I just keep getting faster

Where does all my speed come from these days?!?! Last night was the NYRR Wall Street run to benefit the American Heart Association. The 5km (3.1 mile) course had us snaking through the streets of lower Manhattan, past the World Trade Center site and around the bottom of the island past Battery Park. My goal was to break 26 minutes.

I don't know how many people ran it, but the highest number I saw on someone was 12002. That's a lot of people! Anyway, the course presented a great number of obstacles: lamp posts, traffic poles, slippery metal plates and manhole covers, pedestrians and so on, which made it so much more exciting than running around Central Park. There were no clocks at the mile markers like usual, so I really had no idea how we were doing, although my side gave me an indication after mile 2. Get a load of my official time: 24:45 with a mile pace of 8:15! This is a vast improvement over my previous pace of 8:48/mile and definitely the fastest 5k I've ever run. *Patting myself on the back*

After the race Ronit and I stopped into a couple of bars and got some drinks bought for us, even though we were slightly sweaty and crusty looking. It must have been our euphoric runner's high shining through the mud flecks and crazy, humidity-inspired hair horns. :)

Investment advice from the pros

If any of you are wondering what to do with your retirement funds, here's an idea:

If you had purchased $1,000.00 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49.00 left.

With Enron, you would have $0.00 left of the original $1,000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling refund, you would have $214.00.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. It's called the 401-Keg.

Guess I know what I'm doing with my IRA money! Hahaha!

Free beer! Must be the start of summer

Ro and I met for margaritas at Rancho's on 88th and Amsterdam because they have the best margs in all of Manhattan AND they're two-for-one during happy hour. I would have discovered them sooner if only I'd have ordered one when I ate there in September 2004 with my parents and great aunt. But I didn't, so I had to wait until my colleague introduced me a while later. Therefore I'm making up for lost time every time I go.

Anyway, Ro had some useful intelligence for us - all the pubs on Amsterdam Avenue between 72nd and 86th Streets were giving out free Amstel Light from 5 - 8 PM! Holy cow. So after our two margs, we headed off down the street to get our free beer. Even though it wasn't particularly warm, there were a lot of people on the street and sitting outside of bars. We stopped into Soldier McGee at 83rd & Amsterdam, which had a pretty rockin' live band doing a wide variety of '70s and '80s covers. The promo girls showed up shortly thereafter with tulips to give away and the crowd suddenly got a lot bigger! We moved on down to the Dead Poet, which had already run out of its allotment of free bottles, so we had to pay for our drinks. But we got to throw our names into the hat for a trip to Amsterdam. Next we crawled on down to Bourbon Street where the Amstels were also gone, so we had some Yuengling as an homage to Ro's great home state.

So all-in-all we only got one free beer, but it was such a great idea that I didn't even care. If I owned some consumer packaged goods company like a brewery, I'd give out free beer once in a while too, just for the fun of it.

More of the same please New York!

Overreactions and extreme sensitivities

The other day, a news anchor on one of the local national network channels dropped the f-bomb in a live teaser commercial just before the 11 PM news. I'm not sure how it played out because I haven't bothered to watch the actual clip, which I'm sure is on YouTube for anyone who's interested, but 1010 WINS played the audio clip repeatedly the next morning as I was listening for the weather before work. She apologized for her language around 11:10 PM during the news cast. The network has no intention of getting rid of her or relegating her to Style news.

My question is this: why are we as a society so afraid of curse words? This incident happened around 10:59 PM on a school night; shouldn't all the kids be in bed anyway, leaving only adults to hear this? If we're all adults, then chances are that we've heard this word before...hell, we've probably used it ourselves. On the very same day!

Apparently no one really cared in the city though. The sociolinguists interviewed by the NY Times for their recent article explain that New Yorkers are really desensitized to curse words in general because we hear them all around (uh, yeah. This is a tough town--sometimes you gotta swear!). One of the interesting reasons they give for our desensitization is the large number of non-native English speakers to whom English swear words don't carry the same gravitas that curses in their native languages might. Eh, maybe. I'm a native speaker and I swear all the time, so I don't know how solid that reasoning is.

I think we're desensitized because 8 million people live on top of one another on a few square miles of space, a situation which requires release in some form. Rather than running around hitting each other, we swear. Seems ok to me.