Bruce the Blog

Ever notice there’s something about the Internot, I mean Internut, I mean Internitwit, I mean Intertwit that is akin to a full moon in its transformative effect on some people, who turn suddenly into brave souls when in the flesh they are more likely to turn tail when confronted by the objects of their scorn.

The following email crossed my desktop late this afternoon from a loyal reader …

I received an email from two residents this morning about a new Croton site, allegedly started by a local boy with issues; they were sufficiently misled by the first posting from a “bruceapart” to think you had posted there. I thought you might want to know.http://watchcroton.com/about/·  bruceapart permalink I have high hopes for this site. The other “Croton” site is doing a fine job of a community billboard, listing events and answering questions about overall functions of Village life. What we DO NOT have is a place for a lively exchange of ideas. Maybe that can happen here.Reply
 

[Back to Bruce the Blog, the one written by the Bruce who doesn’t have ”t” when he arrives at the end of his name, although a crumpet right now would be fairly brilliant]Apparently, the “boy with issues”’s idea of “a lively exchange of ideas” is to post sophomoric blather under false pretenses of another person, not that it’s outside the realm of possibility that there is someone in Croton by the unlikely, even icky, name of Bruce Apart. I hope that is, in fact, a person’s actual moniker because, with apologies (make that profuse apologies with sugar and bodyguards on top) to, appropriately enough, Mr. T, I pity the poor fool whose life is so bereft that he has to stoop to impersonate the likes of me in the guise of giving his own site an endorsement. It’s so convoluted and dysfunctional, I can’t even follow what I’m writing here myself. Okay, I get it now. It’s supposed to be parody. I probably should be flattered but what do I know. Excuse me for not mistaking the cyberian missing link behind this courageously anonymous site as Stephen Colbert. I must be overtired from working 14-hour days. By the way, Stephen, you can be excused for lapsing into a catatonically unfunny state when creating Watch Croton (although I do appreciate the pun on the Croton-brand timepiece of the cable infomercials), because I thought you were hilarious last night opening the Grammys at the Staples Singers Center in la-la land. Quite fitting, because Watch Croton looks like it was conceived in la-la land as well.After what the Watch Croton cretin did to my name in the name of stupendously stupid self-aggrandizement, let’s all be thankful he didn’t try to plagiarize Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, or we’d be reading Sydney Carton intone, “‘Tis a fart, fart better thing I do than I have ever done before.” Thank goodness for small favorts.

Transparency is the order of the day in politics, though, like water, transparency is fluid: it depends which side of the looking glass you’re on. The view from elected officials is that anything more we’re told or shown than we were told or shown before they took office is transparency. The view from voters is that we’ll decide just how transparent our government needs to be, and we’ll take those who don’t meet our standards out to the voting booth for a little heart-to-heart chad.

So a salesperson in our company walks into my office today — while we’re on deadline, mind you –and claims that there are some nameless, faceless people she’s spoken to who want to know — nay, DEMAND TO KNOW! — why our, in their words, “far right” political columnist Anthony J. Bazzo now also is interviewing people! How dare he ask questions and we publish the answers.

I ask who these people are. I already knew the answer. These are the people who never have names. Only complaints. I wonder aloud what Mr. Bazzo’s political ideologies have to do with him asking questions since he’s not also answering them.

Apparently just the sight of his name to the “far left” nameless faceless complainers is enough to convince them that North County News now is a “far right” publication.

The obvious reply to that is, “compared to what”? If someone self-avowedly on the “far left” thinks someone or something else is on the “far right,” isn’t that relative? Maybe, just maybe, to them, “far right” is somewhere in the middle.

And if they didn’t complain before this, does that mean the paper then was “far left” and coincided with their point of view? Is it that North County News is “far right” or is it that North County News was too “far left” and has move to the right to find a more sensibly centrist middle ground?

But don’t hate me because, like Andy Bazzo, I have the temerity to ask questions of others.

But don’t let my blogarrhea bravado fool you. I really do want to hear any and all feedback about what we publish by whomever wherever whenever whatever forever.

So we look forward to receiving your Letters to the Editor at Editor@NCNLocal.com, but only publish those that are signed and include (not for publication) a phone number for us to verify the sender. Or feel free to call me directly at (914) 962-3871 X410. Operator is standing by … on the right, and left, and in between.

Well, you know, we all want to change ourselves.

My 2009 New Year resolution worked out pretty well, if I don’t say so myself. And I don’t have to. Everybody else keeps saying so for and to me. But that was about 43 or so pounds ago.

The best, most apt comment came from Chris Sciarra of CS Construction, when we kibbitzed, along with Yorktown attorney laureate Al Capellini and sportsdome mogul CJ Diven, at Murphy’s Bar + Grill for the Yorktown board’s inaugural after-party on New Year’s Day.

After CJ insisted he never realized how tall I was when I was about 45 pounds heavier, and that I looked six inches closer to the ceiling now, Chris had had enough of the weight-loss talk and said, “The problem is that’s all anybody ever talks about with Bruce when they see him nowadays. That story’s over.” Hey, I couldn’t agree more, Chris. You’re right. Now, the story is 2010 resolutions.

 I resolve to …

• Go to bed early (er than 1:00 a.m.)
• Go to the gym at least 3X a week
• Water down the wine on social occasions (wine has water in it, doesn’t it?)
• Take dance lessons
• Take golf lessons
• Take more golf lessons
• Learn how to play golf
• Learn how not to play golf badly
• Come up with witty ripostes when my buddies make fun of me playing golf badly, like, “Well, excuuuse me for not going to medical school!”, or, “I can guarantee you it’s not because I’m distracted by lots of girlfriends in Las Vegas!” (Hey, wait a minute, my wife Elyse is on her way to Vegas right now, but it’s on business, or at least that’s what she told me)
• Stop playing golf 
• Go on a diet of screens emitting electronic beams
• Bulk up on more bound texts
• Update my blog daily

And you?

Okay, first that header. No, it’s not about a depleted jar of a branded ice tea powder mix. Nester is among those misnomers we’ve come to take for granted, even if they don’t make much, or any, sense. In avian terms, a nester is like a bird feeder. While it’s commonly assumed the “nester” in empty “nester” refers to the parents of children no longer living under the same roof, “nester” in fact means the home itself. So, Elyse and I are not nesters, we’re denizens of the nester, or nestees.

If you think about it (and believe me, I do), the same misnomer status obtains with the commonplace term “homophobia.” It’s actually a colloquialism rooted in a derogatory expression, not in the discipline of etymology. Broken down, homophobia literally means “fear of homo.”

Etymologically, the prefix homo- denotes two or more people or objects  or concepts alike in characteristics, hence homogenous to mean a group of similar things or homonym to mean words that sound alike, or, more to the point, homosapien to mean the species to which we all belong — human beings.

Applying the stringent rules of grammar, then, the coinage homophobia connotes fear of those similar to you, which is virtually the inverse of its common usage to mean fear of those different from you.

So, that’s my linguistics prologue to kick off an entirely unrelated topic. 

Which is this clarion call to arms: Empty nestees of the nesters unite!  You know what that’s about.

My creative idol Stephen Sondheim said, “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way.” I say, when you’re an empty nestee, you got no kids around, you’re a familyless man. A little dramatic, I know, but please don’t revoke my poetic license.

Well, when you’re an empty nestee, there’s nobody around who doesn’t need to pop a cocktail of pills every day (some prescribed by physician, some prescribed by paranoia). There’s nobody around who doesn’t need to unbed during the graveyard shift to find relief in the loo. There’s nobody around who isn’t performing nose and ear and unibrow electrolysis before or after every shower.

When the kids hightail it to college or marriage or just lives of their own (”how rude!,” as Elyse would — and does — say) outside the cozy comforts of womb sweet womb, the peace and quiet are enough to drive you crazy.

Well, now it’s the year-end holiday season, when the kids who are doing who knows what in college are, for the winter interregnum, doing who knows what at home. You know what that’s about. Even when they are rumored to be home from the University of Tiass (This is a stickup, sucker: give me all your money to pay for the next four years for the rest of your life), there’s still, it seems, nobody home except for those who fulfill all aforementioned obligations that accompany the aging process.

Our daughter Elissa has been home ever since that fateful Friday a fortnight ago when I drove six hours in one limbs-in-limbo day to pick her and her friend up at their dorm and ferry them back to what used to be their forlorn norm before being liberated from high school and the ‘rents (that would be us oldsters).

It’s not that playing collegial chauffeur isn’t fun. It’s just that in the course of the arctic expedition to the snow belt of New York State, the mind drifts in aimless mischief to visions of sugar plum fairies, dental surgery, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and colonoscopy, which for some reason reminds me of the time my car was rear-ended, pushing its tailpipe clear into the Corinthian leather interior like a sneaky snake named Alger Hiss presumably up to no good, but later acquitted of all allegations, thanks to a clean bill of health.

So ask Elyse and I where Elissa has been since she got home? Go ahead, ask us. No, really, I mean it. Take your time. We have no place to go. It’s she who has all the places to go that we don’t know about. We might be able to have a clue were it not for the lithium battery sadly losing its will to live on the homing device we surreptitiously attached to Elissa’s ankle as she was unconscious one day at 2:00 in the afternoon (or maybe she was just sleeping).

Attempts at humor aside, she’s really a good kid. Actually, she’s a great kid, who was pleased as spiked punch to attend a SUNY school (at Oneonta), not that that has anything to do with her being a great kid and all.

True, there are some subtle benefits to having a kid in the SUNY system. Thanks to state subsidies, the thermostat in our house overnight is only set at about 40 (and only that high because Elyse is a compassionate and forgiving god of budgetary prudence, aka tightwad), compared to what the thermostat might be set at if our darling daughter were matriculating at a private school. I don’t even want to think about that alternate university universe. By contrast, kids who perform random acts of matriculation at state colleges only get letters to their parents reprimanding them. Thank goodness for small-school favors. We are truly blessed. And, like most college kids, she is truly blissed.

At least Elissa had the enterprise and thoughtfulness to share a small part of her generous holiday downtime with a local pizzeria, a humanitarian effort for which she is cutely, if not handsomely, compensated. She worked there last summer and the owner flipped for her. Granted, in his business, flipping is part of the daily routine, but let’s not pick nits, and, while we’re at it, I like mine half pepperoni, half mushrooms, and don’t forget to hold the anchovies!

Even though Pizza Princesa Elissa was assigned evening hours, all the way to closing time, she, like her nocturnal paternal forebear, is a night person, so we know she won’t get home pasta her bedtime, which means there’s little danger of her being pie-eyed, in the sober sense of the word, plus she stands to make some decent spending dough, which she’ll knead back at college, where she’s a sister in Phi Sigma Sigma (the sorority was so nice, they named it twice), either that or they ran out of letters and had to double up. These are, after all, recessionary times. Damn you, Ben Bernanke).

It goes without saying that the vessels of the genes from whence Elissa sprang will be sad when she must return to the Land of Oneonta in the mist of the midst of January. We’ll miss missing her at home, and look forward with eager anticipation and total bemusement to the next time she’s home when once again we won’t know where she is, but also once again will be secure in the knowledge of where she surely is not: hanging out with the decidedly uncool (except when it’s 40 degrees overnight) empty nestees.

‘Twas the night before Christmas,
And all through the shuls,
Israelites gathered to
Celebrate movies, not yules

That’s right. What for most of the world is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is for many non-celebrants the annual festival of Takein, as in take in a movie and take in Chinese food. The holiday also goes by the interchangeable moniker of Gooutto, but Takein has a nicer ring to it, donchathink?

So tonight, before Christmas, Elyse and I are about to celebrate Takein/Goouto by seeing George Clooney in “Up in the Air.” Tomorrow, she has her festive sights set on “It’s Complicated,” which I would be happy to see if I were truly anorexic (my sister-in-law Linda thinks I just might be as I melt away before her eyes). At least if I were anorexic, that kind of movie would help discharge my digestive system. But I’m not anorexic, so I’d rather see James Cameron’s genre-creating “Avatar” in 3D.

Oops! Time to go … I’ll report back to all you Christmas celebrants later. In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all and to others a Merry Takein/Gooutto!

We’re baaack! Elyse insistently is calling “Up in the Air” “cute.” I call it “a clever movie with a message.” I told her I also can tell lickety-split when a movie script is based on a novel versus original material. The latter invariably varies from insipid to hackneyed to predictable to Hollywood ridiculous unreality. Of course, in this instance, I knew from reading Joe Morgenstern’s review (is there anybody else worth consulting on cinematic quality?) that the film derived from a novel by one Walter Kirn. I watched the beginning of another movie based on one of his works, “Thumbsucker,” but otherwise his is not a muse with which I am familiar.

I liked Clooney. Elyse afterwards remarked, “He always plays himself.” I allowed that such inference by a moviegoer such as he perhaps unwittingly is testament to the effortlessness of his craft. I had a close encounter with Rosemary Clooney’s nephew circa 1998 at a home entertainment convention in Las Vegas. He was on hand along with a mini-coterie of contemporary celebrities (in projects, not in generation). One was Matt LeBlanc, riding high at the time with red-hot TV sitcom “Friends” (which charms, along with “Seinfeld,” eluded me). I recall Matt with his arm in a sling. I recall Matt being a personality-challenged pill who barely deigned to chat up the likes of ink-stained trade press hacks like me. George, on the other hand, was as affable and warm and accessible and physically agreeable as he appears on the big screen. He talked to me about his newsman father Nick, who of late can be seen on cable movie channel AMC.

Then there was Gloria Stuart, Titanic the Movie’s doyenne in the pivotal and spine-tingling role of Rose the Elder (portrayed in the main by Kate Winslet), whose tossed amulet serves as the film’s talisman, or what the great Hitchock dubbed the “Maguffin.” That would be a property in the movie that seems to be what the plot revolves around, but in truth is more of a diversion than an indispensable driving device.

Anyhow, one of the prized photos hanging on the wall of my home office is a photo of yours truly standing backstage at that late ’90s Las Vegas convention presentation with Clooney and Stuart. I don’t know where LeBlanc was and could care less. Perhaps he was just having a bad night and preferred to be somewhere else than with the likes of us when the photo was posed. Whatever, he did not hide well his boredom any more than I now hide well my disdain for his unsociability.

Back to “Up in the Air.” If Oscars (or, perish the thought, Golden Globes) were meted out for Best Opening Credits, my vote would go to this film. Bless Jason Reitman (the film’s director and son of Animal House director Ivan Reitman) for having the uncommonly good sense among his directorial fraternity to understand that audiences like me have little patience to endure the self-indulgently prolonged sequence of most Hollywood movies’ opening credits. Here, the names on the screen flit by quickly, thankfully. The overall graphic conceit of this film’s credits are a credit to the production designer. I’m not sure if there are specialists in Title Design these days, in the tradition of Saul Bass, known for his patented and indelible James Bond movie opening sequences. They don’t make ‘em like that any more, that’s for sure.

The Men’s Room Critic I heard, as I … OK too much information … told his compatriot, “That one is a keeper.” He then added that his 47-year-old divorced son had been through a series of women, each of whom “was crazy about him,” but he, like Clooney in the movie, had a commitment problem. Presumably, from where I sat, that’s why this gentleman could relate to Jason’s vision.

Enough already. On Christmas Day, I am looking forward to seeing the 3D version of James Cameron’s “Avatar.” I then will talk about my close encounter about 10 years ago with the Titanic director at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. And I have a Cameron-signed Titanic poster to prove it.

For now, I only will say that as Elyse and I exited the showing of “Up in the Air” at the less-than-satisfying Trademark Cinemas at Jefferson Valley Mall (the sound was not great), we encountered friends en route to their second viewing in as many days of Avatar. That was a good sign this is a movie worth seeing.

We’ll be sure to let you know if we agree.

It’s merely a hard rain that’s gonna fall today — aka snow. But for those, like Elyse, whose wonderment at the frozen drops has not abated a bit since childhood (perhaps even has escalated), the precipitation is cause for heightened anticipation.

We’re perusing the weather maps on TV that depict accumulation along New York State’s eastern corridor. The towns of Mahopac and Poughkeepsie are labeled, but not Yorktown or other places in between. So it’s left to the mind’s eye to fill in and approximate where our house falls within the layers of projected inch-count. In verbal parlance, it is called synecdoche, or using a representative object to connote a larger context. (The arcane term may look more familiar of late due to the eponymous Hollywood film by eccentric film talent Charlie Kaufman.)

Friday’s “winter storm” forecasts for the weekend changed rapidly from morning to noon to night. First, the weight of the storm was projected to fall to the south and east of New York City, focusing its atmospheric wrath on Long Island, with perhaps a topical dust touching the Hudson Valley. That wimpy forecast then presently shifted to predict heavier accumulation in this region.

At about 9:30 Saturday morn, Elyse advised me the snow would plow through in about an hour. I scoffed, “No way.” But, since the 7th Annual North County News Holiday Wrestling Tournament was in play today and yesterday at Yorktown High School, I was anxious about when the snow would begin its descent, and how that timing would affect the tourney’s stretch run to the championship round late Saturday afternoon.

Not to worry. The competition went off without a hitch, thanks to the cooperating weather and mostly to host Yorktown High School Coach John Tornambe and Yorktown Central School District Athletic Director Fio Nardone, who put together a great draw of 12 teams, with top props going to Brewster, which bested John Jay-Cross River in the finals. Placing third was Sleepy Hollow.

So, here it is 6:48 p.m. Saturday and we’re still waiting for “go, snow.” Now, however, the forecast fingers the inch count at 12″-18″, far more robust than the incipient prognostications.

Weather or not that proves prophetic, we won’t s’know until Sunday.

Inevitably, it has started: the mainstream media is rushing to tell us the Best of the Decade and so on and so forth. I’m no Stephen Hawking or Carl Sagan, but, according to the reliable sources of my fingers and grade school teachers, the default counting system in most societies is 1 to 10, not 0 to 9.

I went through the same bemusement when it was decided that the end of the last century would be celebrated on the last day of 1999 instead of New Year’s Eve 2000.

I’ll wait until December 2010 to draw my own conclusions about this past decade, thank you. I wouldn’t want to leave out one-tenth of it due to mithguided mathterminds who are closer to mythematicians than mathematicians.