The Zeitgeist

      

Something like my green resin Adirondack chairs, bikes in China, the Tech Talk guys from MetroPCS and Oliver Perez the Mets’ $12 million persona non grata.

Back on The Bicycle, Back on the Porch

About six years ago having a had burning need to feel the wind in my hair, I ambled down to South Shore Bikes in Woodmere and purchased something from China (a country that knows something about bicycles with zillions of people using them to get around) with fuddy-duddy fatter tires, padded seat and shocks that makes no pretence than I am firmly ensconced in middle age. The only cool aspect of this bike is the jet black color and chrome accents.

Now in my adolescent youth, I owned a series of French-inspired “10-Speeds” (this bicycle has maybe 40, I think, and I use perhaps four of them) that looked straight out of “Breaking Away.” Before obtaining my license at 17 I used to ride anywhere and everywhere, miles on end and without using my hands. I could navigate any traffic or terrain with both hands at my side or even eating ice cream, such was the measure of my teenage dexterity. Once I got behind the wheel of an unending series of cars however, bicycles were what Manhattan food delivery guys rode, not me.

As part of the “Battle of the Bulge” (a/k/a Middle Age Spread) I decided on more aerobic pursuits, so hence the bike purchase. Typically, once we get past mid-November, the bicycle remains in the garage and doesn’t reemerge until sometime about now – mid-March. I am proud to report that this past Sunday I made my Spring 2011 bicycle debut in that beautiful 55-degree day and promptly discovered that despite using the bike machines at the gym all winter that my knees were not in the least bit happy to be pedaling to Hewlett Neck. Now, I’m in reasonably good shape for a 52 year-old but there is no denying time. Clearly it will take a few weeks back on board to shake the cobwebs out so I can resume my routine ride from Woodsburgh through Hewlett Neck, with a stop at the Woodmere Town Dock to admire the clear vistas to Mount Garbage in Oceanside and the Long Beach skyline and then on to the back of Lawrence to soak in the mansions of the rich and famous on Ocean Avenue.

First Day of Spring

I was feeling so optimistic Sunday that I actually dragged out some chairs from the garage (and even cleaned them!) to put on my front porch where in nice weather I like to drink wine, read the paper and watch the geese poop all over the Woodmere Club fairways. Sunday’s chairs were of the molded plastic Adirondack variety which in Summer are consigned to the backyard. It takes real heat and warmth for me to put out the white wood Adirondack Rockers where I can truly morph into Bartles and James. Monday, on the first full day of Spring however, we were inundated with cold rain, clouds and 46 degrees. Wednesday and Thursday mornings was a smidge of January déjà vu all over again with snow on the lawn and all over my car. I thought we were done brushing snow off the car!? As I said last week, I need some sustained warm weather and this past week hasn’t been it. The weekend is not supposed to bring much relief either. Will someone please turn on the tanning machine and leave it on through October?

Metro PCS

About a month ago I switched my Blackberry from Verizon to MetroPCS. Why? No two year contracts. No contracts at all. My bill dropped from about $145 a month to $55 a month with unlimited web, email, text and phone to anywhere at anytime. That’s a $90 a month savings, or nearly $1,100 a year. That means more sushi for me and less lucre for Verizon. Happy to say that I’ve been happy with the service which has been 90 percent as good as Verizon for a whole lot less. On a family plan, you can get a phone with web and text for $35 a month. Taxes included. Good for the kids. They have a place near the Dunkin Donuts at Burnside and Rockaway. Something to think about especially if you own a bunch of phones.

Mets

The best $18 million the cash-strapped Mets have spent in years. That’s what it cost for the team to dump two of the loathed kings of bad Met karma that they let go of this week – namely the hapless Little League (and no insult meant to Little League) pitcher Ollie Perez and second baseman Luis Castillo, he of the “Let’s drop an easy pop fly in the ninth inning against the Yankees when we’re winning and can go home” variety. There is one last missing link left to purge the Mets from the miasma of the past four seasons – Carlos Beltran (whose knees are about as good as mine were last week on the bike) who can’t move and can’t hit but sure is getting paid a lot of money.

The Mets unbroken precipitous descent into the pits of baseball hell began in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game Seven of the 2006 National League Championship Series when Beltran, with two outs and bases loaded and with the tying run on first got struck out by St. Louis closer Adam Wainright on three pitches with Beltran getting caught looking as pitch three whizzed right by his head without him taking so much as a stab at it. I was at Shea that night. The air got sucked out of the stadium and the wind got knocked out of the Mets from that moment on. It was like the Curse of the Bambino for the Red Sox. Now, Carlos is a good guy (even if he’s a bit hobbled) but the fact is he’s the nexus point of all the Mets’ bad luck which was born at that awful moment in October 2006. Nothing the Mets did after that ever worked. Nearly all the dead wood from those days has been chopped away with the cutting of Perez and Castillo. Now is the time for another bold move – bring some young buck up from the minors to play right field and let’s have some fun watching an up-and-comer and not a faded star in his death throes.

The Zeitgeist

        

Ah, nothing like an old fashioned cast iron monster of a furnace to keep the house warm…

I Need 65° and I Need It Now.

Like many of you, I unfortunately burn oil to heat my home. I’ve got a 50-plus year-old beast of a burner down in my basement which probably emerged from the foundry at the same time as the boilers for the Titanic (which is also probably why it continues to chug along year after year, what with it being made from solid steel and not plastic). Come what may with the outside temperature or occasional puddles down in the nether reaches of my basement this burner keeps cranking out the heat and hot water, sending surges of old fashioned scalding hot steam to my 1920-vintage cast iron radiators.

Now when this steam engine was initially installed, I bet that home heating oil was five cents a gallon. Maybe they were even giving it away. Right now however, on the last bill from my dependable oil people, I see that the charge per gallon has risen to $3.94 and at 127 gallons came to over $500.  We have a story in this week’s issue about the ever escalating expense of oil and gasoline but you don’t need that to tell you that the cost of warmth and mobility are reaching new challenges to household cash flow management.

Yeah, I hear all the time about natural gas. The thing is, to remove the existing burner and put in new stuff costs something like $5,000 along with having legions of plumbers wreak havoc on my basement for a week. It would probably take three years for the natural gas savings (on years when there are savings versus oil) to pay for it all. The other issue for me is a deep set paranoia about being the one house in the Five Towns that gets blown to smithereens by a gas leak explosion (you see these all the time on TV, don’t tell me they don’t happen every year) with my being catapulted to kingdom come in the middle of the night courtesy of National Grid. Rational? Hardly. The real solution here to my heating angst is for the weather to finally climb north of 60 degrees for a sustained period and preferably above 65 so that heat becomes irrelevant.

The daffodils, crocuses and tulip tips peaking out from the now thawing ground are harbingers and teases of the balmy temperatures on the horizon. These past two winters here have been a real throwback to the winters of my youth in the 60s and 70s – real, deep cold combined with a lot of snow and ice. Unrelenting and unremitting. I’d like to send the bill for “global warming” over to Al Gore. Maybe he’d like to fill my oil tank. Having spent a week in Florida in February and blissfully missing one of our big storms has made me ponder just how much our area would be paradise if only we had an median temperature of 70.

Thankfully, we’re in the 50s most days now, which means the scarves and gloves are back in the closet, we’re wearing lighter coats, and come next week with the first day of Spring, the banishment of my corduroy pants to the back of the closet until next November. I love cords and the preppy-tweedy look and am excited to don them around Thanksgiving time but I have a rigidly inflexible fashion policy of no cords after March 21^st and no whites after September 22^nd. So, I’m hoping that with the cords put away, the flowers will yet reemerge and we’ll see 65 degrees which I need now not only to stop supporting Big Oil (and the hedge fund/commodity speculators) but also to sit on the porch, warm my bones and get more natural Vitamin D into the bloodstream.

The Zeitgeist

   

A stack of Mets Tickets and folks lining-up to buy them at CitiField. 

Yes, I Bought Met Tickets

I just couldn’t help myself. When it comes to the New York Mets I’m kind of like an abused spouse who keeps coming back for more, or a crack addict who just can’t shake the addiction. So help me G-d, I love baseball and I love the Mets. I’m even watching Spring Training games on WPIX and SNY. Though more often than not utterly unworthy of my affections, this is the team to which I pledged my troth at the ripe old age of five or six. My blood runs orange, blue and black and I’ve never been able to wrap my hands or my heart around Bronx pinstripes. This is a team very much on the ropes from just about any and every perspective imaginable – financially, the team owners were mauled by Bernie Madoff (as were quite a few other innocent people I know) and are now being persecuted and prosecuted by the Madoff Trustee, Irving Picard who is trying to force the Wilpons to fork over something like a zillion dollars. The team is weighted down with some very expensive aging players of diminishing worth (like Carlos Beltran) and some just plain stupid acquisitions by former General Manager Omar Minaya that is tying the Mets’ hands on finding some new blood. The pitching staff is dominated by wounded warriors, ace Johan Santana won’t be back probably until July (if at all) and for sure he won’t be the guy he was a few years ago. Some of the new pitchers just came off Tommy John or other kinds of surgery and heaven knows how long they’ll last before throwing out, breaking or tearing something. Mike Pelfrey, the Vice-Ace, is inconsistent. It’s all going to be up to thirty-something R.A. Dickey and his knuckleball and Jon Niese who exudes potential but hasn't become a star just yet. On offense, we’re a grade “B” team with very few guys hitting for real power compounded by a huge home field that makes home runs as scarce as water in the Sahara. One bright spot is Scott Hairston who has been swatting homers left and right in Spring Training and is a fair bet to fill in for Beltran in right field.

Some have asked me why I remain devoted to the Mets? That's like asking fans in Baltimore why they stick by the Orioles, or Bostonians how they stuck with the Red Sox for a nearly 90-year drought from the World Series, or Chicago Cubs fans who have been left unrequited for over a century or the folks in Cleveland or Oakland. Being true to your team is about one's character as a man -- its about loyalty to things big and small and loyalty to people. It's about knowing how to win and how to lose with class like a man and about perseverence and stick-to-itiveness which are all metaphors for life. In a two-team town like New York, one's choice of team allegiance also says a lot about how a person sees themselves and conveys this to others around him for better or worse. It's also about geography, I'm a Long Island guy and The Bronx is two bridges (or two trains) and light years away in every respect.

What the Mets have this year is a realistic expectation of playing .500 ball and ultimately ending up in the second or third spot in the National League East. There will be no getting past Philadelphia as that team has probably the best starting pitching rotation in all of baseball and as solid an offense as there is along with playing at a ballpark that’s a homerun bandbox. What the Mets also have is a roster of young up and comers who are hungry to prove themselves in the big leagues and get the big bucks down the road if they can. Hopefully this scrappiness will lead to some aggressive ball playing which could be a lot of fun to watch. The Mets also have been freed-up from the pressure of championship expectations from 2006-2009. Most fans I talk to don’t expect anything. That is a liberation, not only for the players but also the fans because anything good that happens this season is gravy and contention for the Division will be the cherry and sprinkles on the sundae. The Mets have National League ball which means classic baseball where pitchers bat. The Mets also have the nicer, more comfortable and more fan-friendly of the two New York ballparks. The food and drinks are better and a whole lot cheaper than in The Bronx, the parking is easier (though not inexpensive) and the ride to my house after the game is just 20-25 minutes. Beers are half the price of Yankee Stadium, which makes alfresco semi-inebriation much more cost effective in these recessionary times.

So to slake my desire to wear my Met player jerseys in public, I succumbed to the blandishments (and serious price reductions) of the Met ticket office and bought into a 5-game flex pack. The Mets lowered ticket prices considerably versus two years ago when they were flush with “irrational exuberance” and with their flex packs are also offering free games. On the five-game pack you get a sixth game (against a non-contending team) gratis. Best part of this is you get to pick one of the Yankee-Met games as part of the package, which are my favorite “color war” type games to go to. Thanks to lower prices, I’m sitting on the field level between third base and home, right near the Kosher Sports hotdog and burger stand and not too far from the imported beer shack out in Center. So, once a month I’ll be back at the ballpark chomping kosher dogs and downing them with the $6 Brooklyn Lagers or $7.25 Leffe Belgian Wheat Ales. With Omar Minaya gone and a bunch of 60-somethings now running the team, I think we fans are going to have some fun and with zero expectations should come zero frustrations. Still nothing like a day at the ballpark – the paradigm of the American cultural experience. Everybody clap your hands!

Citibank Shea Spot and Other Cool Spots

Citibank (for whom CitiField is named) has been running a commercial for months now showing an older couple who’ve relocated to Istanbul (of all places). Narrated by their loving son (who we never see) we are informed that the couple manages to settle-in wonderfully in Turkey except for missing their beloved Mets. So, the son buys them their old seats at Shea Stadium, “Row C, Seats 5 and 6” and we then see the parents sitting in these orange seats in Istanbul, watching a game, presumably by satellite. Here’s the cool thing about the spot for me – those were my seats! I sat in Loge for years at Shea in Section 6, Row “C,” seats 5 and 6. How ever did the folks at Citibank know that? View the spot here:

La Quinta Inns is running kind of a snarky, subversive spot where they promise traveling road warrior salesmen that by lodging with them one will be empowered to in fact actually sell ice to Eskimos. Hilarious:

Chutzpah Spot of the Year – Chrysler featuring Detroit rapper Eminem in their commercial “Imported from Detroit.” Great attitude and right in your face. Here’s the one minute version but Chrysler is running the 30-second spot a lot now but I can’t find that one on YouTube. This kinda, sorta makes you want to buy an American car and it also doubles as a great spot for Detroit, the city:

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