This Is How You Promote Girls Soccer

Forget Mia Hamm And Brandi Chastain.

Why focus on the beauty, grace, and inspiration of a sport when you can focus on girls in shorts attacking one another brutally??





That pigtail throwdown is brutal. Now that's entertainment! (/sad state of today's youth, etc. etc.)

#27, Let The Ticker-Tape Parade Commence



[[NOTE: Get Your Tickets To City Hall Plaza, HERE]]

I was in a ridiculously crowded bar last evening (Blind Pig, on 14th Street) when Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer in the history of the game, closed out the New York Yankees 27th World Series Championship.

The atmosphere was electric. With every windup came the quickly accelerating claps and stomps that have become the traditional last sound opposing batters hear right before a two-strike cut fastball sends them back to the dugout. When that harmless grounder was scooped up by Robbie Cano, and shoveled to Mark Teixeira at first, you could feel the bar momentarily leave the ground.

The Yankees Win!! Thhheeee Yankees Win!!!!!!

My friend Jay was at the game. I had chosen a tragic, mist soaked Game 1. I hate that bastard right now.

I plan to go to the ticker-tape parade tomorrow, and if your do too, here's some things you should know:

First, an excellently illustrated blog post on the importance of getting there EARLY: The Anatomy of A NYC Parade.

Second, a parade primer:


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Third, the parade route map:


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And finally, practical advice from around the interweb on how to land a choice spot:

This Will Not Happen To You: Best Parade Ever (Seriously)

One Man's Good Spot: Broadway nr. John St.

Live Blog Of The Giants 2008 Parade: He gets there at 9:21, and that's cutting it close.


My First Ticker Tape Parade They get there around 9:00.


Could This Person See Anything? "Toomer, I Think"

"People were already lined up in front of Trinity Church this morning when I left for work and cars were rolling down Broadway honking incessently – all 4 hours before the Giants even showed up."

This is from the Mayor's Office:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced today that the City will hold a public ticket giveaway at 2:00 PM today through 311, NYC.gov and Twitter for the ceremony honoring the 2009 World Series Champion New York Yankees at City Hall Plaza on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 1:00 PM. The 1:00 PM ceremony, where Mayor Bloomberg will present the Yankees with Keys to the City, will follow the ticker-tape parade up the Canyon of Heroes that begins at 11:00 AM. The sidewalks lining the parade route along Broadway from Battery Place to Chambers Street are open to all members of the public, and the City will set up a large screen near City Hall Park for members of the public to watch the subsequent ceremony. There is very limited space on City Hall plaza for the ceremony itself.

The City will conduct a public giveaway for 500 tickets to the ceremony on Thursday, November 5th from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM through www.NYC.gov/parade and 311. People will also be able to access the entry form through the New York City Mayor's Office Twitter page: twitter.com/NYCMayorsOffice. New Yorkers 18 years and over will have an opportunity to enter the giveaway by visiting www.NYC.gov/parade or calling 311 and selecting the Parade Giveaway menu option. There will not be an opportunity to enter the giveaway before 2:00 PM, and it will end promptly at 4:00 PM. Entrants may only enter once and request two tickets, and will be asked to give their name, email address and phone number in order to enter. Members of the public can become a follower of the New York City Mayor's Office Twitter page by visiting twitter.com/NYCMayorsOffice.

Get There Early, People. Otherwise, don't bother.

Conflict Of Interest

Never before have two of my interests collided so tragically. The final season of Lost, the greatest show ever made, will be preempted for two weeks because of the Winter Olympics, a sporting extravaganza I once attended in Lillehammer, Norway and love to watch as well (I once pretended to be a speed skater to pick up a chick... it failed miserably).

Can't the creators of Lost find some solution other than stopping the season for two weeks? Like maybe they can do some crossover episode in which Hurley attempts the luge in order to escape the Others, and John Locke shows off his deadly accuracy while biathlon-ing through an ice age version of the mysterious island?

Hey, there was a polar bear on Lost once. And Ben Linus does look bad-ass in a parka.


If Ben could push this...


... then couldn't he push this?

I'm just sayin, lets be creative here. Maybe change the time slot for those two weeks of Lost to coincide with a Winter Olympics event no one really wants to watch, like Curling. It's shuffleboard on ice, people! You don't watch shuffleboard, do you?

Yeah yeah. I know, keep dreamin. Bob Costas better bring his A game.

Weed For Kids With Autism??!

I saw this article today and was completely horrified. The author, a teacher at Brown University (so much for the Ivy League), admits to doping her nine year old autistic son because she can't deal with his tantrums.

My sister has autism. A severe case similar to this author's child. And my parents and my sister's teachers dealt with years of her tantrums through traditional therapies, which, while long, frustrating, and often-times grueling, have helped my sister learn to live life in spite of the limitations autism attempts to place on her.

The author of this piece didn't have the patience or time for that. Her solution was to drug up her 9-year-old... basically, keep her high all day so she didn't act out. Because the author saw her child as a problem, and not, well, a child, she didn't have any issues with this.

Let me make this analogy: Say your baby keeps you up at night all hours with crying. A traditional parent would rock the baby back to sleep, give it a bottle, play music, read another bedtime story until the child finally went back to sleep, even if it came at the cost of their own slumber. But the author of this piece would probably fill a baby bottle with a couple shots of Southern Comfort and make their baby drink till she passed out from drunkeness. Problem solved!!!!

This author is getting her child high... because it makes him easier to deal with. It's hard to get an autistic child to swallow pills, or undergo therapy. But give a kid with autism a cookie? They'll eat it right up. And then it's easy to get a high child to do just about anything... like Jaycee Dugard's kidnappers discovered.

What a horrific person!

The author wrote a part 2 presenting evidence of how pot has helped her child. For instance, he smiles more! But then again, she's not concerned with helping her child adapt to the world and gain some sense of independence. Rather, she is perfectly content to make her child a drug-dependent invalid, who will go his whole life not learning how to live with his condition, but instead, how to live in a cloudy daze.

Her concern is with a happy child. What if all parents tried to make their children happy in the same way? Maybe my mom could have fed me pot every day since childhood. I'd be pretty happy... at least until the drugs started to wear off and I realized I was a pothead still living with my mom at age 27.

What happens when the marijuana runs dry? The author better hope it never happens. Because she'll be left with a child who hasn't learned, hasn't grown, and hasn't adapted to cope in the world, despite his limitations. She'll be left with a kid begging for his pot.

She's learned to control her kid with drugs. Congrats.

Bon Voyage!

I'm off to Paris for a week. So the blog will go quiet (yes, more than it has already). But feel free to take this time to look back and bask in almost 8 years of Adam's Life (several of which have been erased for security purposes). Like my rants. Or Guest Blogger Robbie Republican. You can recall the time I met a weird girl at Macy's. Or you can just marvel that its been more than a year since the virgin shark was killed, and the apocalypse hasn't yet happened.

PETA Kills Pets????

This was very disturbing: PETA kills 95% of its pets.

Of course, I don't really take a figure like that at face value. And neither should you. Any intelligent person would immediately wonder... what's the source??

Well, five minutes of digging revealed that the information comes from the Center for Consumer Freedom:

The CCF has drawn harsh criticism for having taken its startup funding from the Philip Morris tobacco company and for lobbying on behalf of the fast food, meat, and tobacco industries while representing consumers.

Some groups the CCF has targeted have questioned its ethics and legitimacy. The president of the American Federation of Teachers referred to the CCF's leader as "a shameless lobbyist who has shilled for pesticide, alcohol and tobacco companies." A USA Today journalist said that they should change the name of their website to FatForProfit.com. It has also been criticized for its efforts to portray groups such as the Humane Society of the United States as "violent" and "extreme," and for its opposition to banning the use of trans fats. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has also campaigned against the CCF's validity as a non-profit tax exempt charitable organization, filing an IRS complaint in 2004 attacking the CCF's claims that its advocacy campaigns were "educational" in nature.

That's from Wikipedia. Yeah, I know. But this was five minutes of digging. And the Wikipedia entry rings of truth, while the PETA claim continues to sound ridiculous.

The CCF claims to have received their information from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. They post documents they claim are from 2007, revealing the deaths.

However, when I checked the records from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (you can do it too, just visit their website-- no "freedom of information act request" needed), it tells a different story.

The CCF claims PETA received 1997 pets, and killed 1815 of them. However, according to the VDACS, PETA actually received 8362 animals... and euthanized 1815 of them. That's a pretty big discrepancy.

I wonder why that is...

Hmm...

Maybe it's because an organization that's sole mission is to discredit "liberal" organizations is lying? Nah, can't be.

Look, some PETA people are certifiable. But then make that argument. Say that they value animals over humans. Okay. But don't make up lies that they sport-kill Fidos. That's just not gonna help your cause.

30 Awesome Inventions



Life Magazine gets it totally wrong. They have a list of the 30 "Dumb Inventions," but to my mind, these are all awesome.

I mean, how pimp are these illuminated tires??

And a Clive Sinclair's Mini-TV idea? How is that dumb? Isn't it an ahead-of-its time iPod nano?

Life, you're dumb. All these ideas are the coolest things ever. Including the Yodel analyzer.