I am not normally a fan of frozen vegetables (visions of unidentifiable frozen green blocks come to mind), but when they are as easy to prepare as Birds-Eye Steamfresh, then I’m on board. The food looks like something you can get at a restaurant (mixed vegetables, pasta and shrimp), but at $4 a serving, its a good alternative to grabbing pizza on the go. And, more importantly, far healthier.

As a student and with a full-time job, these are a godsend; it takes little or no talent to prepare them. I understand that these are not cheap for what they are (other frozen foods cost far less in bulk), but they also aren’t as high a quality. And, most importantly, there is no way to overcook it or screw it up (the steam makes sure of it), which for bachelors like me, is the most important thing.

Google Transit is an ongoing project associated with Google Maps to help us move from Point A to Point B as easily as possible.

Unfortunately, Google Maps for Transit for NYC is a rough, beta product. For example, it kept on thinking my former apartment, in Lower Manhattan, was in Brooklyn. No, Pearl Street is in Manhattan too.

I’m still discovering my new neighborhood of Kew Gardens, and I just saw my first movie at the Kew Gardens Theater, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

What a wonderful, wonderful film this was. I love Woody Allen’s romantic films (Hannah and Her Sisters, Match Point, and VCB) because each is an extended examination into the ways in which each of us satisfies each other and falls short in relationships. I’m sure the comparison has been made before, but Allen, I think, has studied the structure of Shakespearean comedy, and gives it to us without the happy ending (but usually, with a post-modern, dissatisfying one ;))

This film, for me, also, was a reminder that not every woman wants the frat-boy i-banker to live with. Some women are more complex than that - for which I should thank God Aspiring to something to which I disagreed has always made me feel uncomfortable and, in the end, has made me less happy.

Well, for several reasons, I think, it is time for me to be happy. It will hopefully be the pole-star by which I navigate the rest of my life.

I will go into my problems with my past jobs and work history, and use this blog as a ‘thinking place’ through which, hopefully, I can arrive someplace more suitable and agreeable to who I am.

This is the first post from my iPhone.

The market went down another 449 points today. That is 7% off it’s local high, and for that reason, I think I’m going to get back into it. I know I’ll lose money in the short term, but I will do OK over a longer period. a really longer period.

One thing I wonder about is…. when I strategize (i.e. plan for the future) I wonder if assumptions about the past will hold water in the future. Logic indicates that it should….but it is still a gamble (although one with pretty good odds.)

I think that when I was younger, when I wanted the world to be different, that I wishes that the above wasn’t so. I think I’m beginning to accept that it is, mostly (nut not always).

I had to post. Too much is happening in the world and I need a way of processing it!

• Bear Stearns was gone in a weekend. Not that I knew anyone there, but I once went for a job interview. They were a big organization.
• The Treasury Department takes over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. $200 billion taxpayer money is ‘lost’.
• Lehman Brothers (26,000 jobs will be lost.)
• Now there is talk of Merrill Lynch being sold to Bank of America.

I was nonplussed at first (after living through the dot-com bust, I became a bit unconcerned about this economy).

Now, I’m worried; first for the future of the financial system to provide New York City jobs, and the whole tri-state area, which will be hurt for a long time to come.

I like Sarah Palin as a person/personality, but as a pro-choice, pro-northeast citizen, I’m not going to vote for her. Joe Biden is the closest representative I have as a New Yorker have in this race.

The people, I think, had a genuine thirst for leadership from outside Washington.

Now, John McCain has chosen to give us two Westerners. Dumb move. At least a Bostonian (Romney) would have been  palatable and sane choice.

There’s a dozen other reasons I’m not going to vote for McCain/Palin, but they could have had my vote on a McCain/Bloomberg ticket.

Why did you tease us for so long with your presidential aspirations Mike, and where are you now?

I don’t believe that abcnews is a real news agency (they employ John Stossel for Pete’s sake), but here they have a point:
they have a point:

Only a “handful” of captured alleged Al Qaeda associates have had the kind of detailed information on weapons of mass destruction that Siddique, who attended MIT as an undergraduate and earned her PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis, had in her handbag, multiple current and former US intelligence and law enforcement officials told ABC News.

We paid MIT and Brandeis (!?!?) to educate this woman so that, later in life, she could kill Americans.

The space at MIT could have been much better used to educate an American citizen. That’s what China or India or Russia would have done, IMHO.

Maureen Dowd somehow knows where all my buttons are. I rarely visit her column for that reason, but in this column, she examines how the American male needs to be changed to fit the current reality (I know this because she uses the pronouns ‘he’ and all the examples are male.)

I think, utimately, that every one of her examples, it will be the woman who is shown to have violated the principles she espouses, not the man.

• Christie Brinkley, after decades of being out of the spotlight, wants a reality show of some kind. That’s probably her motivation for a public trial.  Peter Cook is much poorer than she is (she has multiple megamansions in the Hamptons area.)
• Madonna is looking, actually, for just the opposite: to get rid of a husband, quietly, so she can get back to the (sexual) freedom of being a powerful multimillionaire artist.
• A-Rod and C-Rod just want to hurt each other, but both want to be rich as well.