Yeah, Uh-huh One More Saturday Night

Saturday night was, of course, The World's Shittiest Costume Party, aka Stefan's 31st Birthday Party. I made a run to "Save on 5th" for $3.50 worth of party supplies (black duct tape, $1.50; big cardboard box, $1.99) as well as four light bulbs for $1.99 and a glass jar that holds a candle for 70 cents. You really do save at this place on 5th.

I got home and got to work:

A couple hours and a lot of head-sweat later, I had a perfect, brilliantly shitty guitar made out of a cardboard box, duct tape and nylon rope:


I took it for a quick test drive and was ready to rock, and by rock, I mean party:

Here are the hosts. From right to left, you have Birthday Guy Stefan as a shitty storm trooper and Biz as shitty slave Leia. If this recap leaves you hungry for more photos and commentary from this soon-to-be-legendary event, or if you've always wondered what a detective would like like if he had a dildo for a hand, check out Biz's summary at PrincessPonyPartyAmazing.

A lot of cardboard costume in this shot.

Here, going from left to right, you have Jaime and Jay as shitty David Wright and Wild, Wild West, disrespectively. Get it? She's Will Smith's shittiest movie. This costume operates at a high level.

In addition to shitty beer (it was actually just-fine Bud but, well, you know - this is Park Slope) and wine, mixed drinks named Number 1 and Number 2 were available:

I started with a cup of the Number 1, which was a sweet, beach-oriented drink with banana and coconut flavors. I moved onto the Number 2 which tasted like Long Island Iced Tea and napalm. Then it was on to trusty old Bud Heavy cans for the rest of the night. But I imagine I speak for myself and most of the partygoers when I say that Stefan's and my karaoke performance was the most intoxicating thing anybody served:

"You know where you are?"

"You're in the jungle, baby."

Later in the evening, some costume judging happened and Jay, Jaime and I accounted for 60% of the finalists. We are joined onstage by (right to left) Bad Habit and eventual prize-winner* "Stefan Sux"** (note the devil horns), who each accounted for 20% of the finalists.

* I believe the prize was a shitty cardboard keyboard for some reason.
** I'm not sure it comes across in this picture, but this was a fantastic costume and she was a deserving and grateful winner. She was happy about her prize to the point of being somewhat emotional about it.

Here are the hosts busting out a little karaoke. If it looks like they really know what they're doing, it's probably because they were up late the night before, practicing. The karaoke machine was a three-day rental and if you don't think they got their money's worth out of it, then I don't even know.

I'm not sure if this was in response to a noise complaint or a preemptive measure in anticipation of one, but the karaoke operation was moved inside at some advanced stage of the party. Everyone (everyone) teamed up at one point for a soaring "How's it Gonna Be?" that truly brought down the house (in other words, all of us singers received thunderous applause from and for ourselves).

"(l. to r.): Jay, Angela and Stefan enjoy Late-Night Group Indoor Karaoke."

The party finally broke around 3:30 and I headed home, sat down on my couch, realized I was hungry, and walked to the diner for a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and mozzerella sticks.

Sunday's accomplishments were minimal.

Dark Knight Night

Most of you know that I only go out to the movies about twice a year. Monica (who, if she has been campaigning this week for election as some kind of Social Coordinator, is doing a great job) got a group of eight of us together last night to go see The Dark Knight. My movie recommendation engine (and fellow blogger) Jay had asked previously in the summer if I planned to see anything this season and, when I said that I didn't but was open to a suggestion, told me that this would be the one. Between that and my desire to witness some of the bedlam that was sure to come with opening night of this movie in the city, I gladly accepted Monica's invitation.

I left work, headed up to Times Square, and dropped into Viva Pancho for a couple beers before dinner. Mel C. and her friend Kristen stopped by and I had the bartender take our picture.

"Pre-Pre Partying"

Pancho's is the kind of fancy joint that offers Quick Draw and I played a two-dollar seven-spot card. My winnings are pictured below in their entirety. As you can see, I'm upside-down on my wager.

Can anyone other than Ol' Dad recognize the significance of the numbers visible in this picture of my card? Click the photo to enlarge it.

The next stop was Virgil's for some barbeque. If you look up "six on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest" in a dictionary, you will see a picture of this place. Without question, it scores just on the good side of "average" in every category except for maybe "value" since it's located in Times Square. It was a nice and fun dinner but these guys can't hold the Dinosaur's jock.

Mary makes some adjustments to the foliage in her mint julep, which, predictably, scored a solid "6".

We walked over to the AMC Empire 25 theater at about 7:45 to claim our pre-ordered tickets and start lining up. There was a crowd, and you could tell that something buzz-worthy was going on, but it wasn't quite the zoo that I expected.


The theater had a show starting every 30 minutes and did a pretty good job of keeping people outside of the theater until shortly before each showing started. As someone who had to use the can at around 8:00, I would argue they did a little bit too good a job. I first talked to a ticket-taker, making the case to let me upstairs to use a restroom since there are none in the lobby level. I promised I wouldn't sneak into the 8:30 show, but still wasn't allowed up. I escalated things to a manager, who at first also refused to budge. I wasn't getting anywhere, but I also wasn't going anywhere. I played the "I'm a paying customer. You can't refuse me access to a bathroom!" card, unsuccessfully. Finally, I broke the situation down to its core and simultaneously asked him to put himself in my shoes: "Look. I badly have to take a piss. What would you do if you were me?" He paused, relented, and said that he would ESCORT me upstairs. I got on the escalator and, luckily, he didn't actually follow.

Afterwards, I re-joined my friends on the line. They were starting to get excited:


But probably not as excited as this guy:

If you look closely, you'll see that there are at least four people in this picture taking a picture of the Bat Mobile. What a bunch of losers. Wait...never mind.

I have somewhat weird and unpredictable taste in movies, I was balls hot and uncomfortable in the theater, and so exhausted that I had to fight to stay awake at times even though the movie is visually and aurally spectacular. I don't know much about the Batman series or stories and I didn't get too engaged with the plot of this movie. I felt the same way watching The Dark Knight as I did watching Lawrence of Arabia or the one Lord of the Rings movie I tried: it's quite a feat of film-making and I understand why people who love it think it's awesome, but I didn't find myself enjoying it and I checked my watch fairly often, wondering how much longer it would be until it was over. Beyond that, I'm leaving the reviewing to the professionals, who are pretty unanimous in their praise.

And on that note, I'm off to fashion a shitty Les Paul (the guitar, not the man) out of cardboard.

Week in Review

Sunday: Yardwork. In the morning, the yard didn't look so good. In fact, it looked like something out of a Vietnam War movie:

View from the back patio

From the patio and looking toward the right.

It was quite a jungle. This seems like a good time to mention that my mom recently saved me about $150 in yard care equipment. I told her a couple weeks ago that the hardware store was getting in some rotary lawnmowers and that I was going to buy one and cut down my lawn, which had gotten out of control. Without even seeing my "lawn" she suggested that my tall "lawn" might actually be mostly weeds and that perhaps I could just pull them out. It turns out that I had almost no grass at all, and the weeds came up in big clumps. I have no idea how she knew this. Some kind of motherly intuition, I guess.

I yanked them out as best as I could, and cut back a lot of the branches from my neighbors' trees that were extending over my side of the fence. I bought a hoe (insert your own joke here; no, seriously, it's OK - it never gets old) and turned over all the soil back there. Cleaned my tabletop and swept all the concrete.

Five hours, 96 ounces of water, dozens of bug bites, a good sunburn, and numerous minor cuts and scrapes later, this is how it looked:


Monday: Free New York Philharmonic concert in Prospect Park. This was a great event that Monica put together. She didn't put together the whole concert event, just our friends' outing to the concert event. Beautiful night, stunning sky, and this orchestra is a pretty competent outfit. Wine and a Thermos full of margaritas. Pretzels, hummus, chips, veggies, black bean salsa, dark chocolate, chorizo, cherries, goat cheese, and chocolate espresso beans.

Jesus, what a bunch of yuppies.

Broke out my picnic backpack.

The view from our spot.

Bonus.

We even night-capped it with a couple pints of beer at the bar after the last of the fireworks. Heck of a Monday.

Tuesday:

That's right, strawberry margarita night at the Gordon household. I don't really have much to add.

Wednesday: My stomach wasn't feeling too good in the morning (no correlation to Strawberry Margarita Night, of course) so I stayed home from work. I had Season 1, Disc 1 of The Wire on a DVD from Netflix, which I got around to joining on Sunday as I'd meant to for about four years. After watching the three episodes on the disc, I walked to 7th Ave, opened a video store membership, and rented the next two discs. By the time I called it a night and conceded that the day had really gotten away from me, I'd watched the first eight episodes.

This show was going to disappoint me if it were anything less than the best drama I've ever seen. It's cool that it's living up to my ridiculously high expectations.

Thursday: Best miscellaneous NYC street exchange involving me, so far this month:

Black guy: "WOW! There he is! There the guy who gets all the chicks!"
Me (continuing to walk, nodding): "Ha ha!"
Black guy (louder, as I'm walking away): "HOW DO YOU DO IT?!?"

It seems to be a commonly held belief amongst very slightly crazy black guys that I get "all the ladies." It started with the homeless guy in Georgetown a few years back who looked and sounded exactly like Samuel L. Jackson who swore I got all the "bitches" because "YOU A PRETTY MUTHAFUCKA!" More recently, a dude on the subway came up to me to say I must get all the ladies because of this nice hair. And of course, if you ever grilled with Trevor and me in front of the 187A, you noticed that black people were much more forthcoming with the props for our outstanding year-round grilling operation than were white folks. This led us to the conclusion that "BPLU" - Black People Love Us. If you're not familiar with the excellent blog of the same name, you should be.

10 Exciting Things

Tonight's post is a list of things about which I'm currently excited, in no particular order:

1) Richmond, VA. Without getting into a lot of detail, I'll just say that it came up a month or two ago that it's been...a while...since I've been to visit my sister Laura. I spent a little time at the end of this week planning a trip down to Richmond for the end of the month. This is going to be insane. Super-condensed itinerary:

- 7/30: Fly (yeah, fly - I love you, Amtrak, but suck it - I'm going Big Time for this trip) into Richmond, hang with Laura, torment Storm the cat.
- 7/31: Road trip with Laura down to NC to meet Dad, Pam, and a boatload of Devendorfs at the beach.
- 8/1: Rock Dad's 60th. Own it. Descend on the beach. Destroy it.
- 8 /2: Drive back to Richmond. Resume Stormenting the cat.
- 8/3: Fly back to NYC.

2) My new table. At the end of a lengthy late morning/early afternoon walkabout in the Slope, my last stop was to check on a table that's been for sale at the 7th Ave flea market for a couple months. I wanted to see if it was still available and if the price had come down at all from $750. I ended up seeing a different, real nice wooden table with two removable leaves for about 1/6 the money. I came home, measured my existing table and the space available for a new one, and went back and measured the one for sale. The guy selling it came up to me and I said, "so, this is a hundred and twenty dollars?" Right away, it struck me as a stupid question:


But he surprised me by saying "one ten." He also said he'd deliver it this afternoon for free, so I said "deal."

Out with the old.

In with the new.

First meal at new table.

Remind me to buy or make a set of coasters. The rubber potholder got the job done, but I don't know that it puts out a vibe of classiness. I don't want people to come under the impression that I'm not a real damn classy dude.

If either of you readers know of any good places to buy chairs, you know who to tell. Not that the rickety stool and three crappy chairs that I found in the basement aren't awesome, but I'm in the market.

2)a) The first-ever Gord Report poll. It'd be pretty sweet if the poll were located right here:

POLL GOES HERE, RIGHT?

But I don't know how to make that happen. So if you want to vote on where the old table should go, I think you have to look at the bottom of this page. Here are some helpful digital photographs illustrating the options:

1. Put it in the living room like an end table.

2. Put it in the bedroom, near the dresser.

3. Put it near the fireplace.

4. Just get rid of it. You should be able to visualize this without benefit of a photo.

If you're reading this, make sure you vote. I wasted a lot of time and risked a lot of back injury hauling the damn thing around my apartment; you can take two seconds to vote. I'll go with whatever option wins, unless you vote like a bunch of jackasses. I see this being very closely contested, with one of the choices winning by about a 1-0-0-0 margin.

3) The Mets 8-game winning streak that has them within half a game of first. In the last five games, they've allowed 3, 3, 3, 3, and 1 hit(s), respectively. I'm sorry, I can't hear you asking who they've played in that span.

4) The baby Jones. I know she's 15 days old and getting her third post worth of substantial attention and that some of you aren't happy about getting zero ink about your own 27 years, but this is an instant classic. Turn up your speakers.

5) The Garden. Here's where we're at:

The string beans went nuts the last couple days. These were nothing at the start of the week. Since the beans themselves blend in with the stalks, I used my advanced photo manipulation skills to write the label "Bean." in red at the bottom of each bean. I've got my eye on the big fella in the center of the foreground there. I'm gonna eat that shit soon.

A friend told me last weekend that a nice thing about lettuce is that you only need a couple leaves, just enough to put on a sandwich. I guess she's not a big salad-eater. Anyway, if what she said is true, then I'm close to harvesting a bumper crop of two sandwiches worth of lettuce.

This is my most advanced pod of peas, so far. I'm watching it closely and really hoping it fills out a little bit the next couple days. I've never studied one specimen of produce more than I've watched this one the last couple days. This pod could very well be the only food that I harvest out of nine pea plants, which is why I'm so attached to it. If other peas are on their way, they're really far behind the curve.

I like this picture. This is one of a bunch of little jalapenos that are starting to show up. The other peppers haven't really started to flower yet.

Finally, here's the whole operation as of this morning. The yellow tomato plant is now as tall as I am (about 6'4"). The new pole in the middle of the garden was the handle of a broken rake, now re-purposed to give support to a vine that had grown off the main stem and grown long enough that it started to break under its own weight.

So yeah. That's the garden. I'm excited about it.

6) The Dan Gordon Party. Believe it or not, I am not the one who named or who is hosting this event. With a friend or two, including but not limited to the great Mel C., I'll finally be getting down to Berwyn, PA on the weekend of August 8-10 to visit my friends Kate and John Murphy and meet their no-longer-a-baby, Sally. If this picture is any indication of how these people know how to party, this is going to be epic:


7) Partying as Shitty Slash. One of the highlights of every summer is the birthday party that Stefan throws for himself. If you weren't able to attend Stefan Rules!, the Tiki Party, Sexy Farm, or Beach Party, you probably at least heard the stories.

This year's event:

Just as I was starting to get frustrated about having no ideas to compare to the brilliantly shitty costumes that my more creative friends were putting together, my plan came together last night. Here's a special sneak preview:

"Shitty Slash"

It's going to be a busy week, what with crafting a guitar out of cardboard and wrapping my cowboy hat in electrical tape so it looks like a black top hat, but this should be pretty hot. And if you know one thing about me, you know that I pounce on all opportunities to wear my sleeveless GnR t-shirt.

8) New tunes on my iPod. Other than happy memories of Lyla shitting on Trevor twice, my favorite takeaway from last weekend was a bunch of new music on my iPod. Since losing my first iPod under dubious drunken circumstances, I've been without a lot of old favorites. I've been needing to plug my new iPod into Trevor's and Anne's computer for a while to get them back. It made for a real nice week, being re-united with music from the likes of OK Go, My Chemical Romance, Built to Spill, the Sheila Divine, and Op Ivy. I also got the new records from Counting Crows, Weezer, Wyclef, and Coldplay.

Reading that list now, I see there's a major "not like the others" thing in there...

9) My new fan. I'm on a semi-environmentalist kick right now and I felt that I should make an honest effort to get through the summer without using air conditioning. On one hand, I believe that they may use freon and produce something called "greenhouse gases" which might deplete some sort of layer of ozone, thereby contributing to global warming, or else not. I won't bore you with more details that I don't know than that. On the other hand, who sweats more than me when the temperature goes above 65?

My conviction on this matter is further tested by the fact that my landlord pays my electric bill, so dropping a few bucks on an air conditioner would mean free A/C for as long as I live here. That's tempting.

Anyway, the kitchen isn't too bad because it has windows and a ceiling fan. I have additional windows in the bedroom, and a small oscillating fan. But the middle of the apartment can get pretty hot. Having a guitar in said middle has provided no cooling effects at all:


So I tried something new and bought a fan. It seemed to have all the features that I require:


I was able to assemble it in just a few short hours, and began enjoying the benefits immediately. This must be what it's like to have a swimming pool.


10) Losing five pounds. There are starting to be a lot of pictures on this blog of me without a shirt on. There's every possibility that I don't look like a fat fuck in many of them, but I'm working really hard at sucking it in for the camera. When I don't make the effort, I look a little more similar to these 8-month pregnant friends than would be preferable:


I should be able to take off five pounds pretty easily, so I'm going to try to make that happen between now and the end of August. Great. More nights of turning myself into a sweaty wreck trying to drag myself around the park and then eating healthy food and drinking water afterwards. Awesome.

Garden Update, 8 July

Here's the whole operation as of Tuesday, 7/8. The yellow pear tomato plant in the front has started getting a little out of control since it overgrew the top of the cage...maybe I should have left the cage upside down so the narrow end of it could keep it reined in a little bit. I'll see about tying it up a little bit so that the growth is upward rather than outward.

It's pretty wild how tall and fast these tomatoes are growing. They're almost as tall as I am.

This is the cluster of the biggest tomatoes I have so far. The largest one is about the size of a marble, not quite as large as a grape. Maybe the size of a small grape. In any event, it's starting to look more and more like we may just have a garden miracle...

File under "Pathetic"

Last night I went for my first run in about three months. It was an abysmal failure. The photo below was taken right after I got home. It's annotated to show a few of the things that went wrong with me. I don't have a rear view shot so I didn't include anything about the back pain that kicked in on my walk home (yes, I had to walk home) and this shot cuts off at the thighs so I couldn't call out any knee or foot issues. Just horrible. Click to enlarge if the type is too small.


A couple of the people who will see this (or about 50%) know that I am involved in a push-up contest for this year (a year for which, incidentally, my motto is "Takin' it to a whole nother level in 08"). At Christmastime, I cranked out 24 to set my baseline for the year. A couple of months ago, I put up 30 while on a phone call with my co-competitors, my sisters and my Dad. Then I put the push-ups down for a couple months. After yesterday's disgraceful foray back into the wonderful world of exercise, I decided to see today what I could do in the push-up department:

I didn't exactly set the exercise world on fire, but it was a better performance than yesterday's and it's good to have a new baseline, something on which to build. I'm posting this video and letting people see where I'm at and also committing to posting an update one month from today. My hope is that this small promise will give me the motivation to keep practicing since it would be embarrassing to do no better in a month than I did tonight.

We'll see how that works out, considering that I have about five readers, all of whom have seen me in considerably more embarrassing situations than a poor push-up performance would constitute.

Lyla June Jones

She is such an awesome baby that she gets her own post.

So damn cute.

She pooped on Trevor. Actually she did this twice this weekend and I was just so proud of her.

Rocking out with her Uncle Dan. She's a good kid. Big, too.

This is so it doesn't go to her head, how good-looking she is. This is like one of those "celebrities caught without their makeup on" stories from the gossip tabloids. Lyla...she's just like us!!!
Looking good, kiddo.