A Truly Defining Comment

Today, after going food shopping at Nacional, we came home hungry. I had bought this outrageously great bread call Pan Kimbo w/Cheese. It's kind of a twisted loaf of really soft yellow dough with cheese embedded in it. It's the best bread for ham and cheese sandwiches and makes an incredible french toast. When I make french toast with this bread I always cut the pieces really thick. To give you an idea how thick I cut it, I needed 5 eggs for the 4 pieces that I made today. I didn't do such a good job cutting the first piece. It came out kind of crooked,  so I ate that piece dry while I cooked the other 4. I gave Massiel the first two slices and then cooked my two. When I finished cooking I joined Massiel at the table. She was almost done. I realized that I had too much and cut a small piece off one of mine and tried to give it to her. Understand that Massiel can eat. Her answer showed a lot about her. She said she didn't want the extra piece. Not because she was too full, but rather because, in her words, "I'm too tired to chew".

It's That Time, In Case You Didn't Know

I moved here permanently in September 1999.
When I got here one of the first things that I noticed was the Christmas lights.
They were everywhere; stores, houses, businesses. Everywhere. As an American I am used to Thanksgiving as the kickoff for Christmas. Apparently these are hard times here. Today is October 10 and there are no lights anywhere.

First To Criticize

You can't only say bad things.

Two months ago I got my oil changed at a place called Lubri in Santiago. I paid for it and then as an afterthought I bought new windshield wipers. I gave the cashier 1000 pesos. I forgot to get my change and left immediately for Punta Cana.
When I got home I received a call from the cashier at Lubri telling me that I had forgotten my change. She said that she would hold it till I came back. She told me her name, Sarah Polanco. She wasn't there, but they called her at home. She told them where the money was, and they gave it to me. No hassle, nothing.

Dominican Cars

I showed the top picture to some locals and they thought this was one of the nicest cars that they have ever seen.

The hooker is sitting in the back seat of the car in the bottom photo. They just drive around until they find a customer, set up the bed, and do their business.

That's Fucked Up

I'm watching the movie Grown Ups. There's a scene involving a little girl losing her tooth.
Her mother, without realizing it, lets on that there is no tooth fairy. The Spanish translatio for tooth fairy was El Raton Perez. El Raton Perez? Perez the Rat?

That's fucked up!!!!!


Even better:

I just showed this post to Massiel and she told me that until I told her the name she remembered that when she lost a tooth before she would go to sleep she would say, "Ratoncito, Ratoncito, aqui te dejo mi diente para que me des uno nuevo.

Life In Modern Times

It's really difficult sometimes to live in a world where technology has passed you by. I am pretty good with some things, but others leave me bewildered. It's like my car. I know how to get in, lock the doors, turn on the ignition and drive. That's it. I know how to find websites on my computer. Look, I found this place didn't I? But I really only know how to drive the computer, nothing else.
Massiel brought back an IPad from New York on Tuesday. Wednesday we went to turn in our old phones because our plan allows us to change phones yearly for next to nothin. I got what I always wanted, an IPhone. In order to enable it you have to download this, install that and I have no clue how to do these things. Even the tutorials leave me lost.  I have the phone now for 24 hours and I can make calls and that's it.

I just walked into the bedroom and said, "I hate to be computer stupid". Massiel asked, "What do you mean you hate to be computer?"

A Life Influenced Too Strongly By "Seinfeld"

Went to a luncheon today. Sat next to someone with an advanced case of " The Jimmy Legs". At first I thought it was a motor under the floor where I was sitting. Then I realized what it was.
The same person showed me something new which was actually a great idea. Again from a Seinfeld episode where George is confronted by someone at a funeral for "double dipping"; that is, taking a chip, putting it in the dip, biting off the part that has salsa on it and then putting the rest of the chip back in the dip. Kind of disgusting if you think about it, even though you see it happen all the time. The new method which works especially well if the salsa/dip has pieces of something (tomatoes in salsa, cheese in olive oil, etc.) that you want to get in your mouth. This is brilliant in its simplicity but really effective. Just take the piece of bread, chip, or whatever, and break it into two parts. Put one in each hand, put both pieces in the dip and push them towards each other. Voila!!!, a full chip.

Why Should I Be The Only One To Cry?

Op-Ed Columnist


Rachel’s Last Fund-RaiserBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: August 10, 2011











Perhaps every generation of geezers since Adam and Eve has whined about young people, and today is no different. Isn’t it clear that in contrast to our glorious selves, kids these days are self-absorbed Facebook junkies just a pixel deep?
No, actually that’s wrong at every level. This has been a depressing time to watch today’s “adults,” whose talent for self-absorption and political paralysis makes it difficult to solve big problems. But many young people haven’t yet learned to be cynical. They believe, in a wonderfully earnest way, in creating a better world.
In the midst of this grim summer, my faith in humanity has been restored by the saga of Rachel Beckwith. She could teach my generation a great deal about maturity and unselfishness — even though she’s just 9 years old, or was when she died on July 23.



Rachel lived outside Seattle and early on showed a desire to give back. At age 5, she learned at school about an organization called Locks of Love, which uses hair donations to make wigs for children who have lost their own hair because of cancer or other diseases. Rachel then asked to have her long hair shorn off and sent to Locks of Love.



“She said she wanted to help the cancer kids,” her mother, Samantha Paul, told me. After the haircut, Rachel announced that she would grow her hair long again and donate it again after a few years to Locks of Love. And that’s what she did.



Then when she was 8 years old, her church began raising money to build wells in Africa through an organization called charity:water. Rachel was aghast when she learned that other children had no clean water, so she asked to skip having a ninth birthday party. In lieu of presents, she asked her friends to donate $9 each to charity:water for water projects in Africa.



Rachel’s ninth birthday was on June 12, and she had set up a birthday page on the charity:water Web site with a target of $300. Alas, Rachel was able to raise only $220 — which had left her just a bit disappointed.



Then, on July 20, as Rachel was riding with her family on the highway, two trucks collided and created a 13-car pileup. Rachel’s car was hit by one of the trucks, and although the rest of her family was unhurt, Rachel was left critically injured.



Church members and friends, seeking some way of showing support, began donating on Rachel’s birthday page — charitywater.org/Rachel — and donations surged past her $300 goal, and kept mounting. As family and friends gathered around Rachel’s bedside, they were able to tell her — even not knowing whether she couldn’t hear them — that she had exceeded the $47,544 that the singer Justin Bieber had raised for charity:water on his 17th birthday.



“I think she secretly had a crush on him, but she would never admit it,” her mom said. “I think she would have been ecstatic.”



When it was clear that Rachel would never regain consciousness, the family decided to remove life support. Her parents donated her hair a final time to Locks of Love, and her organs to other children. Word spread about Rachel’s last fund-raiser.



Contributions poured in, often in $9 increments, although one 5-year-old girl sent in the savings in her piggy bank of $2.27. The total donations soon topped $100,000, then $300,000. Like others, I was moved and donated. As I write this, more than $850,000 has been raised from all over the world, including donations from Africans awed by a little American girl who cared about their continent.



“What has been so inspiring about Rachel is that she has taught the adults,” said Scott Harrison, the founder of charity:water. “Adults are humbled by the unselfishness of this little girl.”



Yet this is a story not just of one girl, but of a generation of young people working creatively to make this a better world. Mr. Harrison is emblematic of these young people. Now 35, he established charity:water when he was 30, and it has taken off partly because of his mastery at social media. (He’s not as experienced in well-drilling, so the wells are actually dug by expert groups like International Rescue Committee.)



Youth activism has a long history, but this ethos of public service is on the ascendant today — and today’s kids don’t just protest against injustices, as my contemporaries did, but many are also remarkable problem-solvers.



As for Ms. Paul, she’s planning a trip on the anniversary of her daughter’s death next year to see some of the wells being drilled in Africa in her daughter’s name. “It’ll be overwhelming to see Rachel’s wells,” she said, “to see what my 9-year-old daughter has done for people all over the world, to meet the people she has touched.”



Rachel Beckwith, R.I.P., and may our generation learn from yours.



•

I Apologize For Not Waiting For Tomorrow

It will certainly be more timely. Here is one of my favorite lines from Rodney Dangerfield:

I just came back from a pleasure trip. Just took my wife to the airport (bus stop, in my case).

I May Have Posted This Previously, BUT

Dominican Parking

The idea is to pull your car in using the minimum effort possible. If that means that your front wheels are within the space and your rear wheels are not, so be it. This is so common.

Exactly Who Do They Think They Are Fooling?

 AND:       Don't they have anyone who knows how to spell?

Great Line

Saw this on TV last night. A guy keeps referring to his second wife as "The Sequel". At one point he says to his friend that he can't understand why this second marriage didn't work out. His friend says, "Maybe if you didn't always call her The Sequel it might have worked out."

An Apology To All Of You Out There Not Reading This/Joachim Zahn

At various times I come up with incredibly clever ideas for this blog. Great jokes, stories from my past, current events observations, and job related tales. This post is one of them.

It is, however, the only one that I took the time to write down immediately upon thinking of it. Sometimes I think of something, and by the time I take out my Blackberry to make a note about it, I have forgotten it. It's a short term memory problem. I usually carry some paper with me. Sometimes I forget to take it with me. Those seem to be the times when I think of something clever.

And Yet:

Sometimes events of years ago come to mind. They seem to stay with me indefinitely. I was sitting next to one of my dealers, Suyeiki, early one evening and a Country and Western video came on. She said that she really liked the music a lot, but had no idea who was singing. I looked up at the screen and thought I saw that the singer's first name was Joachim. I went closer to the screen at the close of the video and saw that his name was actually Jason, but the Joachim name got me thinking. I started to remember back to the mid 60's. I used to hang out in a Preppie bar called Mike Malkan's. Mike was a whole other story, and a fascinating one at that. This: http://books.google.com/books?id=SsEBAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=mike+malkan's&source=bl&ots=jqnHHXap21&sig=cJoA58h5Ucr5uzgX4MjAZfXvVtY&hl=en&ei=dCRATo-jJ8TV0QH5reCcBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mike%20malkan's&f=false will give you an idea.

I discovered Malkan's in the mid 60's. I used to go there every night, sometime to drink, but more importantly to socialize. It was an amazing place, filled with celebrities, mini celbrities and wannabes. I was considered a regular. One night one of the girls that I had gone out with, also a regular, introduced me to a new friend of hers. His name was Joachim Zahn. He lived in Germany and he was visiting for the summer. Joachim had a summer job working in the Mercedes Benz dealership in Fort Lee, New Jersey. This was right over the George Washington Bridge, about 25 minutes from midtown at non rush hours. He was quite handsome, spoke very good English and was a very pleasant kid. His only bad quality was that he insisted on telling everyone that his father was Chairman of the Board of Mercedes Benz. I would introduce him to friends and I would always say something like, "Joachim says his father is Chairman of the Board, although if I were in Germany I would probably tell people that my father was General Motors." I could live with his wanting to have people think he was something special. We went out on double dates many times. I was driving a Cadillac at the time. My father had always wanted one and finally he bought one. I'll never forget that he didn't want to spend too much on the car so it had no air conditioning. Joachim, working at the dealership, only had experience driving Mercedes, probably just around the parking lot. He was fascinated by my car and wanted to drive it. I knew that my father would kill me if he found out, but one night we made the switch. He drove the Cadillac and I drove a two door sportscar, that was later called the 450SL but I am not sure of the model number for that year. There were no problems and no incidents with the switch. I would often call him at work to make arrangements for the upcoming evening. They would answer the phone, Mercedes Benz Fort Lee, I would ask for Joachim Zahn and they would say, "Just a minute and then he would pick up. That is, until September. I called one day in September and ask for Joachim Zahn and the operator said, "Which one?" I said, "What do you mean which one? How many are there? The operator very politely explained that Joachim Zahn, the CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF MERCEDES BENZ, had come to visit with his son. With whom did I wish to speak?

End of story; I was went to dinner at the Plaza Hotel a couple of night later with both Joachim Zahns.

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree

I think that I wrote along time ago about crying at some movies, even comedies. The first one I think that I ever really cried at was BIG starring Tom Hanks. There's a scene where Tom's character goes back to see the playground of his youth. A baseball rolls his way and when he throws it back one of the kids yells, "Thanks, mister". He's not a mister, he's still a kid who just looks much older. But he can go back to being a kid and every time I see this scene I start to cry. I am still a kid, but I can't go back.

Anyway this is just one of many movies that break me down. Today I was watching a real tear jerker, Field of Dreams. Michele, my daughte,r called and we were discussing my crying and she confessed that when she watches BIG and the baseball scene is coming up she starts to cry knowing that if I were there I would be crying.

Never Before Have I Been Called Such A Name

I said something to Massiel, and she said, "You're so innocent".

I've been called a lot of names but never that.

That was a first for me.

I Have Always Felt That Dominican Women Know How To Display Their Breasts Better Than Anyone

 Even the mannequins

I'm Not The Kind Of Guy To Name Names

But if I was, I would name this post after you.

Sometimes a person with an inferiority complex should have the complex because he actually inferior. Consequently it is not a complex, it is reality.

It's Not Every Day

Last night one Poker game slowed to a stop as someone passed around a picture of his favorite fighting chicken and the other players paused to admire it.

Still The Best

http://i48.tinypic.com/jh6048.gif

The Stars At Night, Are Big And Bright

Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap

Deep in the heart of Texas. Also here in the DR. Tonight we  (Massiel, the girls, Jessica and Kiara, and Grandma) went out for dinner and when we came back we sat out by the pool. I got to do one of may favorite things, which is to look up on a starry night at the millions of stars in the sky.

Best Line Of The Evening

It used to be if you wanted to see a woman's ass you had to open her panties. Now,if you want to see a woman's panties you have to open her ass.

3 Penis Rule Update

I am pretty observant. I pride myself on it. I always tell people that as a Poker player I have learned to watch what people do. This applies to all facets of my life including going to take a leak in a public toilet. I specifically mention leak because there is no way in the world that I am going to do the OTHER THING in a public toilet. It would literally have to be coming out of me for me to consider sitting in a public bathroom to take a dump.
Anyway, working in a big casino like Hard Rock, I get to go to whizz a couple of times per night. I am just amazed at the number of people who's parents never taught them to wash their hands after using the bathroom. Tonight I realized that a builder could save a fortune by only putting in one sink for every 25 urinals and toilets. Even then there would never be a line to use the sink. Amazing.

Apropos the above, last weekend I was in Santo Domingo. I went to the Nacional Supermarket and had to use the bathroom. Above each urinal was a sign in Spanish that read, "the Lava manos (the wash hands...that's what they call sinks here) are only to wash your hands. Of course, there was some guy taking a full bath in one of the sinks. I have seen this more times than I care to remember. I actually know the sequence. Interestingly this rarely occurs after going to the bathroom. Some guy just enters the bathroom, starts to wash his face, shampoos his hair (with or without soap), takes off his tee shirt and washes his upper body. Mercifully I have never seen anyone take off his pants to finish off.

I Don't Know Where I Have Been, But I Might Be Back

Massiel and I had to go to pick up a ticket at the Santo Domingo Airport. There was a young guy there wearing a great tee shirt. It was brown with orange lettering that said, "I'm probably lying". I asked the guy where he got it and he didn't speak English. I knew right away he had no idea of what the shirt said and when I asked him, in Spanish, he said that he thought it had something to do with no problem. I told him what it said and he looked confused, like pissed or something. When I asked him again where he had gotten it he told me that it had been a gift from someone who had come to visit him from New York.

On Age

Working at the Hard Rock I am constantly in contact with music.
For many years I have told people that I am the oldest living Rock n' Roller.
Of course it's not true. Some of my favorites (The Rolling Stones,the surviving Beatles and others of that era are all a couple of years older than I am.
As I grew up I was always aware that there were an awful lot of people who knew nothing about Rock and Roll music.
What I didn' realize was that they were all older than me.
Now that I am one of the oldest people on earth I have had an amazing awakening.
I see all these dorky hotel guests, people who look as though the only song they know is "Happy Birthday" and they all consider themselves to be rockers.

New York Trip Report

Spent 5 days in New York and not once did I find myself thinking about someone else, "What a fucking moron".

My New Favorite Story

Leaving Santo Domingo on the way to Punta Cana you have to pay a toll. It costs 30 Pesos. They have exact change lanes of several different types.
One is for the Dominican version of Easy Pass. There are probably 25 people in the whole country that have it.
Then there are Exact Change lanes which have somone sitting there to make change for you so that you can go through.
Then there is a real Exact Change lanes. Apparently the rule is "have exact change or die"
This lane is located right next to the one where thay make change.
I'm in the exact change lane with about 8 cars behind me when the car in front of me gets to the toll machine and the driver realizes that he does not have the exact change. The passenger jumps out with a 100 peso bill and starts to walk to the next lane to get change from the person making change. The army person, stationed at the toll is busy talking with the "change" woman. When he sees the passenger walking towards him he tells her to get back in her car. When she explains that she needs change he menacingly lifts his rifle (just a little, but enough to get his message out) and tells her to get back in the car. He then insists that they back their car out of the toll, which is, of course, the most difficult of all possible solutions because now myself and the 8 other cars behind me all have to back up as well. He says that he doesn't care, BACK UP!!!
So I hop out of my car, give the 30 pesos to the driver and everyone goes about their business.

$5 Snapple

No thanks. Not that thirsty. I am flying to New York.
I am waiting here at the Punta Cana airport. I stopped at the food stand, picked a bottle of Snapple from the cooler.
The cashier told me $5. I told him no thank you.

Well at least it got me to post again.

it's Official

As of this coming Monday, February 7, I am really fucking old.

And I hate it.

Think He Is Sexist?

I was talking with someone about a woman I knew. I said that I thought that she was an amazing worker.
I said that you only have to mention something once or ask her to do something once an it gets done immediately.
My friend looked at me and said ,"Yeah, sounds like she's a man of a woman"