So I turn on the history channel the other day and Robocop is talking about the Roman Empire.

So bizzare. 

It turns out that, according to the Daily News, " Weller, 58, who holds a master's degree in Roman and Renaissance art and is working toward a Ph.D., has become one of Syracuse University's most popular professors."

You know what he says at the end of each class?

"Thank you for your cooperation."

Josh sent me an e-mail today...   

Check this girl out - she's perfect for you...

http://www.yourperfectgirl.com/default.html?playlist=161_161_93_51_15_343

Ladies and gentlemen, the search is over.

I knew in all those RSS subs, there had to be someone like this...    :)

Make your own at www.yourperfectgirl.com.

Did you know there was a Guinness record for riding the whole NYC subway system... stopping at all 468 stations?   Well, 6 guys from Regis High School in New York City did, and they smashed that record by an hour and a half, doing it in just under 25 hours. 

I told my friend about it and she said, "That's such a Regis guy thing to do."  If you know any of us, you'd have to agree.  :)

Nice work Bill Amarosa, Brooklyn's own Brian Brockmeyer, Stefan Karpinski, Andrew Wier, Jason Laska and Michael Boyle!

One thing I haven't meantioned a lot is that I like to play pool.  I tend to play at Amsterdamn on the Upper West Side or Slate on 21st.  I'm a bit streaky, but I can hold my own.  Perhaps nextNY should do a pool tourney sometime.. 

I found this on College Humor:

I have a closet with three Container Store shelves, each with two large folded piles on it.  The piles are:

• Nice t-shirts
• Grey and black t-shirts that used to be nice, but are maybe a little faded, so they're good for wearing underneath button down shirts
• Decent gym t-shirts
• Not so nice gym t-shirts and things with sleeves cut off
• Gym shorts and pants
• Random shirts with specific usage, like ZogSports t-shirts, softball jerseys, etc.

I have no sweaters.  I always lock the bathroom door, even when I'm in the apartment alone.  I bounce my right leg up and down when I'm sitting without even noticing it.  I hate soccer.  I fall asleep before my head hits the pillow and would easily sleep uninterrupted for 12 hours every night if it wasn't for my alarm clock.  I do not trust the snooze button...  I reset the alarm even just five minutes from now just to be on the safe side.  I have a fear of heights.  I'm eating craisins right now.  I once broke down in a U-Haul truck in Mechanicsville, PA.  Ironically, there was no one around to help us until the next day.  I nearly pass out over needles.  I have a discoloration on my right hand where I tore off a big chunk of skin playing street football when I was 15.  I broke the toilet in my old apartment by standing on the tank to weatherproof the windows.  The whole tank tore from the floor and toppled over.  I managed to get it back, but it was sitting precariously for a month before I left.  Seattle is the next major US city I would like to visit that I haven't been to. 

When I yawn, my eyes tear uncontrollably.  That's my que to go to bed.

If no one ever tells you about something, you're likely not going to find out about it until after you probably should know better.  It happens.  You'll get what I mean when you read this...   Please feel free to add your own!

1. When I used to hear marathon times when I was younger, I'd always thing, "Wow...  4 hours.. that's way longer than I could ever run."  But, I knew that logic dictated that if you ran faster, it would take less time.  Time being the bottleneck there, I imagined that if you just ran the marathon really really fast... like as fast as you could, it would be a lot easier to finish, because it would take so much less time.  Why was everyone just jogging?  How come no one has ever tried this??
2. One time my mom noticed my hands at dinner when I was like eight.  She said, "Wow, you have really slender fingers!  You should be a pianist!"   If you say pianist too quickly to an eight year old boy who had never heard the word, they think it has something to do with their little boy parts.   I was so embarrassed...   What could my mom be thinking of at the dinner table that slender fingers could be an advantage for?   "A what!?!"   Oh...  pi-an-ist.
3. There are no male cows.   There are no female bulls.  I thought that cows and bulls were seperate animals until my senior year of high schoool.  Male and female cows.  Male and female bulls.  Makes perfect sense to a city kid.
4. My first grade teacher, Sister Ann, told us that you couldn't digest gum and fingernails, so you shouldn't swallow either.  Wow... couldn't digest it at all?  Jeez.  I imagined that if you didn't know better, eventually, they'd have to surgically remove this big gum and fingernail ball from your stomach, and that the gum and fingernail ball was the most disgusting object I could ever conceive of.
5. When I was like 10 or 11 and dating and liking girls started to become a topic of conversation, I was really confused about something.  In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, people used to call making out "going with."   No, not like the 50's version of dating or seeing each other as in "they're going with each other"...  I mean, literally the act of making out was "going with".   A boy and a girl would take a walk around the block and we'd be all dying to know if they "went with each other."   The problem was that I didn't really know what exactly we were referring to.  I mean, I knew about a kiss and I had some loose conception of what sex was... but anything that fell anywhere in between... no clue.   Where the hell were all these people going?  Where they having sex?  The funniest thing was that, in the seventh grade, the first time I ever really went with someone (which turned out to just be some open mouth and a bit of tongue) I told my friend about it and he goes, "And you guys were naked!?"    Apparently I wasn't the only one that didn't know what the deal was either.

If no one ever tells you about something, you're likely not going to find out about it until after you probably should know better.  It happens.  You'll get what I mean when you read this...   Please feel free to add your own!

1. When I used to hear marathon times when I was younger, I'd always thing, "Wow...  4 hours.. that's way longer than I could ever run."  But, I knew that logic dictated that if you ran faster, it would take less time.  Time being the bottleneck there, I imagined that if you just ran the marathon really really fast... like as fast as you could, it would be a lot easier to finish, because it would take so much less time.  Why was everyone just jogging?  How come no one has ever tried this??
2. One time my mom noticed my hands at dinner when I was like eight.  She said, "Wow, you have really slender fingers!  You should be a pianist!"   If you say pianist too quickly to an eight year old boy who had never heard the word, they think it has something to do with their little boy parts.   I was so embarrassed...   What could my mom be thinking of at the dinner table that slender fingers could be an advantage for?   "A what!?!"   Oh...  pi-an-ist.
3. There are no male cows.   There are no female bulls.  I thought that cows and bulls were seperate animals until my senior year of high schoool.  Male and female cows.  Male and female bulls.  Makes perfect sense to a city kid.
4. My first grade teacher, Sister Ann, told us that you couldn't digest gum and fingernails, so you shouldn't swallow either.  Wow... couldn't digest it at all?  Jeez.  I imagined that if you didn't know better, eventually, they'd have to surgically remove this big gum and fingernail ball from your stomach, and that the gum and fingernail ball was the most disgusting object I could ever conceive of.
5. When I was like 10 or 11 and dating and liking girls started to become a topic of conversation, I was really confused about something.  In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, people used to call making out "going with."   No, not like the 50's version of dating or seeing each other as in "they're going with each other"...  I mean, literally the act of making out was "going with".   A boy and a girl would take a walk around the block and we'd be all dying to know if they "went with each other."   The problem was that I didn't really know what exactly we were referring to.  I mean, I knew about a kiss and I had some loose conception of what sex was... but anything that fell anywhere in between... no clue.   Where the hell were all these people going?  Where they having sex?  The funniest thing was that, in the seventh grade, the first time I ever really went with someone (which turned out to just be some open mouth and a bit of tongue) I told my friend about it and he goes, "And you guys were naked!?"    Apparently I wasn't the only one that didn't know what the deal was either.

"I feel like I... have nothing to conclude, despite having tons to say..." - K.S.

I'm listening to the Pretenders on my iPod singing the theme from the Living Daylights, which is a Bond movie I'm always torn about, because it has no sex and Timothy Dalton, but it has one of the best car scenes. I could use skiis, tire spikes, and a rocket motor on my Mustang...that would counter the rear wheel drive. You know what I just realized? Old men whose pants keep creeping up their torso as they get older aren't buying longer and longer pants...they're shrinking into the same size they've always worn. They're pulling 'em up that high so their 34" lengths aren't bunching up at the bottom. It's not so much a fashion problem as it is a posture and calcium deficiency issue. The Godfather theme is now playing. There's a really tall woman standing next to me...she must be 6'3". She's the tallest person in the car except for this one up front. If you're a guy who is really tall, it's like you got to some level in a videogame that no one else can get to. This woman is like the secret bonus level that all us normal sized guys can never get to. I was 5'11" at the end of my freshman year of high school...figured I'd get at least another two inches...nada. Didn't grow an inch after that. One more would have been nice. I was also 152 pounds. I don't remember feeling like a skinny guy, but I guess I must have been. I've always weighed myself. My grandmother has a bathroom scale that I would rush to everytime I got to her house. Kids love growing. I remember distinctly weighing 77 pounds, 85 pounds, 115... Right before I got to Union Square I was 192, but that was before I started biking to work and playing in all these leagues. By the end of that summer, I was down to 176, which I didn't like. Now I'm about 185. David Byrne playing My Fair Lady now. Canal St. Everytime I pass Canal, I think of how cool the ATTAP (Riffs) offices are. I need to move back into the city...and work right next door to my apt. I stopped to look around to find some thumbing inspiration... No one looks or is doing anything interesting at the moment. Actually, it's a really unremarkable subway crowd this morning. Lots of su doku and sleeping. Just caught the cover of the News...didn't some high school kid dress as Hitler last year. Don't we go through this every year? Didn't someone get eggshell in the eye or something more newsworthy?  Either way, whether he gets punished or not, the kid is an idiot and so are his parents.  Now, when you Google his name, forever, he'll be the Hitler kid.  Have fun getting a job, loser.  Its chilly in this car...the a/c is on. I'm excited to go to the gym...really love the NYSC on 35th and Madison.

Well, this is just bizzare...  A small "general aviation" plane flew into a building on 72nd and York.

A few apartments in the building are on fire...   details coming out.  Hope no one was home.

It’s as if your id had a typewriter. In a world where everything is
instant, the delaying and censoring mechanisms that contributed to a
civilized life are gone." - Maureen Dowd, NY Times, Oct. 7, 2006

(I don't subscribe to Times Select... or get the actual paper copy, God forbid... my friend Alicia sent this to me.)

The senior members of our team here at Oddcast are Israeli, so today, we got a little culture for the office related to the Jewish New Year...

Little kid and his dad at Pier 40 this morning...

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Here's the rest of what the WTC site is supposed to look like.  If we have to wait any longer, they'll have to retrofit parking on the roof for flying cars.

Two great comments by Gothamist readers:

"I, for one, welcome our new steel and glass monolithic overlords."

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Timeoutnewyork.tv is having a photo contest to have your NYC photos featured on the front page of their site.   Just tag your best NYC photos (horizontal only) timeoutnewyork.tv on Flickr and you're automatically entered.  There might be a free magazine subscription in there or something, too... not sure... the details aren't up yet.  Technically, it starts tomorrow, but here's your chance to get a head start.

Check out their site, too.... its pretty cool.

GothamGal has a though provoking post up about the insanity of carefully crafting over acheivers and getting kids into college today.  She says that we should drop the current system and look for a new way to screen students...  fewer tests, less pressure.

I do think that what is going on is insane, but anytime there's insanity, you don't have to get caught up in it.

When I was in high school, the average graduating SAT score for my class was 1350.  Now I hear its up over 1400...   average...  1400!   I was lucky because we all seemed to take a pretty healthy approach to it, but one could go nuts trying to test prep your way to a score like that.

If you need to take two test prep courses and hire a private tutor to get your kid to score a 1520, then, well, sorry, that kid just isn't a 1520 student.  I remember this guy in my freshmen year of college who used to study in the lounge about 10 hours a day to get a 3.7 and I just remember heading out the door with my baseball glove to have a catch and enjoy a nice day while he was studying.  If that was what it took to get the really high grades, well then I just wasn't going to be a great student... simple as that.

It was that kind of approach that I had in high school.  In hindsight, I probably could have worked harder, I admit, but it was where my head was at the time.  Pushing me wouldn't have helped.. .I had to push myself... which I did, big time, when I got to Fordham.   Yeah, so I went to Fordham, which was a good school, but it wasn't Harvard or Yale or Princeton.  However, I wouldn't be where I am today at another school.   Being at Fordham, close to the city, enabled me to intern at the GM pension fund during school.  It also meant that another Fordham grad who was at GM sort of took me under his wing, rather than the Harvard intern we had, because he felt like this guy would get everything he wanted anyway.  That led directly to my job in the private equity group, which led to Union Square Ventures, which led to Oddcast.   

If I was coming out of Harvard in '01, it wouldn't have been enough for me to just go to Harvard... I would have had to beat out all my own classmates for jobs.  When you go to a top school, you almost have to be the best there, too, because there will already be 5 or 6 Harvard resumes in for a job, and they're not going to interview all of you.

You don't have to go to a top ten school and you don't have to be a Goldman Sachs investment banker to be successful either.   Teach your kids to follow their own way at their own pace.  Of course, give them all the tools and encouragement to be their best, but don't push them to be more than they're mentally ready to handle.  I wasn't ready to take the lead in high school and I would have burned out very early had I tried.  I'm lucky that my parents were just happy I was in a good school and supportive of whatever I did.  They let me come around on my own terms.

Oh, and I wound up doing better than that kid who studied ten hours a day...  and I really do owe it mostly to my mental health.  In college, I really believe its really not about how hard you work, but more about how smart you work and how you handle stress.   Oh, and networking, too.  You'll never make good contacts in your field, which can take you a lot further than your GPA, if you're a big ball of stress that seems mentally unstable.

And then there were eight. 

Everything I learned in elementary school science seems to be a lie.   

Did you know there were more than three states of matter?   At first I learned about Plasma, making it four, but now it turns out there are a whole bunch of 'em.  That probably explains why if you leave ice cubes in the freezer long enough, they completely disappear.

I've been working really hard today, so I took a ten (err..  20...) minute break to make a Chuck Norris avatar for my sidebar.  More reasons to reorg the sidebar...    I gotta find a way to make him randomly repeat different Chuck Norris facts.

New York City snowfall tally as of this morning...   13 inches.  Dorean came by to play in the snow around 11 last night and we threw snow at each other like eight year olds and then went over to Carl Shulz Park.

Her dad built an igloo on 86th Street with his snowblower, and of course, I had to get in it.  The snow wasn't piled to high yet, as you can tell from my car, which we wrote on.  I think it continued through the night, though, and this is how things looked outside my window this morning.

____________________________________________________________________

I've posted about this before, but its come up again.  Last Election Day, I tried to doublecheck my polling place by e-mailing the NYC.gov website.  They finally got back to me in late January.

Well, today, they replied again, for good measure I suppose...

"SORRY FOR THE DELAY, YOUR POLL SITE IS:PS 290, LOCATED AT 311 E 82 ST."

And they want us to believe they'll figure out electronic voting without a hitch?