• Emotional Response to Stimuli: removed (now a flaming bus full of war orphans will not even move me to look in their direction)
• Attitude Projector: on and…locked (prevents sappy panhandlers from getting the upper hand)
• Vision Controls: removed (Cardinal Rule for All Cities: Make no eye contact. EVER.)
• Anti-Terrorism Tools, consisting of a flashlight, a fully charged cell phone, eye drops, ibuprofen, and half a roll of electrical tape. (Yes, your shrewd observation would conclude my preparation is essentially useless crap for an attack, but it makes me feel prepared.)
• Innocuous Items that Can Be Used as Weapons: check, check, and… check

I haven’t been into the City since the Dinkins administration and this would be my first jaunt into the city solo. I have been told that the town has changed and that it’s nicer, friendlier. All the same, I went in thinking that every other person was a mugger or a panhandler. The others were obviously tourists.

I took the train in and managed to get into the city much faster than I had expected. I probably estimated more time in having to fight the CHUD’s and various street urchins. Turns out they both unionized (Tourist Scammers and Newspaper Sellers Local 3) and don’t start work before nine. Who knew? So I took the most leisurely walk I could manage up Seventh and Broadway over to the Hilton for the seminar. New York at 6:30 in the morning is unlike anything imaginable. Quiet streets, minimal foot and car traffic and almost picturesque shots of storeowners hosing down their sidewalks. I even broke the Cardinal Rule: when I stopped my walk long enough to let a jogger by, she not only looked directly at me, but smiled and thanked me! If the Queen Mum offered to do my laundry all next week, I couldn’t have been more surprised.

Even with a fine and leisurely walk uptown, I made it to the hotel early. Try "two hours before the seminar" early. Although I had some serious considerations about getting a good New York bagel, I was gripped with this unexplainable fear that every shop I passed was a festering hotbed of disease. So I spent the bulk of my time doodling in notes about the trip and reading.

The seminar went well. I saw what I needed to see by lunch so I cut out and met up with an old college friend, D. She’s one of the few people I know who has lived in both Philly and New York and I was hoping would have an interesting perspective on the two cities. Her take: both places suck equally. She holds the belief that there are only two types of people in the world: you’re either from California or you’re from New York. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Saskatchewan, you’re either a pushy New Yorker or a go-with-the-flow Californian. Sadly, she’s a Californian trapped in New York, for the time being.

All this, and I can’t wait to go back…

"Honey, I really don’t like the Marx Brothers. I prefer the Three Stooges."

She doesn’t like the Marx Brothers? But… how? And why have you kept this terrible secret from me for so long?

It’s not that I have anything against the Stooges, but their shorts and movies are everywhere. You can hardly make it through a full day of TV without some station throwing up one of their slapstick routines. It’s likely there are kids in China who are trying to poke each other’s eyes out in sacred reverence to the Howard Brothers and Company at this very moment. But it’s slapstick, plain and simple. It’s humorous violence for the sake of it. I’m not saying that it’s not difficult to do, but it’s a holdover from the days of vaudeville and Buster Keaton. Audiences will always love a good belly laugh at the expense of someone else. Pain for one is humor for another.

When I was a kid I LOVED this kind of humor. The Stooges and Warner Brothers cartoons were rife with dynamite and falling anvils and giant lump-inducing mallets. I even practiced a few of these techniques on a friend (sorry about the mallet thing, Jimmy). But as I got older, I discovered the humor of what was being said rather than what was being done. Anybody could drop a 50-ton weight on you or bounce a pipe wrench off your skull, but it took real comedic genius to leave you with a burning insult or snappy one-liner. I held on to Bugs Bunny cartoons for the dialogue (the whole "Duck season! Wabbit season!" argument between Bugs and Daffy is pure gold), but moved on to the Marx Brothers for insults and rejoinders.

And now the Missus, my woman of wimmins, says she still prefers the Stooges. What am I to do?

I can see the argument, but not the reason for demanding equality in it. Women are usually the content gender. They don’t need bars to meet people. Like bees, they have a vast network of relations and intricate forms of communication largely invisible to the naked eye. At least to a guy’s eye. This network constantly delivers reams of data on a guy’s physical, social and financial status, their sexual prowess, anything a woman needs to know before deciding to say hello or simply spray him with mace. They don’t need to interact with us cretins to figure all of this out. If you ever see a woman staring blankly at a guy while he tries to deliver his best pick up line, she’s actually just busy downloading the latest info on him.

Bars were originally a guy’s invention, a place to wet your whistle and discuss the topics of the day. However, guys realized that staring at the same six boozehounds while listening to them prattle on about the Yankees got boring pretty quickly. How best to remedy this? Guys thought and thought and thought some more.

The answer: women.

Yeah, women! We can bore them with banal sports statistics while ogling their bodies the whole night! But how best to bring the fairer sex into a dimly lit room reeking of stale beer and cigar smoke? While kidnapping was the obvious (and short-lived) response, discounts on drinks and cover charges proved the more favorable technique.

And now, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Mr. Gillespie, we’ll be back to rattling off RBI stats with nothing for our eyes to settle on. Better men have gone straight to Hell for less than this.