The Fantastic Four Food Groups


The Food and Drug Administration decided to allow produce companies to radiate vegetables like spinach and lettuce to kill bacteria. The practice has been allowed for meats for years. So with the food pyramid filling out with a trefoil, sounds like its time to get me some superpowers! "With great fiber comes great responsibility." But what can everyone else look forward to?

1. Glow-in-the-dark guinea pigs.

2. Vegetable stands with nuclear capability.

3. Rabbits that get stronger the madder they get.

4. Complaints from bacteria rights activists.

5. See-through elephants.

6. A lot of armchair dentistry (What with the X-rays and all, get it?).

7. Lead-lined salad tongs.

8. Mushrooms that produce namesake clouds.

9. Popeye going Kosher.

10. Attack of the 50 foot cow.

What I Now Know About Race Walking


Olga Kaniskina won a gold medal but I'm not sure why.

I'm not saying she didn't deserve it for her performance in the 20-km race walk at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I'm just saying I don't understand what she was doing. What is race walking? This is what I have learned so far from watching it last night.

Good form is when your legs look like noodles collapsing inwards as they are twirled around in a blender. Your feet look like they are desperately trying to avoid hot coals. And if the gold medalist and record setter was any indication, your face must contort into an artistically pained expression of melancholy beauty.

Winning is about resisting the urge to run. I know I would have broken. While the racepack, resembling a bunch of senior citizen penguins jazzercising, trailing Kaniskina by merely feet (or meters, if you prefer), I was waiting for one of the other runners to lose it and just take off. Then all of them would follow suit. It's like when I was a kid in a Catholic school walking from building to building in a straight line. If one of us broke ranks for whatever reason (usually no reason) and took off at full speed, everyone would follow. And we'd all get in trouble (accept for the little butt kissers. You know the ones that respect their elders and go to heaven)

Judges are involved and they hold up little paddles like they were at an auction to warn of rule violations. I question any sport that has judges. Maybe there is Simon Cowell in there being brutally honest, but you might have you share of Paula Abduls watching a whole other ballgame (to mix sports metaphors).

Though not the normal track, the Beijing Olympics race walk track, lined with potted plants, looked like one of those entrances into an Atlantic City Casino.

It took an hour and a half to declare a winner. Shorter than a baseball game, but really had they just run ... (I know, I know it's not allowed).

Where are all the White Spaces At?

Like most Americans, I enjoy being informed about an issue I never heard of involving elements that I didn't even know existed. Then, when one side of the debate (the one that gets to me first) explains the issue, nee tells me what to think, then I get riled. Thank goodness Google has launched a campaign and matching website called Free the AirWaves to inform me that my White Spaces are being kept from me.

White Spaces are TV channels set aside to protect existing channels' signals from interfering with one another. They're buffers, the same way Georgia was for the British and Spanish colonies and Larry Fine was for Moe and Curly of the Three Stooges.

Companies like Google and Motorla want to use these channels when TV goes digital to broadcast for wireless Internet connections. Broadcasters fear that such usage would interfere with the signals they still use. It reminds me of a local long-standing tradition of developers buying up land that once housed one home and squeezing two or three buildings onto the same piece of property. You know what they say two's company but three's a crowd but over 20 thousand in a three-mile radius is a village.

So why side with Google then? Well, just visit the Google sponsored site to find out. First, Google simply wants to "Free the Airwaves." Those poor airwaves, caged that way. It's unnatural. I prefer my air waves Free Range or Kosher. Secondly, "Google cares." It says so in big blue letters. I'll tell you why they care and it has nothing to do with the money they would make from this venture. Okay, it has a little to do. Well, a lot, but they care because they love us, I can only assume. They care so much that they want us to be involved, and by involved I mean do the work. They want us to make our own videos of support and spread the word. I hate to seem so selfish in light of Google's beenvolance, but what's in it for us?

"It's like Wi-Fi on steroids," said Google co-founder Larry Page to FCC lawyers. Page was then dragged into congressional hearings on major league baseball. Probably not a good idea to make your case by alluding to another illegal and very unpopular issue. Though I'm sure at least one public official, without a sense of irony, thought, "Well, I'm sold!"

According to the Free the Airwaves site, there are many other potential (and more wholesome)benefits. "White spaces could provide America's schools with affordable, mobile, high-speed Internet access." Sure they could. And bus companies could provide free transportation and publishing companies could supply free books, and restaurant chains could donate free food. Boy, remove the word could and education improves exponentially. Also, this will allow for better communication for public safety officials (two-way wrist radios?) and more Internet access especially for out of the reach places (thus, generating support from cults and militias alike).

So give me my White Spaces, whatever it is ot they are. Do something that will make my life better. But don't screw up anything I am already used to. If taht happens, I will be the first to join the anti-White Spaces campaign. I am an American and I am free to be fickle.

The Three Worst Dates I Ever Had

Drum roll please ....

3. A rose, a meal and an extra guy. That's right. The girl brought a guy on the date with her. Particularly humiliating was the fact that I had told the waitress table for two and then waited an hour before she showed up.

2. After not sleeping for three days a late night dinner at a place I could only describe as an Italian picnic and drinks at a bar (I'm straight edge) with marketing execs for Drug Companies that extolled the virtues of Hoboken and a soon to be Reality Star and his wife who kept telling my girlfriend that I liked them better than the other couple.

1. Smackdown! After promising to take her family to a (at the time) WWF event at Nassau Coliseum, and after we arrived at the coliseum in her car, my girlfriend decided she didn't want to go in to the event and split. After a loud show where her nephew pressed my hands against his ears for three hours, after a trip to the bathroom covered in vomit, we went outside and my girlfriend revealed that she had dropped me and her family to go on a date with another guy who she brought with her to meet me (lightening strikes twice). After a fight where she ordered me to get int the car, I, with my Scooby Doo backpack (a Christmas gift from my girlfriend) thrown over my shoulder, walked back to Mineola in the rain while limousines filled with wrestlers drove by.

My five most Romantic dates:

Here's a sweet journey down memory lane and a set-up for my next post.

1. Watching the Disney movie Tarzan and then sitting in the trees with my "Jane."

2. A tour of the Hindu exhibits of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a sweet and sensitive Brahman class girl, who made the imagery understandable and relevant.

3. Karaoke Night at a Manhattan Japanese restaurant where I was put on the spot to entertain a bunch of people I didn't know and wowed them with everything from David Bowie to Cher.

4. Learning to do the the Hustle by videotape in a living room in Long Beach.

5. A homemade dinner in Chelsea with the girl of my dreams.