April Fool's is wasted on me, for two main reasons. I'm usually not gullible enough to fall for an April Fool's prank, and, as evidenced by the many dollars I've lost in Texas Hold 'Em with the fam, my poker face is for crap so it's rare that I can pull off pranking anyone either.
I don't want to go all Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus up in here, but last night I read an interesting article in NEJM about a study of the effect of low-dose aspirin for women. Men have been previously studied, and the trend for men is that low-dose aspirin reduces their risk of myocardial infarctions, but not their risk of strokes. This latest study shows that women exhibit the opposite trend- low-dose aspirin does little for their risk of MIs, but does significantly decrease their risk of strokes. I could go off on a rant right now about how so many of the early low-dose aspirin work focused solely on men, and how women actually have a higher incidence of stroke than men... but it's Friday, and I still have my commute home to expend rage.
But I still have to mention that I was a bit disheartened to hear this morning that it looks like plans to move the Jets to Manhattan are well underway. This, quite simply, sucks. I don't have any allegiance to NJ, believe me. But it's symptomatic of something that is really starting to piss me off about Manhattan, and I don't understand why more New Yorkers aren't getting angry about it. If you go with the premise that I've always advocated, that NYC is a place like no other in the United States, then you should have a big problem with Bloomberg and his idiotic plans. Manhattan has some big problems, as it has continually had, when it comes to money, schools, housing, transit. Crikey, have you seen the size of an average studio (we're not even going to touch the subject of rent, because, well, I live in SF, so I have very little sympathy there) in Manhattan, the Barbie kitchens with EZ-bake ovens? Have you tried to catch a cab in Manhattan at 6 pm on a Thursday when it's raining? Have you tried to get from midtown to anywhere past Rockefeller Plaza by foot when the Christmas season is upon us? Have you noticed how many people have to move to the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, or even worse New Jersey, and commute into the city, because of space and money concerns?
My point is, Manhattan has enough going on. Manhattan is not Jacksonville, is not Orlando, is not San Diego. New York does not need the 2010 Superbowl. It does not need the Olympics. And it certainly does not need a football stadium. Why would you want to turn Manhattan into such a generic place? I've long forgiven the Disney-fication of Times Square, but I really find this latest turn of events angering. Saying that this stadium is important to the city's vitality is an insult to its actual vitality- its people, its art, its business.
Setting all of that aside, you can bet that, should this stadium get up and running, it will evolve into exactly what a Knicks' game has become- a f***ing corporate circus. Want tickets? You have to ask the boss man, because most of the tickets these days are owned by corporations. And you can forget about tailgating. And also, the Jets are so NJ. Come on... Mark Gastineau? Tell me you wanted him anywhere but the Meadowlands.
In the usual completely non-sequitur tangent- the great white shark in Monterey was set free yesterday... my previous doubts about whether she was really combative or whether the soupfins had just gone soft have been settled- Monday, the great white shark was observed chasing some hammerheads and galapagos sharks. So I guess she was just exhibiting natural tendencies. When I called my brother to tell him about this today, he was incredibly forlorn. He's always been a fan of sharks, but due to the procrastination gene that runs in our family, he never made it to Monterey. He cursed me a few times for this, although I might have deserved it a little. The brother-sister dynamic requires gloating and teasing. If we didn't have that, what would we have, come to think of it?
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