"Mr. Clean" gets dirty — and pays $5,500 an hour for it

Gov. Eliot "Ness" Spitzer, who after fighting corruption on Wall Street as an AG graduated to the cesspool that is Albany with a promise to clean it up, was forced to publicly apologize today after a months-long IRS investigation revealed that he had been visiting prostitutes.

You can bet that the investment-broker types downtown are drinking themselves silly right now in celebration. You can read an entire tome of Times metro section coverage (or check out any other major paper, political blog, 24-hour news network or highly vocal street person, for that matter). You can read the Times editorial in which you can almost feel the palpable anger. You can think that while, yes, he broke the law and betrayed his wife and flouted his anti-corruption ideals, maybe people are making a little too big a deal about the whole situation (I'm leaning toward this option.)

But really, all you need to do is watch the video of Silda Spitzer, standing next to her cheating husband as he goes down in a flaming ball of hypocrisy.

EDIT: I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. The mere time that it takes to say "five thousand, five hundred dollar-an-hour prostitute" would cost you about $20 with such a practitioner. And if Eliot Spitzer really wanted to cheat on his wife, I'm sure he could have found someone who would have happily complied, without risking a decade's worth of his public reputation. So I take it back. Legal and ethical considerations aside, Eliot Spitzer is too big of an idiot to be running a state. Kick the bum out.

And Dick Cheney Said, "Let There Be Light!"

Happy (belated) Daylight Savings Time everyone!

Do take a few seconds to contemplate:
a. the fact that our dark overlord has the power to rearrange the clock for two weeks out of the year (OK, so Congress has to agree to it. But back when this was passed that was rarely if ever a problem).

b. that this is the only context in which you will ever see the words "Dick Cheney" and "sunlight" occur in the same sentence.

Not that I'm complaining. Not at all. I'm all about sunlight, especially when there's more of it at a time of day when I'm awake to appreciate it.

I probably would have forgotten to set my clocks ahead if it had not been for a homeless woman on the train. After she finished telling us how if we didn't give her money her daughter would have to go hungry that night, she reminded us all to reset our clocks or we would be late for church.

I gave her a dollar.

Sleep, schmeep.

The damn neighbors are blasting their music again. That, in and of itself, is tolerable.

What is less tolerable is when the people upstairs think the music is coming from MY apartment and bang on MY ceiling. Argh.

Also, every Saturday night and some Fridays, there are parties at the church across the street that don't get going until about 1 or 2. But who parties in the wee hours with music blasting at a CHURCH? Well-dressed middle-aged people, of course.

Also, due to the fact that there are approximately 83734723727 churches in this neighborhood and exactly one parking lot, sometimes on Sunday mornings there are two rows of parallel-parked cars on one side of the street. No, I don't understand it either.

bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb bob-omb

Yesterday, after I heard that a tiny bomb had exploded the night before at the Army recruitment center in the middle of Times Square, I left for work 15 minutes early to go gawk at the scene. By the time I got there, 13 hours after the fact, there was really nothing to see except some Army men in uniform and a few reporters having what appeared to be an impromptu press conference.

This morning the New York Post made a complete ass of itself by conflating some nutjob's completely unrelated letters saying "We did it" with a confession to the bombings. Oops.

Goodbye, Brett!

Today is a sad day for Cheeseheads the world over, for it is the day our beloved Brett Favre announced his retirement from the game of football.

I take back any sentiments of goodwill that I may have previously expressed toward the Giants.

HTM in Review: Diet Books

I went on my first diet when I was 6. It lasted about three hours. Later efforts have had similar levels of success. Along the way, I've read enough silly weight-loss articles in women's magazines to earn an honorary degree in nutrition from the University of Conde Nast. I am not a fan of diets; I find it a lot less effort to just make little lifestyle changes over a period of time. But I do have a soft spot in my heart for diet books, mostly because they contain recipes. Of course, being that I don't usually end up cooking most of them, I'm kind of like those dudes who say they read Playboy for the articles. But whatevs.

Since I left for the city I've read two diet books, which were nearly polar opposites of each other.

The first was The Supermarket Diet from Good Housekeeping. The basic premise being that you make all your own food (and buy certain frozen/prepared stuff), follow three decreasingly torturous phases of recipes and ta-da! You're skinny. Within the happy rhetoric about how much food you can choose from, this book is actually bossy as hell. The author promises "You won't feel hungry," But she prefaces the 1200-calorie "boot camp" phase of the diet by saying that if you just can't handle the hunger after two days, skip ahead.

I would never consider following this diet. If you're really dead-set on cutting your sodium, though, this book could be of help. Also, it does have a lot of useful information on how to read between the nutrition-label lines and pick the healthiest stuff from the grocery store. Also, there are LOTS of recipes (though I haven't tried any of them yet). For the $5 I paid for it, not a total rip-off.

I picked up French Women Don't Get Fat from a book exchange at work. I was skeptical. French women don't get fat — Spanish women don't either. But when I went to spain, I gained 10 pounds. 

This book, however, has a really good point, which is that one of the reasons Americans have such a weight problem is that we, as a country, have a massively dysfunctional relationship with food. We eat junk — in huge f-ing portions — without really consciously enjoying it. And we don't move enough or drink enough water. So the point is that you figure out what your bad habits are and over about 3 months you cut as many of them out as you can. Also lots of recipes One of which I actually tried. And it even turned out OK.

I do disagree with the author's hatred of workout machines. And she does project a certain amount of snooty French elitism. But because of this book's suggestion of mixing fruit juice with seltzer water I've given up soda almost entirely (well, that and the fact that there is a tea-brewing machine right next to my desk at work). Which may not have done anything for my waistline but it's saved me a ton of money.

And that's it for the first installment of Hoty Takes Manhattan In Review. What are you reading/watching/listening to these days?

Semicolons get me goin'

A few days ago on the train I saw a public service ad thats gotten its share of media attention:

No matter what paper you read,
Its language or viewpoint,
Please put it in the trash can;
That's good news for everyone.

Why did a story about this sign spend at least a good week on the Times' most e-mailed list, you might ask?

Because of its "impeccable" use of a semicolon.

Sadly, the irony of a newspaper praising an ad about throwing away newspapers is lost on them.

Also, shouldn't you be recycling that newspaper?