Magic Jewball

Yes, yes, sorry, it’s a business matter that couldn’t wait. My schedule is all booked. We have:

Monday – Pious B
Tuesday – Bob the Triathlete
Wednesday – Alfa
Thursday – a person who shall not be blogged
Friday – Dad and Brother1 (sorry, no Brother2 jokes this year, unless they arrive by SMS)

But the family plan always has some blank spots and that’s why you too can buy tickets to the US Open at face value from Becca! Take your wife! Take your mistress! Take your boss! Take my tickets!

Anyway, it’s for Monday 8/27, day session, and details can be found here:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/tix/403511679.html

Special bonus, meet Becca and have her surreptitiously hand you tickets on a street corner before counting the cash.

8/23 Edited to add: Sold! Thanks for participating in J-Ball special offers.

And now a post about nothing but you’d best enjoy it because next week’s posts are going to be pretty much all tennis all the time.

Today when I arrived at work there was a marching band in my lobby. I kid you not, a high school marching band, with drums and horns and all that marching band stuff. I had this conversation with the security guard.

Me: What’s all this for?
Him: It’s for [name of artist redacted]
Me: Are they going to play right now?
Him: Well not in the lobby.

Of course not. Because there are so many other fine places in our office building for an orchestra sized group to play. It turns out, actually, they were supposed to play outside but it’s pouring rain. Why, you ask? Because Tuesday is new release day and we like to announce our releases with marching bands. Yes.

Anyway, upon closer inspection I could see that the kids in the band did have the name of the artist on their shirts. I didn’t spot this at first because I’m wearing my glasses today and this is because I have some sort of eye thing going on. That caused me to have to run out to Westchester and see my optometrist in the middle of the day yesterday. Did you ever notice that? How things that you’ve lived with for days and imagined would just go away seem like emergencies to health care professionals? Crazy! But I grew up in Westchester and due to the fact that I don’t trust any doctor who hasn’t been sticking me with needles since I was a wee lass, these things tend to take half my day.

Once I was done there I took The Loop bus (which means the place in WordPress that controls how my posts show up to me but something entirely different to the Bee Line Bus people) to the train station. It was like a party on there! Everyone seemed to know each other and they were whooping it up. Despite the fun Happy Hour atmosphere, I had other thoughts. There’s a Target on the way to the train station! It’s 5pm and I have nowhere to go! I’m sure Target is just another Starbucks to you suburban peeps but it’s like Disneyland to me. So I stopped there and bought new running shorts plus eight kinds of 100 Calorie Snacks. In case you haven’t been following my friendly debate with HungryGrrl over on Consumerist, take that! Of course, by then I was starving so I had a 900 calorie Cinnabon for dinner. There was no time to return to Target for new, larger-sized running shorts.

Afterwards, I wandered around the mall where I worked for years. Every store has changed except maybe Radio Shack. Certainly all the record stores are gone. Yes, malls now exist with no record stores, forget ones where Becca wiled away her teenage years in training to work in the music business. Or maybe I just couldn’t find it with my sad-ass glasses.

Back on the train I tried to follow the comments on my own blog via Blackberry but failed. You people are just confusing without context. When I got home there was still plenty of time to kill before the Yankee game (people on the “West Coast” are in another “time zone”) so I watched an episode of Big Love which someone from Poopli.com had kindly sent me. What is Poopli? I’d link you but it just takes you to the login screen. Back in 2000 when everyone was buying a TiVo, some of us were buying ReplayTVs and they can send shows over the Interweb. Yes, all I did was click on the name of the show on the Poopli site and a few hours later I got my confirmation and my TV showed a little message saying someone was trying to send me a show (last week’s Yankee game tickets were an unexpected surprise so my DVR recorded that week’s Big Love right over the previous week’s and now it’s gone forever). But I’m still two weeks behind. No spoilers!

Then the game began, things started going badly, and in my concern I promptly fell asleep. Which is good not only because of how the game ended but because I’ve just received an e-mail that the entire marching band will be playing in our receptionist area in a half hour and I think I’m going to need all my strength to deal with it.

The Beatles – A Day in the Life, not available on Napster.

I didn’t have time for iPod Song of the Week this week. Make up your own! Hum it in your head! Sing it out loud and make people slap you!*

*J-Ball Management not responsible for people getting slapped. Especially after the event detailed below.

This post was meant for our Friday light post but as you can see, I got too busy to even hit the “publish” button. Oops. But now you can enjoy these items from last week’s International papers as you sip your coffee this morning instead.

From the London Daily Telegraph:
Wham! fan fined for Christmas revel in May

A fan of the 1980s pop band Wham! tormented neighbours by playing their hit song Last Christmas all night. Brian Turner repeatedly played the song at full volume from 1am onwards one night in May this year. Now he has been silenced after becoming the first noise nuisance to be prosecuted by Newcastle city council’s night watch team. Magistrates fined Turner, of Sandyford, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, £200 and ordered him to pay £215 costs.

Gosforth magistrates were told that he was visiting friends in a nearby flat in the suburb of Walker on May 15 when he began playing the Christmas single, to the annoyance of the residents. He played the hit by George Michael, whose hits with Wham! included Bad Boys and Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, relentlessly from 1am to 4am. Finally a neighbour snapped and called in the council noise squad, who eventually gave residents some peace by seizing the stereo.

Becca’s commentary: wake me up before you go go, then I shoot you for driving me batty.

From Le Monde:
Les cambrioleurs et la tentation du pot de Nutella
(The Burglars and the Temptation of the Jar of Nutella)

Don’t make me translate the whole article, especially the parts I had trouble with. But basically, the cops are patrolling in the wee hours and they see a couple of suspicious looking teens so they stop them and search their bags (no warrant needed in France I guess).

…the police officers discover a portable computer, a digital camera, two mobile telephones, a pack of cigarettes and… a jar of Nutella. Objects which the two teenagers have just stolen from a house a few minutes earlier.

Yes, while they were swiping the valuables, the two burglars, 15 and 16 years old, couldn’t resist the lure of Nutella. Who hasn’t been in that situation?

Becca’s commentary: as they said in the Godfather, leave the computer, take the Nutella.

Actually, a thief in Beit Shemesh, Israel, where my cousins used to live had an M.O. of stealing your valuables plus any fruit you had laying around the kitchen. He especially liked bananas.

Speaking of laughter, feel free to check out my new page which details the songs I have purchased on iTunes. It’s over there in the box with Pages on the upper right (you could have guessed that, I know). I reserve the right to take down this feature should my purchases get even more embarrassing. It’s a widget. Yes, I broke down and added a widget.

Wham! – Last Christmas

And now some talk about me. But not about me.

You will of course remember that I told you I was part of a clan. Not The Klan, just A Clan. Well, you might have skimmed past that in which case, welcome to the information that I have five million cousins! And I know all of them! I mean, Pi is like my third cousin once removed. Do you know your third cousin once removed? Maybe it’s second once-removed, who knows. Except… someone knows. A lot of people know. This is because lots and lots of people in my tribe have decided it’s imperative that we keep track of every member and document it all on spreadsheets and family trees and Internet sites. Can you tell I don’t have a lot of interest in this? It’s kind of like the letters I get from Johns Hopkins about reunions: if I wanted to be in touch with you, I would be. But it’s worse, really, because due to the plethora of family occasions I already am in touch with all these people. I don’t need a map to tell me how I’m related to them.

Yes, I’m going someplace with this. The other day, a cousin of mine signed me up for some website where family trees can be documented and connected. Being the control freak I am, I don’t like to be signed up for anything, so you can imagine my dismay upon hearing this from the same cousin who is responsible for 80% of the spam on my main account, resulting from the myriad 90′s coupon & savings sites for which he signed me up. But wait, there’s more! He uploaded pictures of everyone in the tree. See, it’s not that the picture was the least flattering one of me you can imagine (and it was), it’s just that most of you can’t imagine. Because as far as I can possibly control, there are nearly zero images of me on the Interweb, let alone one that is connected with my actual legal name plus my e-mail address, which could be searched by anyone. These three things are the holy trinity which I never like to be connected in any form.

I know, this is weird. Most people who have blogs (well, I have no empirical evidence, but most I’ve come across) have sites littered with their picture. Several of my readers have enthusiastically allowed me to post pictures of themselves and their families. And I’m pleased to do it. But it’s not me. As a matter of fact, many people I know from the web for years don’t even know my last name. Some of them don’t find out until we meet and at the end of dinner I hand over my credit card. And it’s not even an Age of Information thing, I have always been like that. If the busdriver asked me my name as a kid, I’d make up a fake one. Not that I needed to, I have like eight names, which is the “convoluted reason” I don’t use my name on my answering machine, as referred to in the last comment on this post. But I don’t like people I don’t know knowing too much about me. This may seem odd considering all I’ve revealed, but since no one can actually connect it to me, Becca Realnameburgsteinovich, I’m fine with it.

Recently, Arjewtino asked me why I set things up this way. I came up with some plausible reasons, like stalkers and the fear of being Dooced (fired from my job due to things I’ve said about my company on the blog), but in thinking about it I realized it isn’t really that. I mean, yes, I have had some wackos whom I’m pleased could not find out where I live. And no, I don’t know if my company would like me saying things about them, which is why I don’t, even though most of my readers don’t even know what company that is. But sometimes I have cool pictures which include me and I wish I could show them or that I could do something fun, like this “guess my age” thing J-F had up the other day which involved a photo. And I admire people like Esther Kustanowitz who posts under her real and actual name. But I can’t quite bring myself do any of these things.

To put it another way, lots of people want to be famous. I am not amongst them. I don’t really want to be known by anyone I don’t know except as Magic Jewball or one of my various forum screen names. Then I can keep my actual self squirreled away until I know you (and I know if I knew you, dear J-Ball Reader, I’d love you). When I was in a commercial in Baltimore and people at the mall looked at me like they knew me, I freaked out. When my voice was used on an Insane Clown Posse CD, my name was not involved. And I wouldn’t even let them use my voice at first. Then they offered to pay me and that made it all OK! But that’s neither here nor there.

So in the end, I wrote a frantic e-mail to and left several vehement phone messages for my cousin and he reacted in his golly-gee-whiz, “I was just trying to do something nice” way. But I didn’t mind. I don’t even mind that my picture on the family-tree site is now a black square saying “picture removed at user’s request” or that a group e-mail went out to thirty members of my family asking them to not post any photos tagged with my name. I don’t mind looking like a nutjob as long as I’m an anonymous nutjob.

Title comes from:

Oingo Boingo – Private Life

I couldn’t decide whether to write about the fantastic Crowded House show or the fun weekend in New Jersey with my cousins so I decided to write about last night’s Yankee game instead. And that was before I heard Phil Rizzuto died. Holy cow! But first, some fun moments from the other two.

The opening act for Crowded House was Pete Yorn but before that was Neil Finn’s son, Liam, who is talented but would never be that warmly received had he not been Neil’s son. Like Neil, he talked a lot to the crowd.

Woman from audience: I love you, Neil!
Liam Finn: My name is Liam.
Woman: I love you, Liam!
Liam: I love you too.

And over the weekend, my seventeen year old cousin in her long skirted religious wear has decided she’s a goth because she likes Evanescence.

Me: What are you reading?
She: It’s called “Oh My Goth.”
Me: Seriously? Ha! Are you into that? I’m going to see The Cure next month.
She: Who?

That was the point where I had to be medicated. But I digress. We had a lovely angle last night and here it is, with a view of Chien-Ming Wang, just beginning to suck in the first inning.

But that’s OK! He settled down. But then Ron Villone came out and sucked further. But that was OK too because along came Joba! Go Joba! I didn’t get any pictures of Joba, I think I was too overwhelmed by his awesomeness. Or maybe I was distracted by the altercation in my section where a guy in a Red Sox jersey called for security, I guess because he thought he was being harrassed, thus causing the entire section to turn on him. This is my question, boys and girls, why would you go to Yankee Stadium on a day the Red Sox aren’t even playing and dress yourself in Sox-gear? And he wasn’t the only one. I understand the desire to see other stadiums while you are in a town but why the masochism? Red Sox fans, do Yankee fans do that in Boston? Because it is strange and a little insane.

Of course, along with our fine seats came the fact that we were wedged in in such a way that by the time I was willing to risk going to the bathroom my kidneys had exploded. Which was fine because it precluded me from buying any $9 soda. On the subway home (the IND, as my father would say) I managed to zip in front of the Japanese fans in their matching Matsui jerseys and the nice Baltimore tourists with their O’s t-shirts tucked into their khakis and actually get a seat. Oh my goth did my kidneys appreciate it.

In conclusion, here’s a picture of the Yankees congratulating Bobby Abreu on his home run, disguised as a gratuitous shot of Derek Jeter’s ass.

Title comes from:

Crowded House – Pineapple Head (not available on Napster)