Sadness

I was on my way to the NKOTB show when I heard the sad news about Michael Jackson. Between the concert and the breaking news about MJ, it's safe to say that last night was a straight flashback from 1989. I kept waiting for Doc to fix the flux capacitor so I could get out of there.

In honor of MJ, feel free to post your childhood memories and be totally cheeseball. I'll always remember him as the Michael Jackson from Bad. You know, very early plastic surgery phase, still on top of the world and keeping the crazy at bay. Bad was the first album that I ever owned, as a gift from my parents, when I was 6 years old. So thanks to MJ for making me shake my booty.

More on the NKOTB concert later (or as I like to call it "The Jordan Knight is OMG Still Hot Tour")

Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh, Oh Oh Oh Oh

The Right Stuff...huh. I'm going to see the boy band formally known as New Kids on the Block, now just NKOTB, this evening. That's right, you are jealous. I'll have a full report tomorrow or Saturday for you. It's a very last minute deal and I certainly was unprepared for the emotional baggage that comes with seeing your childhood idols again after 20 years. I'm a firm believer in leaving things in the past, but a free ticket is a free ticket. Will I revert back to my 8-year-old self and sing along to my old favorites? Will I pass out from the hysteria? Will I just sit there and think...my god...I had horrendous taste as a child? Likely. Maybe I was right way back in 1989...maybe Jordan Knight and I ARE supposed to be together forever and this is how we will meet.

Either way, I will let you know how it turns out.

Serious Question

Ok, so I go on vacation to San Francisco/Santa Cruz/Napa Valley and two days before our return to the D I woke up with a raw sore throat. That night the back of my throat started to tickle and sure enough I woke up the next day with a cough. Sunday came and my voice started to go froggy, I spent Monday and Tuesday exhausted from nights of sleepless coughing and days of explaining to our customers, vendors, etc... why I sounded like a man. I finally got a good night of sleep on Tuesday and felt my voice loosening up yesterday along with the phlegm in my chest only to start sneezing and blowing my nose while having to do the suck in breath thing between bites of food at dinner last night. Today I've sneezed several times; on my shoes, on my hands, on the ground, on my desk and have covered nearly ever surface in snot. Now I realize there's probably no one left reading right now but I have a serious question to ask. Where does the snot come from and have I always had this much in my head? Is it becuase of some bacteria or virus that it's just now making its cry for freedom through my throat and nose?? I thought I was on the upswing of this thing and now I'm starting to wonder...figures I would go alllll winter long without even a touch of the flu or a cold and as soon as summer and my vacation hits, BAM, onslaught of wheezing, sore throat, coughing and runny nose! It couldn't be the fact that I was totally off my mostly healthy routine while in Northern Cali, eating every unhealthy thing I came across and washing it down with several forms of alcohol while sleeping restlessly in 4 different hotel beds for 6 nights, not to mention slacking on any form of exercise....nah, couldn't be that.

Sharing is Caring

Hi all...just wanted to share this photo. I had lots of interesting topics floating around in my head today, but forgot them all the moment this appeared on my screen. I think the other topics had something to do with Jon & Kate being genius media whores (but those poor little children!). I'm going to let this photo sink in for a few minutes and come back with my rant/rave about America's favorite trainwreck family.

Return to the stomping grounds...

I'm not sure how many of you have had the opportunity to return to the stomping grounds of your early 20's or college but I recently got the opportunity to do just that. Most people wouldn't list metro Detroit in their top 10, okay let's be honest, not even top 100 places to party but Detroiters have an ace in their pocket that few people outside the area even realize: Windsor. At the ripe old age of 19, Canadian's, who clearly mature 2 years faster then U.S. citizens, are legally old e

nough to drink alcohol. Windsor is a only stone's throw away from the metro area so while the rest of you were forced to either 1. procure a fake I.D., 2. drink illegally at house parties, or 3. bide your time until turning 21, we Detroiters and really anyone who felt like hopping on one of the many highways to the Ambassador Bridge or the tunnel could be in Canada drinking legally in under 30 minutes.

Well thanks to a long standing promise Nick and his brother Chris made back in their early 20's to their cousin Leslee who turned 19 just a few weeks ago I found myself back in Windsor last Saturday night. On our way to the tunnel Nick and I  figured out that it had been about 5-6 years since last stumbling down Ouellette Avenue in Windsor.  A lot can change in 5 years and we soon found out just how much had changed since our Windsor days.   After primping and doing a little pre-drinking at our hotel we asked the front desk for a map of the local bars.  We knew which bars we wanted to go to but we were a little rusty on their locations.  We first settled in for dinner and the Red Wings game at a cool sports bar called The Honest Lawyer.  We have a long standing tradition when the Wings games are on a weekend night which consists of taking shots for every goal they make.  On average this will only work out to be about one shot every hour for 2-3 hours since hockey isn't generally a high scoring game.  This game, however; proved to be quite different.  The first period landed us only one Red Headed Slut shot and we were eating and enjoying ourselves without it having much effect.  The second period began and over the course of the next 20 minutes four goals were made! Four goals!  When have you ever seen a hockey team score 4 goals in one period?!?  Needless to say, we started asking for fruity shots before we all ended up on the floor at 10pm. 

We decided it was safe to leave the game a few minutes early since the score was 5-0 and I asked to check out the map with the list of bars on it.  I was a bit confused when I first glanced down at it and  noticed that 2 of the bars I used to frequent had been crossed off the list.   We started walking in the general direction of the strip and I was shocked when we came upon a place that had once been a saloon style karaoke bar but is now covered in gleaming chrome, mirrors and black leather.  After a pit-stop there we went in search of trusty old Bentley's, 

a place that has so many memories of nights spent dancing, laughing, and meeting new people.  We were starting to wonder if we were lost when I saw Woody's across the street and realized that the spot where Bentley's once resided was now empty.  I asked a bouncer on the way into Woody's where Joker's was and he pointed across the street to an empty lot where the building had been knocked down.  Practically none of the places we used to spend our Friday's and Saturday's at were there anymore, everything had changed! 

 

Well not everything.

The bars we did end up in may have changed names, styles, Deejay's, drink specials, etc...but the people watching hasn't changed a bit.  I felt old but not entirely out of place when a few 19 year old boys tried to sidle up behind me for the "bump and grind" dance.  I doubt the freak dancing will ever truly die out, I mean what else would guys do at a dance club besides that? And no one better leave a comment about glow sticks, that is not an acceptable form of dancing unless your at a rave.  The younger girls still come out in large groups, all dressed alike, but somehow they look so much older then I remember us looking at that age.  The guys are still pounding shots and looking for a girl separated from her pack in order to try the sidle up move and in general everyone there is just out to have a good time.  It was strange being back in a town that had been our spot for at least 2-3 years straight 

when everyone there now doesn't have any idea about how it once was but I'm sure its the same in a lot of bar towns.  It turned out to be a really fun night and as a ode to some things NEVER changing, we ended up at the casino at 4am and lost a bunch of money.

Are You Ready?

I just have one question for you today. Are you ready for the Digital TV Transition? In case you haven't heard about this transition, it's basically D-Day for your television set. If you have an antenna or don't pay for cable or both, then your TV will self combust at some point in the very near future. I, for one, really wish that our government would have warned us about this incoming apocalypse. Maybe a few commercials instructing us as to how we could prepare for this transition would have been helpful. Or maybe a running ticker at the bottom of my TV screen for the last 6 months during the local news. I don't know...I'm not on the government's DTV Transition Committee, but if I were none of this would be a problem. There is going to be a national outcry this week when our innocent TV watching citizens are shocked to find their analog TV sets only show a fuzzy Pat Sajak. I just hope in the future someone will better prepare us for a situation of this magnitude.

I think the only thing us responsible TV watchers can do is to spread the word. Shout it from the rooftops. Tell everyone you know that there is a major transition happening in their TV. It WILL NOT WORK anymore if they haven't updated their set in the last 20 years. My cable service Wow! assures me that as long as I pay them $100 a month, I am safe. I'd hate to miss the next episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey so I will keep writing those checks. Please share this news with everyone you know who owns a television. We can't make up for the time our government has lost by not spreading the word, but we can start to make a difference now.

A Miracle Monosaccharide

I'm having a hard time finding inspiration lately, but finally I have something worth sharing with the internet world. I recently was made aware of the cure for one of lifes most nasty and disabling self-induced illnesses - the hangover. I've been having Hallelujah moments every weekend since a friend let me in on a little secret = Glucose prevents hangovers. Technically it doesn't cure them because when you take glucose you don't even get one. It's like you never ingested those 6 rum and cokes or that last red bull and vokda shot (I'm talking in general...nothing I write reflects upon my actual habits or behavior).

I did a bit of googling and found some tried and true research on this very topic. All this time it's been at my fingertips and I was ignorantly suffering through my Saturday and Sunday afternoons (not every one...just those few random occasions). Can you imagine what college would have been like had I, I mean people in general, known about this?! It's mind-boggling! I'm not even going to talk about those international weekends we all spent enjoying the sights and sounds of beautiful Windsor, ON. It's almost cruel that doctors aren't legally obligated to tell you about this as soon as you turn 21 (or 19 for our neighbors to the north). Don't take my word for it though - here's what some website called Health News has to say about it:

"Once you start drinking, the body stores the alcohol in your system which is why the effects can come on strong and last for hours. The alcohol you let absorb into your body disrupts the production of glucose (natural sugar) and makes your liver work overtime which explains the feeling of sluggishness you receive upon waking up, among the many other symptoms already mentioned. Glucose feeds the brain and accounts for the weakness encountered after your body has been taken over by the drowning qualities of alcohol."

It's nature's all natural organic preventative! And you can buy it at your local grocery store! You can find it right in the medicine aisle with the diabetes medications. I haven't actually bought any and keep bumming it off people like a bad habit, but it's there and just waiting to be discovered. There is even a pretty solid little factoid on the Hangover wikipedia page:

A 1976 research has come to the conclusion that "The results indicate that both fructose and glucose effectively inhibit the metabolic disturbances induced by ethanol but they do not affect the symptoms or signs of alcohol intoxication and hangover."

Translation: take it before drinking and you're golden.

In my recent experience, if you take one or two of these little (alka-seltzer sized) orange flavored tablets after one or two drinks, your symptoms will either be non-existent or greatly reduced. They are actually kind of delicious because, well, they obviously taste like sugar and sugar is delicious. I liken it to a giant Smartie with life-saving abilities. Now, I need to give credit where credit is so completely due. The glucose didn't fall out of the sky like manna from heaven - it came to us on the advice of our friend Ben Davis. He apparently learned about it during a top secret military campaign in a land where the glucose flows like honey. I'm not sure where that is, but I'm glad he was able to bring his well-earned knowledge back with him and share it with us glucose-deprived casual drinkers. The world will be a better place because of it and my couch will miss me on Saturday afternoons.

So next time you're planning a night on the town, just remember to play it safe. Take your glucose.