Finally, something other than the SSDD to write about

I honestly didn't plan for this, but between the 1,701 previous entries here and the 298 now filling the baseball blog, this is my 2,000th entry on LJ.

Figures that it would come after my longest hiatus here since God Knows When.  That resulted from some of the activities below, from general busy-ness beyond that, and with the sudden creep-up of the year-end holidays starting to settle in. 

Whatever. I'm chockablock full of stuff and nonsense right now and will try to get through all of it.

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As I mentioned last week, after I made the recent Mens Wearhouse trip to hang suitable crepe on my ever-creakier body, I finally resolved that enough was enough and I joined the gym that Eleanor signed up for a month or so ago.  I was fairly good, at least at putting in the time, when we were last in an exercise program back about five years ago, but I was nervous about whether the extra pounds and extra stress would kill me on the first day.

So, apparently, was the trainer who did the initial fitness evaluation. After checking my body-mass index with that handheld electronic gizmo and consulting his charts, he wouldn't even give me the step-box test to check my elevated heart rate, and he wrote a list of exercises that was maybe a quarter of what I'd been doing on my own years ago.  My second meeting with him, to "learn" the resistance training machines and drills, was set for last night.

By then, I'd already been in three times. Nothing like getting a bad grade on a test to motivate me to do better. And at least as far as the cardio stuff went, it turned out it was kind-of like riding a bicycle. Actually, it literally is riding a bicycle, before or after a treadmill or an elliptical machine.  I came out each time with my heart rate settling nicely into a decent target range (if those sensors know what they're doing, and sometimes they don't- I've had my rate go from 40 to 250 in three seconds if you believed the thing, when mostly it runs around 110-120 under moderate effort).  Dude wound up cancelling on me last night, so I rescheduled with a different guy today, who upped the list of machines and seemed pleased with what I was getting.  Other than an unfortunate habit he has of calling me "Rick," I'm more comfortable with him than with the first guy.

This morning's appointment also included the Visual of the Day Not Captured on Cell Phone Camera. The entrance to this place is at the north end of Eastern Hills Mall, which occupies the whole east side of Transit Road from Main to Sheridan. Not long after making the turn from Main, I could tell something weird was going on way up the street, and by the time I hit the light at the main entrance about halfway along, I could see it. A fire hydrant had blown its gasket and was propelling a water-cannon-like stream of H2O into oncoming traffic, much to the dismay of the Water Authority worker who'd been dispatched to fix it.

It took until I got within a few feet of the entrance (at that point too underwater to even enter) to get the visual joke: his dispatching unit, named in huge letters on the side of his truck, was the

WATER AUTHORITY
LEAK DETECTION UNIT

I could just imagine him calling in the sight of this onrush of water, rivalling anything the Pakistani military has unleashed on lawyers in recent weeks: "Urm, yeah, Earl, I found one!"

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And, of course, there'll be sport.

There really wasn't anything to say about the pastede-on-yay'ing that got put on the Bills the other night, other than the somewhat surprising news that nobody on our side got seriously hurt.  I still think that forfeit might be a more reasonable alternative for the rest of the teams on New England's schedule, particularly the Jets, whose coach ratted out the Patriots' video scam and who no doubt made them angry. You wouldn't like them when they're angry.

Speaking of Gang Green: Neil Best, who writes a sports-media column and a related blog for Newsday (the RSS for the latter being on, and often virtually hijacking, my Flist), made me aware of this unfortunate report about halftime goings-on at Jets games in the Meadowlands:

At halftime of the Jets’ home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday, several hundred men lined one of Giants Stadium’s two pedestrian ramps at Gate D. Three deep in some areas, they whistled and jumped up and down. Then they began an obscenity-laced chant, demanding that the few women in the gathering expose their breasts.

When one woman appeared to be on the verge of obliging, the hooting and hollering intensified. But then she walked away, and plastic beer bottles and spit went flying. Boos swept through the crowd of unsatisfied men.

Marco Hoffner, an 18-year-old from Lacey Township, N.J., was expecting to see more. Not from the Jets — they pulled off a big upset over the Steelers. He wanted more from the alternative halftime show that, according to many fans, has been a staple at Jets home games for years.

“Very disappointed, because we’re used to seeing a lot,” Hoffner said.

Lacey Township? You have GOT to be kidding me. That sounds like something out of a Rodney Dangerfield movie.

But I digress. Back to all the bra that's fit to fill:

Denisse Rivera, a 23-year-old from the Bronx, was on a first date Sunday. When she arrived at the crowd at Gate D, several men pointed at her, signaling men at all levels to chant in her direction. After a brief moment of hesitation, she flashed them. Then she took a bow.

“I don’t care,” Rivera said when told that video clips of previous incidents, taken on cellphones, ended up online. “I love my body and I like what I have, so let everybody share it.”

Two security guards soon approached Rivera. The guards warned her about indecent exposure laws, she said, and let her go.

Jets officials declined to be interviewed about the halftime tradition at their home games. In a statement, the team said: “We expect our fans to comply with all rules at the stadium, and the vast majority do. For those who don’t, we expect and encourage N.J.S.E.A. security to take appropriate action.”

Greg Aiello, an N.F.L. spokesman, said, “I would defer any comment to law enforcement and the people on the stadium authority there that are in charge of fan-conduct issues.”

The State Police staffs every Jets home game. But Sgt. Stephen Jones, a spokesman, said the State Police did not make an attempt to prevent fans from congregating in Giants Stadium. But he said that there were incidents of fans throwing money into the center of the spiral ramps. Those fans then threw objects at children picking up the money. Access to the center of the ramps is now blocked off by a chain-link fence.

As all good Bills fans know, the official fight chant of their formerly Titan-ic division rivals, shown here in perfect form by its unofficial spokesperson Fireman Ed, is

and also that the necessary variation on that here at the Ralph replaces each of the finally-chanted "JETS" syllables with the far more correct syllable "SUCK."

Well now, thanks to the testosterone of Gate D, I will forever be substituting two different letters at the start of the chant. Which, if you think about it, is about as tautological as my experience above with riding a bicycle.

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The first two days of this three-day week have been all-day dead, but I do need to send an explanatory email to someone now.  So I thank you all for these three-plus years and 2K of entries and hope you'll find it all is, in the words of our new corporate sponsor, ...

MM Good.