make your way to a tree-hugging festival in the middle of NYC, right?  Right.

Which is what I did yesterday.  Wifey’s idea, natch.  She was all into celebrating Earth Day so she signed up the whole family for the NYC Green Festival.  Which I suspected was going to be every bit as terrifying as it sounds.   You fucking know it: a fully-sustainable clusterfuck of granola, drum circles, and hemp shampoo.

To help protect Mother Gaia, do we do the right thing and take public transportation to event?  Fuck no, we all hopped into our 250hp fossil fuel-fed four-wheel drive family sedan and gunned it down the West Side Highway.  I may have even hit a bird on the way down.  We then spent another 30 minutes circling the west side looking for a parking lot that wasn’t full so we could park our car.  Fuckin’ A.

Eventually, we got to the event, which was tucked into one corner of the Javits Center.  It was the smallest event at the convention center that day.  It was dwarfed by something else called the International Beauty Show (they used the most unfortunate acronym, IBS New York – I was expecting row upon row of portajohns), and some college fair.  We snaked our way through what looked like a million Snookis and another half-million high school imbeciles.

 

When we got into the Green Festival, it wasn’t entirely what I was expecting.  Being at the Javits Center, this was like a trade show.  But open to the public.  Four massive aisles of booths, multiple stages set up across the floor for talks and workshops, and a floor full of extras from Portlandia.  We started our wander through the booths.

What did the kids immediately make a beeline for?  The first few booths, which had tons of chocolate, all boasting fair trade, organic, small batches made by Nicaraguan cave children or some shit like that.  Kids didn’t give a shit, they just saw open bowls of chocolate and they were encouraged by the nice hippie ladies behind the counter to help themselves as much as they wanted.  Thanks for nothing, bitch, you’re not the one who has to deal with the sugar crash in 20 minutes.

 

Eventually, I came across a booth that didn’t piss me off – a bike shop!  They had some sweet small brand bikes, but in the end, they didn’t really have anything that excited me too much.  The only bike I wanted was the owners fillet-brazed steel fixie.  And he wasn’t about to part with it.

Right in the back of the hall was this big white bus.  The inside of the bus was a kids’ play area, but the whole thing looked suspiciously like some brainwashing lab on wheels.  I imagined my kids going in as normal kids who eat hot dogs and play with lightsabers, but then coming back out wearing a hemp sackcloth, eating a bean taco, and asking to adopt a goat.

Thankfully, Kid Uno did not disappoint, as he took to their whiteboard and happily predicted the devastation of the earth’s poles (left).  I have never been prouder.  My kids ain’t half bad, after all.

Also not half bad was the centerpiece of the event, an all-electric Ford Focus.  I have a difficult time with Ford.  Being an American car, I can’t be blamed for thinking it’s going to be a piece of shit, but the Ford Focus also has roots in Europe, which means it can’t be completely awful.  This electric version was eye-opening, that’s for sure.  Not only did it not suck, the build quality was quite decent, design fairly ergonomic, and the ripped-off-from-Aston Martin front end was flattering rather than offending.  Downside was that it’s still a short-range, single-speed, 40-grand hatch.  It may be one of the first all-electric cars that doesn’t look like a Tamagotchi toy, but it’s not quite the answer yet.

And in what shape did I emerge from this whole thing?  Fuck if I know.  All I know is that my kids had a blast, wifey enjoyed it, I ate some really shitty food (vegan cheese and kale chips), some not-so-terrible food (corn salsa and vegan macaroons), and I wanted to punch this fucking guy who kept walking around playing a guitar…

 

And I escaped without getting caught up in some tree-worshipping pagan ritual.  Boo yah.

Te-boned: positive thoughts about Lil’ Timmy and the Jets

Yes, there is an overwhelming amount of teeth-gnashing and grumbling over the Jets’ brilliant move to pick up Tim Tebow.  I know my Twitter feed and Facebook updates page practically imploded with Jets fans seeming to perform a virtual mass suicide yesterday.  Poor Jets fans.  And yesterday was the one and only day I was rooting harder than I’d ever rooted for the Jets.

But I can’t help but see the upside of this whole circus around Tim Tebow playing for the Jets.  I only see fun and good things.

 

 

Let me explain:

• By releasing Peyton Manning, the Colts put a domino effect into motion that pretty much guarantees that the Jets will have the Colts’ 2011 season record for several years to come.  As if it was as simple as taking off a sportcoat (clearly not a yellow sportcoat) and putting it on someone else.  Which sets up the next point…

• The Jets will also have a lock on the first overall draft pick for 2013 and several years after that.  Not because they’ll trade up, but because they’ll have earned it outright.  Who gives a shit about the loss of your fourth- and sixth-round draft picks?  You’re number one, baby!

• With all the money the Jets will save from all the costs of not going to the Super Bowl anytime in the near future, maybe they scrounge up enough money to entice Sean Payton to sign on as head coach after his one-year suspension is done.  Because this is clearly the last year that Rex Ryan will be allowed anywhere near the Jets.

• They made everyone think they were signing another QB, but what they’ve really done here is fortify their running game.  This is sort of chicanery is super-competitive cloak-and-dagger shit.  Cheer up, Dirty Sanchez, you’re still on deck to throw 50 interceptions this coming season!

• With a fresh face in town, maybe Ford will be inclined to replace Derek Jeter in all those gawdawful commercials.  Anything to get Jeter’s shitty acting off our TVs, amirite?

• The media can’t seem to get enough of Tebow.  Nevermind that anyone with any working knowledge of football knows that he’s a textbook disaster of a football player, because who gives a shit about facts, it’s the media we’re talking about!  So what better market for Tebow to be in than New York?  You know that every network in NY just pissed themselves in delight the minute the pen left the signed contracts yesterday.  Huge win for the media, guys!

• Antonio Cromartie was clearly not happy with Tebow coming to town.  But these two are gonna get along just fine. They’re going to be BFFs halfway through training camp, I just know it.  Cromartie clearly loves children, and Tebow is all about pro-life.  These two are all about babies and children and shit.  And if babies and children can’t bring us together, what will?

Thanks for this move, it’s going to be an AWESOME year for EVERYONE, guys.  The atmosphere in the league has gotten quite dark in recent years – crippling head injuries, player stomping, bounties, and a myriad of other fiascos.  This trade injects a healthy amount of much-needed comedy and levity into the sport.  The Jets are being the Jettiest they’ve ever been.  And all is right in the universe.

You want March Madness? THIS IS MARCH MADNESS!!

March isn’t about hoops.  Who gives a shit about college hoops (alright, alright, tons of people give a shit about college hoops, just not this guy).

For me, March is about an awakening.  An awakening of metal, carbon fiber, rubber, combustible liquids, and the manifestation of insanely complex physics.  CAR RACING, motherfuckers.  And I mean proper car racing, not that NASCAR driving-around-in-a-circle-with-antiquated-steel-tubs bullshit.  In March, the only balls that matter are those attached to the driver.  For a petrolhead, is there a better time of year than March?  No, no there isn’t.

Because March marks the end of a weird, gestation period in Formula 1 every year.  The sleepy winter tends to see racing factories “shut down”, though you know the engineers and supernerds are all still grinding away at race car design in secret.  The season’s race cars are typically introduced around January.  Then all the teams go to various racetracks and test the shit out of their new cars.  Problem is, you can rarely tell what they’re testing for – often it’s aerodynamics, sometimes it’s a suspension setup, sometimes it’s an exhaust configuration, sometimes it’s fuel consumption, sometimes it’s the tires.  But the lap times these cars rack up are typically useless to your average fan because you don’t know what they’re testing for.  Still, all of that comes to an end by early March.  The bullshit stops because it’s pencils down, and every team packs up their race gear – cars, tools, marketing swag, all of it – into large containers and fly the lot to Australia for the first grand prix race of the season.  March is when everyone stops fucking around.  March is when F1 gets real.

March is when I stay up ’til 5am on a Sunday to watch 24 completely insane drivers in race cars with wings and screaming engines fly around a racetrack for two hours.  At that hour, it is dark, it is quiet except for the 2.4 liter V8 engines, and it is fucking glorious.

So the F1 cars this year have fugly noses.  And we still have horrible teams that don’t belong in the sport (looking at you, HRT and Caterham).  But I’m not gonna care about that anymore…  because of this fucking guy:

KIMI‘S BACK!!!  ZOMG!  KIMI’S BACK!!!!!  I haven’t been this excited about any single driver since, say Sebastian Vettel’s first race for BMW at the 2007 U.S. Grand Prix.  Thank God this madman is back in the sport.

F1 is back.  And it’s a beautiful thing.  In spite of that nose.

 

But March isn’t just about F1.  Le Mans cars will only now be gearing up for some good and proper thrashing around the test tracks, in preparation for the annual slog in July.  Le Mans is a treat for the eyes, the ears, the heart, the mind, all of it.  This year, everything’s full of hybrid/electric/kinetic-powered/voodoo witchcraft/space-age wizardy.  I’m quite sure that teams are permitted to cast magic spells and summon dragons during pit stops.  Audi have announced two mental cars for this year’s competition (no need to bring up last year’s crashes, mmkay).  That’s lovely and all.

But here come Toyota – “I tell you what, there’s no school like the old school”:

Just look at that fucking thing.  It’s hideous.  Sure, it’s a new car and all, but it’s got this lovely old school look and feel about it.  And… and… ahh, fuck it, it’s not gonna win anything anyway, so I’m not gonna waste anymore time on it.

In fact, I think I’m done rambling about racing now.  Let’s just watch some videos of the Morgan-badged OAK Racing prototype and the Aston Martin Vantage GTE and call it day.

Time to go racing, bitches.

 

10 people it’s OK to be mean to

iPad-reading pedestrians.  It’s one thing to have dipshits walking around reading the paper or some book – it’s perfectly OK to stick your foot out as you walk by to try and trip them, that’ll teach ‘em to walk and read.  It’s a whole ‘nother thing to have some pretentious wank walking around while reading his iPad.  Every time I see one of these assholes, I feel compelled to bat that precious iPad out his hands, just to see the horror on his face watching that stupid thing shatter all over the sidewalk.  This morning some girl reading her iPad walked right into my arm, and the iPad smacked her on the nose.  Soooo satisfying!

People who board subway trains before letting people off.  I’m a bit of a germaphobe when it comes to public places.  Which means I don’t fucking touch jack shit when I’m riding the subway.  I keep my hands stuffed into my pockets, or I keep my arms folded.  The latter has a brilliant benefit of mercilessly elbowing shitheads who barge into a subway car while I’m trying to leave it.  Fuck you, you’re going to wait for me get out first or you’re going to get a sharp elbow right into your goddamn sternum.  It’s too bad I’m short – I’d love to take an elbow to the face of some of these rude bargers.  Fuck ‘em.

Audi drivers.  The other day I was riding my bike and I hear a car revving hard from behind and blowing his horn repeatedly at me.  I get well fucked off with this shit – people blowing their horns at me for good fucking reason.  So I did what came instinctively – I flipped him off.  This fucking guy – in his Audi S4 – pulls up alongside me and starts scream, “HOW DARE YOU GIVE ME THE FINGER!!  MEET ME AT THE CORNER, I’M GONNA BEAT THE SHIT OUTTA YOU!!”  Really, asshole?  I have a theory about Audis.  It’s like all the shithead BMW drivers give up their leases 3-4 years ago, and they all went lemming-like to Audis.  Audi drivers are the new asshats of the road.  Need some proof?  Gladly.

I took this shot at the long-term parking at JFK.  There’s a large lamp post in the middle of this parking spot (way to go, JFK).  But fuck if that’s going to stop this Audi driver from parking his ridiculous 4×4 into this sliver of a parking space.   And he backed it in!

 

 

 

And just for fun, here’s a bonus picture of an R8 I grabbed off Jalopnik.  The example of fine German engineering is parked across two parking spots – one of compacts, and one for motorcycles.  Makes you want to key every Audi you see.

 

 

 

 

 

Fans of the Mets, the Jets, and Rush.  I’ve banged on enough about the Jets and the Mets, I think.   The interesting bunch here are the Rush fans.  This past holiday season I was at two parties on successive nights.  At the first party, I saw complete strangers (me included) strike off remarkable conversation and friendships by simply agreeing that a) Rush are insufferable, and b) Geddy Lee is the worst singer in the world.  It was a fascinating evening – it’s like you knew that you could settle into some conversation and camaraderie because you were all able to so easily agree on one thing.   At the second party, I spent about half an hour with a good friend trying to dissect between the ability to hate Rush and the need to appreciate Rush’s talent but simply not like their music.  They’re the same fucking thing.  That’s like saying you can’t possibly hate Hitler because shit, he was a charismatic speaker, you can’t deny that.  Yes, I believe I just compared Rush to Hitler.  What cracks me is how any Rush fan is pretty much a Rush apologist.  Their fans spend more time trying to validate why Rush don’t suck than I do trying to shit on Rush.

Droid phone users.  And speaking of apologists, the biggest, saddest group of apologists in the world are these Droid phone users.  Do you ever see iPhone users constantly bang on about how great the stupid iPhone is?  No, you don’t – because iPhone users just buy the fucking things and use them, and they just get on with it, and they seem quite satisfied (when they’re not whinging about AT&T, that is).  Droid users on the other hand seem to take any fraction of an opportunity to yammer on about how awesome their Droid phones are and how their Droid phones can do all this shit that iPhones can’t do.  Calm down, no one gives a shit about your stupid Droid phone.  You’re never going to convince an iPhone user that your stupid phone is better than the overpriced and incredibly fragile mobile device that Steve Jobs shat upon mankind.  You just aren’t.  So please shut the fuck up about your stupid phone now.  Nobody cares.

The Amish.  ‘Cause they’re never going to read this, amirite?

Middle-aged potheads.  Seriously, it’s just sad.  It’s one thing if you’re blowing the bone when you’re a kid.  But when you’re a graying, middle-aged wank?  Puh-fucking-leeze.  Blazing up when you’re past 50 just tells me that you lack imagination, still relying on weed to get baked.  Shit, I still drink but I sure fuck don’t exactly drink what I drank when was in high school or college.  Like fuck I’m gonna be doing shots of Jaeger or pounding Natty Lights.  Not by choice, at least.  So, if you’re middle-aged and you still insist on getting high, move on to heavier shit like heroin, or knock it the fuck off.  It’s just embarrassing (unless you’re Willie Nelson).

People who give lottery tickets as gifts.  Seriously, what is that.  It is so much worse than not giving someone a gift.  That’s like telling the person you gave the tickets to, “Hey, I give so little shit about your shitty gift that I’d rather not give you the cash equivalent of it, I’ll give that to the Bangladeshi man at the corner deli who sold me these lottery tickets, which will have a far greater than average chance that the coin you use to scratch them is worth exponentially more than what these colorful pieces of paper will ever be.  Fuck you very much, dickhead!”

Escalator standers.  “I hate people who don’t walk on escalators. An escalator is there to help you walk faster, not to avoid walking entirely, you fat useless hump.”  – Anthony Bourdain brings the pain.

Stop. Just stop it. You’re making baby Jesus cry.

Stop it now.

Please.

Just.

Stop it.

Now.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Please stop this bullshit now.

 

 

Congratulations, you are the stupidest people on earth

Ahhh, the thrill of holiday shopping.  Made more fun when shopping at an outlet mall.  And at the outlet mall, you will see the stupidest people on earth:

Notice the almost-all-Asian line-up outside the Burberry store.  My people are idiots sometimes.  I’ve already gone on record with my unending loathing of all things Burberry, so to see fuckwits line up for the privilege of entering the store to blow shitloads of cash on that ghastly brown plaid, it’s enough to make me want to take a baseball bat to every asshole in that line.  What a queue of douchebags.

This sight caused several minutes of gut-busting hilarity.  There were easily 50 fucktards lined up outside the Coach store.  Motherfucking Coach.  The fucking Applebee’s of bagware.  And these assholes were lined up for hours trying to get in and to buy some of that shit.  That’s like standing around waiting to order a greasy, deep-fried onion.  Oh wait, people do that at Outback restaurants, don’t they.  Fuck, people are stupid.

Welcome to 2005, stupid.  The next most hilarious line at the outlet mall: the line of 50 or so dummies stretched to the end of that building.  For fucking Uggs.  Those stupid boots that so fucking dated, Napoleon Dynamite’s moonboots were laughing at these assholes.

And speaking of assholes:

“I tiny-dicked shitbag” more like.  It took every ounce of self-restraint not to cut that convertible top open and take a shit in the driver’s seat.  Rule my steaming pile, you festering testicle.

Holiday shopping, ain’t it grand.