Some quick-fire bullshitting, just to get some things off my chest..

WINTER
It's April 7. We're expected to get 7 inches of snow. Seriously now, Old Man Winter, I've had enough. You're like the snowbirds who leave New York every fall for Florida, then stay too long and don't return until June � they're just getting in the way and annoying everyone. Granted, this isn't unprecedented, and it can't all be blindly attributed to the greenhouse effect and global warming � on April 6, 1982, New York got 9 inches of snow. But because of the forecast, the Yankees postponed today's home opener until tomorrow, and both the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs had their openers today pushed back. Why the weather can't just even itself out, I have no idea. Last winter was sparse and dry, and we suffered through a drought all summer. This winter we eclipsed last season's snowfall by mid-December and were officially through with the drought shortly after the new year, if not sooner.

Driving into work today, I easily got a parking spot in the front parking lot because half of the people in this building are cowards who don't provide essential services and get paid too much for doing nothing � practically nobody outside of our offices is here today, all because of the threat of a little snow. It's supposed to be a wet snow, too, and with all this advanced warning, the plows are going to be ready. I can easily see a few inches accumulating on cars, yards, sidestreets and parking lots, but I bet the main roads home will be nothing more than wet, with maybe a little slush. Pansies. I want to beat up all of them.

NYC TRANSIT
Starting May 4, subway rides in New York City go from $1.50 to $2. The one-day "fun pass" Metrocard, which gave you unlimited rides until 3 a.m. from the time you bought it for $4, will now cost $7, meaning you have to use it four times to make it worthwhile, whereas previously you only had to use it three times. The one break I can foresee, but it's not worth the sacrifices is that you get a free ride when you purchase a Metrocard of $10 or more; now you don't get a free ride until you buy one for $15 or more.

Now I'm not just some liberal crackpot spouting off here, but this can be directly attributed to the President. Yes, it's Dubya's fault the MTA is raising rates. Sure, the MTA may claim they were looking into it long before Sept. 11, and they may claim he has nothing to do with it, but it's clear that his misguided economic and aid policies have short-changed New York. Consider the whole sham of "Homeland Security." (What have they done for us, besides give comedians new fodder with duct tape and bringing a little color to our daily lives?) The Sham of Homeland Security says we have to be more diligent protecting our cities, water sources, ports, coasts, airports, etc. Then they don't provide enough financial help to make it happen. But don't take my word for it; Paul Krugman explained it all in the April 1 New York Times:

Even in the first months after Sept. 11, Republican lawmakers made it clear that they would not support any major effort to rebuild or even secure New York. And now that anti-urban prejudice has taken statistical form: under the formula the Department of Homeland Security has adopted for handing out money, it spends 7 times as much protecting each resident of Wyoming as it does protecting each resident of New York.

Here's how it works. In its main grant programs, the department makes no attempt to assess needs. Instead, each state receives a base of 0.75 percent of the total, regardless of its population; the rest is then allocated in proportion to population. This is a very good deal for states with small populations, like Wyoming or Montana. It's a very bad deal for states like California or New York, which receives only 4.7 percent of the money. And since New York and other big urban states remain the most likely targets of another major attack, it's a very bad deal for the country.

No offense to Wyoming and Montana, which serve vital purposes in the grand scheme of the United States, but those states do not need nearly as much money as every state from Boston to Washinton, California, Texas and various cities around the U.S. Even if terrorists decide to his a nuclear power plant or something, they're going for one in a populated area, not one out in the Badlands or down near Alamogordo.

CAR HORNS
Remember when you were young and your parents would take you to the movies or a theme park or the beach, and Mom would pull up the friend's driveway and you'd jump out, run to the door, knock, and gather your friend for the afternoon? Or when you were on the receiving end of that friend knocking on your door. Or perhaps you were like me, eagerly awaiting your buddy's car to arrive, so you'd sit at the window watching the road, waiting for that familiar vehicle to slow down, blinker flashing, before turning into your driveway. Heck, I still do it when I'm at my parents waiting for Dave to come by.

Well, so many fat, lazy people don't remember those times, because on our street, it's honk first, ask questions later. I've noticed an overdependence on the car horn over other methods (such as the brake) for years now. People would rather honk at you before slowing down or altering their driving habits (no matter how wrong they are). On our street, everybody honks. I doubt if these carpoolers or drivers have ever been inside most of their friends' houses. I can understand it with taxi drivers and carpool moms in the mornings, but once should be enough. If you call a cab, you should be ready, so please don't make him have to honk twice, and certainly not three times. And you kids in the mornings � your ride comes the same time every day (moms work like clocks), so be ready. Stop playing with your Xbox and get ready for school. For the rest of you, tell your friends to get up off their lazy asses and walk to the door. Yeah, I realize we live on a two-way street with curbside parking and only enough room for one car to get by so it should really be a one-way street, but for some reason God only knows, it's the only two-way street in the neighborhood. But you should be able to pull into your friend's driveway, or even the neighbors' since it'll only be for a second, to knock on the door. For some reason I feel that you'd just stop the car in the middle of the street and get out, and with our luck another car would come down the street and wait a mere three seconds before leaning on the horn to get you to move. So maybe it's better off the way it is.

ADAPTATIONI can't believe I put it down to win best adapted screenplay in the office Oscar pool. I thought it was a decent enough movie for the first 90 minutes or so, but it went way too far in the end. Chris Cooper deserved his best supporting actor award, and Nicolas Cage was good enough to make me forget I hate him in most things he does, but I thought it was horribly written at the end. Throughout the movie, Cage's character Charlie Kaufman struggles with writing the screen adaption of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. But he suffers from writer's block and then finds that the book isn't good enough to be seamlessly transfered to the screen. The characters don't change enough and the plot stalls. For the first 3/4 of the film, I thought it was brilliant the way Kaufman incorporated the character's struggles into the actual film on screen. But then � and there's no way to tell if this is all still based on fact or at this point mere fiction � the sequence of events gets so outrageous that, in my opinion, it overshadows all that good work that came before. To top it all off, the movie ends with so many loose ends you don't know where anybody ends up, save for Charlie Kaufman in his car in L.A. � and that's only physically; you have no idea where he is emotionally, professionally or romantically. It's crap.

So as not to be completely curmudgeonly: Things I'm happy with right now...

DENTAL COVERAGE
Yeah, lame, huh? But my plan at this job pays for my entire visit � cleaning and x-rays, everything. The crappy plan at the cheap newspaper only covered up to a certain amount, leaving me with $18-20 to pay on my own each time.

THE SIMS
Yes, we realize we "completely missed the boat on this one," as Casey said, but although we are paying our own way in a cab speeding through city streets to catch up with the bandwagon, we're on board. We're hooked. OK, at least I am. I created myself yesterday, plopped me down in a modest house on the water, took a job as a security guard working midnight-6 a.m. (got promoted after two days, then demoted after three), created Julia Stiles down the block, introduced my Simself to her and we've become great friends. I suck at interacting with the others in the neighborhood, so I may have to create more (or wait for Casey to create some of her own), so I'm pretty damn cranky and keep bitching about not having a girlfriend. And I'm frequently too depressed to look for a new job, and I just broke the computer. I also have let all the flowers around the house die, so I may have to hire a gardener to keep the place looking good. But I'm saving up for a pool table so that when the neighbors come over, they'll have more fun and like me more.

Yeah, I'm buying my Sim friends.

BASEBALL
But I've talked about this one at length lately.

Oh, crap, I just realized I forgot to bring an apple with me today as I'd intended. Crap. And the tiny shovel I keep in my trunk.

I'm going to move my car from the convenient uncovered parking lot out front to the sheltered spaces around back down the hill so I don't have to clean it off when I leave at 9 p.m. Yes, 9 p.m., if I'm lucky, because did I forget to mention that Dylan is out sick today and I've got to see everything through? Yeah, that happened too.

But it's slow now, so I'm going to read through more of the Sims game manual.