Wednesday, December 16, 2009

The Twelve Days of Gheorghe-mas: Six Rules Worth Knowing

On the sixth day of Gheorghe-mas, Big Gheorghe gave to me...

Six Rules Worth Knowing
Five Golden Rings
Four-gone Conclusions

Three Saluki Tallies
Two Recurring Features
And a Doofus Dancing (hee, hee)

Coach Bobby Finstock had some simple rules for life (go to the 2:30 mark if you are impatient):



Damon had his five-point plan:


Building on these cultural icons, we present to you six rules addressing the random, sometimes illicit parts of your life. These are crucial. They may save your hide one day.

Rule 1: Marinate your meat (ngs).
This is not a cooking blog. And it's not a dating blog. It's a blog about living your life with a smile. And to all my meat-eaters out there (ngs), don't put virgin meat in your oven, on your frying pan or on your grill. Marinating makes you look sophisticated to both your lady friends and your meathead dude friends. And it makes meat taste better (ngs). Leave it to marinate a long time. Over 24 hours is better. Trust me. I'm kinda fat, so I know these things. Bamm!

Rule 2: Never ever ever pay any attention to the best looking girl at a second-rate strip joint.
This rule is different from going to a "good one" at a bad time (ie, 2 PM on a Tuesday, when your boss and your wife think you are at a conference in town). I'm focusing on the truly mediocre strip clubs. We all know when we are in one - it is a bad city, a bad neighborhood, or just a clearly sub-par place that a drunken crew lands on - but we all need to recognize when we are there and act accordingly.

In general, women know their sexual pecking order. This is magnified in a strip bar. Unless it is a top-notch joint, where a couple dozen women are interchangeably stripperiffic, there is a clear Alpha Stripper vibe among the (top-)heavy hitters, if only because the lower echelon ladies at sub-par strip bars fall into the "way gross-to-she looks like a streetwalker" categories. When you vie for the attention of the queen stripper bee, you acknowledge her place and take away any power you have. She'll demand a drink and/or bilk you for an exorbitant lap dance. Nobody needs that. Always shoot for the middle-of-the-road lady in the place. Assess your environment and act accordingly, gents. The hungry ones will show you a better time. Everybody wins.

Rule 3: Always sneak down to better seats at sporting events.
Confession here - I am jaded live sports attendee because I live in the exorbitantly priced tri-state area surrounding New York. I loathe the owners of most of the local sports team (especially you Jimmy Dolan, you bloated waste of space). And I am hesitant to transfer any more cash into their pocket than I need to. So I make up for this by opportunistically upgrading myself at sporting events. I avoid doing this when I think there is a decent chance of being caught, because I hate looking like a schmuck, but I am all over it when it looks reasonably easy. It has been an amazingly simple process at sparsely populated Knick games at Madison Square Garden in the last five years. And what's more fun at a bad basketball game than getting close enough to the court so that when you heckle people like Ira Newbie and Greg Ostertag, you know they hear you and get bummed out?

Rule 4: Always have a 15-second dance routine for wedding receptions in your back-pocket.
Wedding dancing is usually dumb. The participants are either lame, sober old people marching like zombies to "What a Wonderful World" or sweaty, disheveled obnoxious people pumping their arms off-key to Buster Poindexter. And then there are the infamous dance circles, a group dance occurrence that pops up at proms and weddings. Everybody stands around and claps and waits for somebody to hop in the middle and be funny. Our rule focuses on this moment. For a single guy at a wedding, having a pre-canned routine can be a make-or-break moment at a wedding reception. It offers an opportunity to show some personality and pelvic coordination to the game little ladies who have congregated to the dance floor. A good sequence makes everybody hoot and holler, genuinely energizes the party and gives a lady an opportunity to approach you. Frankie D., an old friend of many writers on this blog, may have been the Caucasian master of this situation. He had the Rerun dance down pat. It's that simple. Everybody loved it every time. When you have a simple routine, people will laugh. And you'll be more apt to pull it off when you're half in the bag. The bar is low for doing this. Dust off your moonwalk, your worm (forwards or backwards), your pop rock or your Russian squat lunge dance. It doesn't matter. Sacrifice two hours while you're home alone watching sports. It will be time better spent than all those hours you talk to yourself about starting to do crunches on a regular basis.

Rule 5: Never pay for porn.
No matter your fetish, you can find it for free on the internet. Just make sure your firewall is up to snuff. At least that's what I heard on last Tuesday's episode of Z-Man and The Teej, located at 106.9 on your FM dial. These guys would know.

Rule 6: Never ever ever ever drink well-booze if you're older than 21.
When I was 22 and poor, I discovered gin and tonics. It's a delicious drink. It gets you drunk. It seems more sophisticated than eating beers when you're in the company of ladies, and it tastes great if the bartender knows how to pour it. But if you don't specifically state the booze you want, you risk getting the well junk. And you don't want bad gin in your system. Ever. Same goes for bad vodka or whiskey. Many of us cut our booze-drinking teeth in the 'Burg, where a mighty big bottle of Odesse Vodka could be procured at a low price. Although it seemed like a good deal and worked sufficiently when we were pouring it down ice-blocks into the mouths of 19 year-old sorority girls, it was a bad move. The brutal hang-over is just not worth it. Especially with gin, where upscale labels like Hendrick's or Bombay have distinct and scintillating flavors that a sophisticated pallate can enjoy.

Happy holidays. And happy living.

40 comments:

  1. 1. Brining is even better.
    2. You know more than I in this regard.
    3. Let's do this more often.
    4. Frank's Rerun Dance kicked ass.
    5. The Teej is the one on the left.
    6. I can't agree more. Especially when potato vodka is available. Always go with the potato vodka: Chopin, Boyd & Blair, Christiana.

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  2. I think that TR and I could really put together a good piece on the ins and outs of the strip club business. Perhaps you can co-write the book with me about visiting strip clubs in every state of the union? I'm debating between a couple of titles: "Couch Dance, Couch Dance, Put Me in Your Couch Trance" or "The United States of Sodom & Gomorrah".

    So far I have these states covered: NY,CT,RI,NJ,PA,DE,VA,WV,GA,SC,FL,TX,NV,IN,DC. Canada too. Can you bring expertise on any additional states?

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  3. Those are tremendous titles. Since you've got Texas and Nevada covered, I think Cali and Massachusetts may be the only states on my list that are not on yours. I also have a bit of European expertise.

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  4. That is a start. Euro expertise would be a welcome contrast. I really need to hit NC and MD to pull off a true coverage of the East Coast. unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any places down in the Outer Banks and I can't seem to bring myself to stop at Cafe Risque off 95.

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  5. I'd love to contribute to your strip club book. As I've stated before, I good friend of mine received the deed to his father's strip club when he turned 18. The next 3-4 years were a bit of a blur. Also, I've hit a few states not on the list:

    WA, MT, AZ, LA (these are just off the top of my head) and Vancouver.

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  6. TR - I hate to break up the strip club nostalgia, but #4 might be the sagest piece of advice ever bestowed on anyone anywhere. I have one question - is it cooler if it looks like it was choreographed or is the goal to look like the feeling just hit you?

    For example, the Kid N' Play dance (forever ruined for wedding day originality by the Lebron commercial) seems like it's more awesome in theory than if two jackasses clearly had been practicing to whip it out together (ngs) on the reception dance floor. At least these days.

    Concur or no concur?

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  7. I actually saw two guys pull out the Kid n Play dance at a wedding. It was blatantly choreographed but hugely successful. This was in Lodi NJ circa 1997, so it might not have been cool in your respective necks of the woods.

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  8. I'm gonna have to go with "not cool" on the choreography aspect of the dance. Its better if it looks spontaneous. Makes you looks original and witty. A planned dance (especially with another man) makes you look, well...gay.

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  9. Wow...Chris Henry, dude, what the fuck were you doing jumping in the back of a moving truck?

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  10. tr, phenomenal post. hendrick's is one of god's gifts to we lowly mortals.

    and uncw is giving wake all they want.

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  11. The Ghost of Brett Blizzard?

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  12. I've been inside the hallowed walls of Cafe Risque on I-95...twice. It is not something about which I was proud, and under public examination it is something I would deny.

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  13. ding dong, the dipshit's dead!

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  14. Late to respond here, but I think a reception dance routine should be made to look spontaneous, even if it is choreographed. And it should be solo, to maximize attention.

    I have a high school buddy who will do the worm in public if he's drunk enough and enough people egg him on. I made him do it at my wedding and got 10-15 people to start chanting "Worm! Worm! Worm!" He did a sweet pop rock intro into the worm and everybody loved it. He foolishly didn't parlay that into any action that night.

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  15. rob, why are you mocking Oral Roberts like that?

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  16. So an intern in my office just fainted outside my desk. It was a solidd, bleeding animal stumbling faint, where he staggered around like he had been shot a few times but wasn't quite ready to go down. He literally collapsed in my arms with a green face. The NYC Fire Dept. is now wandering through our halls, and a paramedic interviewed me.

    Never good for productivity to have carcasses dropping 5 feet from your desk.

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  17. ABC News is reporting the Elin has filed for divorce.

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  18. And Chris Henry is dead. WTF?

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  19. I assume the intern walked through one of your fart clouds.

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  20. nice to see that intern hazing is still allowed.

    and divorce is the best possible thing for tiger's golf game. selfishly speaking, this is good news.

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  21. Bruce Allen is your new Redskins GM. Rumor has it Gruden as HC not far off from being announced as HC. I'm pleased with the former and not thrilled with the prospects of the latter.

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  22. I have a dirtbaggish question relating to El Tigre - When can he get laid again?

    It was obvious that he liked to get action a lot. So he was bumming after the news broke. Clearly Elin wasn't going to give it up to him. And he couldn't make any booty calls. So he's resigned to being a near-billionaire who has had to surf the Web to "relieve pressure" over the last few weeks.

    At what point can he make a call to an old flame, ask the maid to hang out after her shift or go out somewhere to blow off steam? Curious what the etiquette is, and what a horndog like El Tigre will do. He must be nervous that the next tramp he beds will take the story to a tabloid.

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  23. i'm an unabashed gruden-phile. that would make me very happy.

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  24. Tiger is hiding in Thailand. He is not relying on the interwebs to relieve pressure.

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  25. Beware of the Allen-Gruden combo boys. From my experience they are not fond of breaking in young players, especially offensively. Get ready for an awful lot of guys off the scrap heap playing crucial roles.

    Oh yeah, you also might want to get used more pre-snap shifts in year one than you've seen in the last five.

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  26. oh, i don't care how they play. i just like the idea of gruden making funny faces on the sideline. and giving snyder atomic wedgies in the locker room.

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  27. Gruden eked Pro Bowl seasons out of Rich Gannon and Brad Johnson when both were 34+ years old. He won a Super Bowl with Michael Pittman as his team's leading rusher. I'm not saying that he's the second coming of Bill Belichick, but I would be delighted if my lousy Bills got Gruden.

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  28. I haven't trusted Bruce Allen since he tried to trick Fletch into killing him in the mid-80's

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  29. Everybody take the survey and remember, "the Wren is mightier than the sword".

    https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MTLQYVP

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  30. I'm nit saying Gruden isn't a good coach. Just that his stubborness and marriage to his (very intricate) system often keeps him from acquiring good young talent or any talent at all. Pittman remained the bucs #1 tb long past that Super Bowl and the bucs' #1 offensive playmaker for a period of about 5 years was a fragile, over the hill Joey Galloway.

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  31. Gruden is one of those coaches where if the players fit (and buy into) his system, then it works very well. If not, then he's very good at adapting his system to fit his players.

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  32. Also, and not surprisingly, Grudens schtick is said to get old with veteran players.

    One more thing: it's cold and grey here today which is somewhat rare for Florida. Of course, most people are bitching about this. Not me, this is whiskey weather.

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  33. Gruden indeed seems to love past-their-prime receivers (Rice, Brown, Rison, Galloway, Keyshawn, Keenan McCardell). Which is exactly why he's a great fit for the Redskins. None of their receivers ever had a prime, so Gruden's system will work like gangbusters.

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  34. Wade Phillips is a freaking moron. Regarding the Saints, he said "We're not going to cow down to these guys." You can bow down, and you can kowtow, but you don't "cow down." And this donkey is, amazingly, the last person to coach my jackass Bills to the playoffs.

    http://sports.espn.go.com/dallas/nfl/news/story?id=4751288

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  35. http://www.sketchysantas.com/

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  36. Michael, "Mermaids" is about 200 yards before you reach the bridge to cross the Currituck Sound to get to the Outer Banks. A few folks have stopped there over the years, but I have not.

    I did go back to Crystal City Restaurant for the first time in probably 10 years this past Monday night. Just like I remembered it. Those ladies put the meaty in mediocre.

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  37. It always looks closed down. I am going to have to investigate their hours for next year. Can I get a cab from the house?

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  38. greg paulus' brother is transferring to play qb for the tribe:

    http://flathatnews.com/content/72354

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  39. It's a good 15 miles from the house, so a cab is a good idea.

    I think a few guys have stopped in for a spell en route to the house when they drive down. I suppose there's nothing like kicking off a dudes' weekend with some skanky, nekked North Cackalacky trailer trash.

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