It looks like I’m not the only one who thinks the Nets should move to the Prudential Center in Newark:

Although I wouldn’t change a thing if I had the whole experience to do over again, not being in Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees win their 27th World Series title, and being 1,200 miles away instead, was a truly bizarre event.

At game one of the 2009 World Series with my fiancée

Let me explain: Anyone who has met me for six seconds or read this blog more than once knows I’m a die-hard Yankees fan. I had partial season tickets in Box 611 in the old Yankee Stadium since 1997, specifically for the purpose of being able to go to postseason games. It takes a very significant event to get me to miss any postseason game, much less the final game of a World Series.

And I was fortunate enough to be in Key West for a very significant event, which, as I already said, I wouldn’t change at all. One of my closest friends got married, and she found an absolutely fantastic guy. Not being there was never a consideration.

Something similar happened to me a couple of years ago, when I missed the Cowboys-Giants game, also for the wedding of another very close friend. I wasn’t the least bit upset with either friend in either case. In the case of the football game, it was just bad scheduling luck. In the case of the World Series, it was just pure stupidity on the part of Major League Baseball. The World Series should not extend into November, and the fact that a potential game seven would have been played Nov. 5 is a sad joke. I never gave the World Series a thought when making the travel plans. November is NOT baseball season.

A stop at the greatest breakfast place on Earth on the way down to Key West

So I ended up watching games three through six all over the place, after attending games one and two at Yankee Stadium.

I watched game three at my fiancée’s father’s house in Boynton Beach with three Phillies fans: my fiancée, her father and her stepmom. I actually like the Phillies, so this wasn’t an issue, with just a little good-natured ribbing going on.

I watched game four at Whiskey Tango, an excellent sports bar in Hollywood, FL, with my fiancée, my best man and his wife, the latter friends since college.

I watched game five at the pool bar of the Southernmost Hotel Collection in Key West, where we were all staying for the wedding. The wedding, incidentally, was a perfect beach wedding on a beautiful day, and I’m ecstatic that I was able to be there.

And I watched the sixth and final game at Jack Flats, also in Key West, with an interesting mix: a healthy number of Yankees fans, a healthy number of Phillies fans and one ass hat wearing a Red Sox shirt.

The main thing I learned from games five and six: Whiskey is evil.

I had a great time, and I couldn’t ask for better company. It still felt surreal watching the Yankees and my fellow fans celebrating in the Bronx and not being there, but it was for a worthy cause and, as I said, I’d do it all over again.

On the beach at Key West, after the wedding

I had a huge scare and a very, very rough week last week. My Aunt Rose, who raised me from the age of 12 on, suffered a minor heart attack and a minor stroke (if you can really use the word “minor” with either of those) and was in the hospital from Monday-Monday. She’s home now and, while not quite 100%, doing remarkably well for someone who’s gone through so much trauma, but as anyone who knows Aunt Rose can confirm, it wouldn’t be Aunt Rose if there wasn’t a funny story involved.

First, the non-funny part of the story: I was getting ready to go to a friend’s birthday dinner last Monday, when my phone rang at about 6:45 p.m. I didn’t answer it, because my cell phone said Blocked Caller ID, but I got a voice mail from Aunt Rose seconds later, so I called her back on her home phone. She was babbling nonsense and repeating the same nonsense over and over, and I realized something was very wrong, so I told her to sit tight while I drove from Hoboken into Manhattan to take her to the emergency room.

The entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel was closed, for some reason, and while I was waiting to get into the Holland Tunnel, a call came in from Aunt Rose’s phone. Her neighbor thankfully called 911, and it was one of the emergency medical technicians asking which hospital she should be brought to. I asked them to take her to Beth Israel Medical Center and met her there. Within one hour of being in the building, I was shocked by the words “heart attack” and “stroke” and extremely worried about how much she’d recover.

She got exponentially better each day, with each test bringing positive results, and late Thursday night, she was moved from the cardiac-care unit, which is equivalent to intensive care, to the cardiac-monitoring unit, which is a lot more relaxed. The only bad thing about her speedy recovery was that she was becoming quite stir-crazy, as she felt fine physically and was getting sharper and sharper mentally.

When I visited her Friday, she mentioned a couple of times that it would be very easy to slip out one of the doors, take the elevator to street level and walk home. I strongly discouraged this, and she promised that she wouldn’t do it.

While getting ready to head into Manhattan Saturday morning, a call came in from Aunt Rose’s cell phone, but the voice on the other end belonged to the nurse, which really frightened me at first. However, when the nurse told me she had no idea where Aunt Rose was, I laughed, shook my head and said, “I know where she is. Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it and get her back there.”

I then proceeded to call Aunt Rose’s home number and, when she answered, I sternly requested that she return to the hospital. She went home because she felt like taking a bath and washing her hair, which could have been done at the hospital. She was just stir-crazy, but it was still dangerous and not smart. My favorite part of the exchange was her saying, “Ah, they don’t even know I’m gone,” to which I responded, “Really? Is that why I just got off the phone with the nurse?”

As I said earlier, anyone who knows Aunt Rose probably wasn’t the least bit surprised at that story. Aunt Rose does what Aunt Rose wants, consequences be damned. If there’s a line, Aunt Rose cuts to the front of it. If there’s a giveaway of one item per person, Aunt Rose comes home with a half-dozen. If the flight attendant makes an announcement that all cell phones and electronic devices need to be turned off, Aunt Rose turns her cell phone on to see if it works. This is Aunt Rose in a nutshell.

Anyway, Aunt Rose has been back home since Monday and continues to improve at a rapid rate. She’s fine physically and totally herself, and all that remains, hopefully, are a couple of follow-up appointments with doctors and possibly a little bit of speech therapy. She still occasionally says one word while meaning the other, but it’s becoming less frequent and she usually realizes when she’s doing it. Considering the potentially disastrous results of the combination of a heart attack and a stroke, she came out of this very well and will hopefully be 100% soon. After all, they haven’t built a hospital that can hold Aunt Rose.

Aunt Rose in a commercial for HSBC (that’s her at the very beginning):

I saw the last concert ever at Giants Stadium by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band last night, and I was a little disappointed. It was far from a bad show. I’ve never left a Springsteen show feeling cheated or unsatisfied. I just didn’t love the set list and thought many very necessary songs were left unplayed. I guess I was spoiled by my favorite concert of all-time, by the very same band in the very same location, last summer.

Even Backstreets, the fan site for Bruce junkies, pretty much agrees with me: “Closing night seemed to break very little new ground, however. The set list was a near carbon copy of the previous Saturday’s show, including the reprise performance of the Born in the USA album. The crowd certainly brought the noise, as exhorted by Bruce to do so, and the band’s performance was excellent, but as a whole, the show seemed to fall short of the heights that closing night in Jersey has brought in the past.”

The July 31, 2008, show was absolutely unreal, and there will never be another one like it. But last night’s didn’t even come close. If you would have told me that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band would play their final show at Giants Stadium and not play Rosalita, Jungleland, Thunder Road, Candy’s Room, Backstreets, Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, Prove It All Night or Two Hearts, I’d have probably laughed at you. I didn’t expect all of those songs, but I certainly didn’t expect none of those songs.

And while music is certainly a matter of opinion and there is no right and wrong, I’ve never been a fan of some of the songs that were played last night. Seven Nights to Rock does nothing for me. American Land is a great song, but it’s run its course. Kitty’s Back is a fantastic classic, but I would have gladly sacrificed it for one of the songs mentioned above, or two, since Kitty’s Back is well over 10 minutes long. And while I’m not a huge Rolling Stones fan and the theme of the song was appropriate for the evening, I could have done without The Last Time.

And in the, “If It’s on the Internet, It MUST Be True” department, none of the rumors being bandied about came to fruition. I read in various places that the band applied for a special permit to extend the show to 1 a.m., yet I was actually sitting on my couch watching the end of the Red Sox-Angels game minutes after midnight. And I read about special guests including Jon Bon Jovi, Mick Jagger, Elton John and Bono, yet the closest thing to a special guest was Max Weinberg’s son, Jay, playing the drums during Born to Run (and doing a stellar job, much as he did when he played the entire show at the IZOD Center a few months ago).

On a more positive note, seeing Jersey Girl live is always special, although I think 70,000 people were shocked to find out it was the last song. I love Wrecking Ball, the tribute to Giants Stadium, and sincerely hope they release a recording of it so I don’t have to rely on a bootleg. Spirit in the Night was awesome, and Tougher than the Rest was a nice surprise.

Don’t get me wrong: I am NOT bashing the band. As I said earlier, the effort and the performance last night were still fantastic, and I still believe they are, by far, the best live band around. And while I will probably not to go either of the November shows at Madison Square Garden for various reasons, many of them involving my dwindling bank account, I will definitely see them the next time they come around, although they are allegedly taking a two-year hiatus from touring. I just expected to close Giants Stadium out with an all-time epic classic show, and not an “average” Springsteen show, even though an average Springsteen show is still better than most other artists’ best shows.

Bring on your wrecking ball.

Last night’s set list:
Wrecking Ball (with Curt Ramm)
Badlands
Spirit in the Night
Outlaw Pete
Hungry Heart
Working on a Dream
Born in the USA
Cover Me
Darlington County
Working on the Highway
Downbound Train
I’m on Fire
No Surrender
Bobby Jean
I’m Goin’ Down
Glory Days
Dancing in the Dark
My Hometown
Tougher Than the Rest
The Promised Land
Last to Die (with Curt Ramm)
Long Walk Home
The Rising
Born to Run (with Jay Weinberg)
* * *
Raise Your Hand
The Last Time
Waitin’ on a Sunny Day
Seven Nights to Rock
Kitty’s Back (with Curt Ramm)
American Land
Jersey Girl

Image from Backstreets

Oct. 2 marked the one-year anniversary of the day I was laid off. I don’t have any delusions of being superior to anyone, nor of being absolutely indispensable for the well-being of a company, but if you told me last Oct. 2 that I’d still be out of work this Oct. 2, I’d have laughed at you. Now it’s not very funny.

Unemployment

As anyone who knows me or follows this blog already knows, I haven’t been completely useless. I picked up one part-time job in April, and a second in June. The good news is that I’m working and I’m doing interesting, relevant things and keeping myself in the loop, rather than just killing time. The bad news is that the two part-time jobs are taking more out of me than my full-time job did, for about one-half the pay. There have been many days when I’ve started around 7:30 a.m. and gone straight through until 8 or 9 p.m., although not having a commute eases the pain of those hours to some degree.

I’ve been doing both jobs since June, and there are times when I still struggle with juggling both. I don’t want to favor one over the other, but just the same, I don’t want to leave something important hanging for either one of them, and admittedly, there have been several days when I would have loved a do-over so that I could take a completely different approach to managing my time.

I was really hoping (and I still am) that one of the part-time positions would become full-time, but I’m a little less optimistic these days, since the first wants me to cut back on my hours and the second brought over another person in a full-time role from a site the company sold. Unless the blog I’m working on explodes, I can’t see them adding a second full-time person when most of the company’s blogs don’t even have one.

Still, as I said, I’m happy with my role in both jobs, and despite what I said about making one-half of what I made at my old job, I’m being treated more than fairly by both companies and I am not even remotely disgruntled. It’s just very hard to adjust to part-time work after being in a full-time role from mere days after I graduated NYU in 1990 until just over one year ago. I really miss the stability of a permanent job.

And on a personal note, while COBRA is one of the most helpful tools for the unemployed, having to write out a check to my old company every month grates on my nerves to no end. I really wish the check went straight to the insurance company, because while I know the funds end up there, the mere thought of that company receiving one cent from me boils my blood.

Speaking of my old company, I’m smart enough to not even consider mentioning specific names or going into detail in a blog, because I’ve heard far too many stories about people being burned by content posted in their blogs. But I’ve held this in for one year and need to get it off my chest.

I’m not saying I’d have survived the layoffs had the things I’m about to mention not happened, because people with far more illustrious backgrounds there were also among the victims, but I really feel like I was doomed by two poor decisions. The first, by an old boss who was forced out of the company a few months before my layoff, moved me from a publication where I had spent 12 ½ productive years and felt like a well-respected part of the core to a publication where I flat-out didn’t fit in and never felt respected or welcome. And the second decision involves the people running the department now, who should not have been picked over some of the people I worked with at my original publication.

Again, there’s no guarantee that I’d still be there, but the two decisions really greased the skids. I never meshed well with the second publication, and despite all that, I’d take my work results and productivity over those of many of the people still employed there (certainly not all, because there are some great people there, too). Sadly, the decision was not mine to make, nor was it made by anyone with an appreciation for how hard I worked, but such is life. I keep trying to tell myself that everything happens for a reason, although after a little over a year, that reason has proven pretty elusive to grasp.

On another personal note, the timing of this stretch of unemployment could not possibly be worse. I got engaged Aug. 1 and, while my fiancée and her family have been nothing short of wonderful and supportive throughout this entire ordeal, not being able to propose with a “real” ring and not being able to contribute anything financially toward the wedding really sucks.

And another thing that really sucks: I don’t see much light at the end of the tunnel. I think I’ve sent out about three résumés over the past two months. I forgot what an interview feels like, much like a phone call that isn’t from a telemarketer. And just when I think things are starting to turn around, I hear horrible industry news, like yesterday’s report that Condé Nast eliminated four magazines, including Gourmet. News of that sort hits hard, even when I don’t know any of the victims, because all it does is increase the competition for the trickle of jobs that might actually be available.

Overall, my spirits and my state of mind are pretty healthy, but when it comes to the job situation, they pretty much suck.

I just finished serving a day-and-a-half of jury duty in Jersey City, and it was the longest day-and-a-half I’ve experienced in quite some time. The stress jury duty puts people through is worth far more than $5 per day, no matter what the state of New Jersey seems to think.

jury duty

I left myself plenty of time to get there Monday. I wanted to arrive early so I could secure one of the cubicle-like seats, plug in my laptop and get some work done. It’s a good thing I left myself so much time because, as I found out later, I could not have taken a dumber route from the Journal Square PATH station to the courthouse. I knew the courthouse was on Newark Street, so I found Newark Street on a map and walked to it, then turned right toward the courthouse, which turned out to be about a nine-block walk. However, making the first right off Kennedy Boulevard, onto Pavonia Avenue, rather than walking all the way to Newark Street, would have shaved about six of those nine blocks off the total, so keep that in mind if you ever get stuck serving in Jersey City.

Despite my Vasco da Gama-style route, I arrived early enough to get a cubicle and immediately started working, which was a wise move when you consider my part-time status: If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. A couple of panels got called, but my name wasn’t among them, and I actually had a fairly productive day, including working through our lunch hour because I didn’t want to lose my seat.

Then bad luck reared its ugly head. My name was the last one called for what I later found out was the last panel called on Monday, so at approximately 2:30 p.m., productivity went down the toilet, as I was summoned to a courtroom where, obviously, computer use isn’t allowed.

The case was a civil case involving an automobile accident that took place in July 2005. It’s great to see that our justice system just hums right along, isn’t it? I barely remember last week, much less four years ago. The eight-person jury box was filled, questions were asked, some jurors were dismissed, and then we were allowed to leave early because the judge had another panel set to convene at 3 p.m., but we were told to report back to the same courtroom at 9 a.m. Tuesday (today).

If I may interrupt for a sidebar (legal term!), there are some downright ugly women in Hudson County. Men are always looking at women, no matter what our status is. Anyone that says they don’t is flat-out lying. If our eyesight and our imagination are toast, then our other vital parts are probably toast, as well. But you can throw out the Ginger vs. Mary Ann debate: Mrs. Howell would have been the sexiest one in this bunch. Having no eye candy around was a big disappointment. Eye candy definitely speeds the day.

And if I may interrupt for another sidebar, the only benefit of the long route I took to the courthouse was discovering a White Castle on Kennedy Boulevard. Once I was dismissed for the day, was there any doubt what lunch would be? I freaking love White Castle.

I returned to the courtroom Tuesday morning, taking a much shorter route thanks to the tip from my lovely fiancée. My experience in the courtroom Tuesday provides the clearest example possible about why jury duty is so stressful. I honestly couldn’t decide which way to “root.” Did I want the process to drag on in hopes that my name never got called, so that by the time a jury was selected, I’d hopefully be dismissed? Or did I want the process to end quickly so I could return to the relative calm (and Internet access) offered by the jury room? Were the events of the morning a good sign or a bad omen? The complete lack of control over my situation and the unpredictability were just draining.

The judge had a long list of questions that she planned to ask every potential juror, and the first batch of questions seemed like they would weed out the most people, so when we got through that first batch and several potential jurors had been replaced by people other than myself, I started to feel a little better about my odds of escaping a trial that we were told would likely last through Monday.

Then the bad omen arrived. A woman who appeared to be Indian was seated as juror No. 1, and I immediately knew in my heart that she would end up completely screwing me. The odds were still about 25-1, as there were 25 of us left in the audience, but I just got this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Some people have no business whatsoever being in jury duty, and she was one of them. I’m not one of those people who demands that every person on the planet speak perfect English, but she obviously did not have nearly enough command of the language to get through a trial. The judge, who spoke clearly and slowly, had to repeat each question two or three times, and she was called up for sidebar conferences with the judge and the two attorneys on numerous occasions. Someone must have finally come to their senses and realized that having her on a jury would likely double the length of the trial, because she was excused. Out of the 25 people left, yours truly became the replacement juror. I knew it. Why, I don’t know, but I knew it. I was no longer a free man: I was juror No. 1.

I had two low cards that I was hoping would save me. One was the fact that Yom Kippur occurs on Monday, which was expected to be the last day of the trial. Anyone who knows me also knows that I’m not the least bit religious, except when it comes to Yankee baseball, but with my last name being about as Jewish as last names can be, I thought I had a shot. However, since the judge strongly felt that the trial would end early Monday, I struck out on that count.

I’m pretty sure my second card was what saved me. As I said, the trial was about a car accident, and one of the questions asked whether any family members or close friends had recently been involved in an accident. Unfortunately, one of my friends was indeed involved in a very severe one a few weeks ago, which he was lucky to walk away from. The accident in the case took place on Tonnelle Avenue, and my friend’s accident also took place on 1/9, but further south, on the Pulaski Skyway. I was called up for a sidebar conference, described my friend’s accident, and returned to the jury box.

At this point, things weren’t looking up for our hero. I didn’t think there was any way to avoid serving on the trial, and I was resigned to completely wasting the rest of Tuesday, as well as Wednesday, Thursday and Monday (Friday is a day for motions, so juries aren’t involved). The only chance I had was being excused by one of the lawyers, but I didn’t think my answers to any of the questions raised any red flags.

We finally got to the point where all of the questions were answered, and it was up to the two attorneys. The plaintiff’s attorney excused one juror, so we all had to sit there while his replacement answered the entire line of questions from the judge. The defendant’s attorney then excused another juror, and the same drill happened with replacement No. 2, but this one took much longer, as he was called up for a couple of sidebar conferences. At this point, I was utterly and completely defeated and just wanted the trial to start already, as I saw no hope of not being part of it. However, I didn’t realize that the attorneys could remove more than one juror each.

Then, the magic words came out of the mouth of the plaintiff’s attorney: “Your honor, I would like to excuse juror No. 1.” Did I just hear that, or was I hallucinating? Relief washed over me as I gathered my belongings and returned to the jury room, where another pleasant surprise awaited: I was free to leave.

I have never been happier in my life to log onto my two work e-mail accounts and get busy. But the two hours and 15 minutes or so that I spent in that courtroom this morning were among the most stressful I’ve experienced in quite some time, and I have no desire to repeat the experience, even for another $10. Today’s experience was way too close for comfort.

I have been waging an 18-month-plus battle of attrition with a particularly annoying telemarketing outfit called Peconic Bay Marketing, so I figured I’d have a little fun with them and blog about it.

To Peconic Bay Marketing

Much like anyone with an IQ above room temperature and at least minimal social skills, I despise telemarketers. I blogged about a particularly irritating run-in with one of them in December. And while the National Do-Not-Call Registry has been somewhat helpful, it hasn’t completely eliminated the problem.

But Peconic Bay Marketing is far more annoying than the organization from December. I had a history with the December folks, having donated to a worthy cause while I was still gainfully employed. And there are no hard feelings: Once I’m working full-time again, if they happen to contact me, I’d donate again.

Peconic Bay Marketing, on the other hand, has no connection to me whatsoever. Yet they have called me anywhere from three to five times per week, every single week, since about a year-and-a-half ago. I swear, I am NOT making this up, nor am I exaggerating. Peconic Bay Marketing shows up on my caller ID more than just about any other name or company.

I don’t treat Peconic Bay Marketing any differently than I treat any other strangers who call on my home phone. If I don’t recognize the person or phone number, I let it go right into voice mail. But not once in the hundreds of times this company has called have I ever received a voice mail from them. And I absolutely, positively refuse to pick up the phone. I WILL win this battle of attrition.

What really intrigues me is how much time and money this company has wasted trying to contact me. How many times can they call the same number, not get an answer, and keep calling back? Apparently, whatever that magical total is, it hasn’t been reached yet. But I still refuse to pick the phone up. And I never will.

So, Peconic Bay Marketing, feel free to keep calling three, four, or five times every week. You’re wasting your time, which should have been obvious months ago. Oh, and one more thing: GET BENT.

I did something Wednesday that I hadn’t done since I was still an NYU student: I covered a live event. In a shameless plug for the company that hosted it, as it happens to be the same company that employs yours truly part-time, Think Mobile was a very interesting gathering, and I truly learned more in one day about technology for mobile phones and devices than I ever expected.

HP 6830s

OK, now that I’m done brown-nosing, while riding the PATH train back to Hoboken, I kept thinking about the differences in the technology I used Wednesday and the technology, or lack thereof, I used when I covered my last live event: the NYU men’s basketball team, sadly known as the Violets, losing to Glassboro State (now known as Rowan University) during the 1989-90 season.

On Wednesday, I used a brand-spanking-new HP 6830s laptop, hooked up to a WiFi network, and I was able to post stories directly onto WebNewser in seconds using a content-management system called Movable Type.

Let’s just say it wasn’t quite like that in the spring of 1990.

I covered NYU at Glassboro State with a good, old-fashioned pen and paper, including copying down the stream of expletives from NYU’s head coach when I asked, in a completely professional tone and minus any sarcasm (shocking for me, I know), if he considered switching to a man-to-man defense in the second half, since NYU’s zone defense worked well enough to give its opponent a 41-14 halftime lead.

Macintosh 20-SE

I then returned to my dorm room and crafted my story on a Macintosh SE-20. Yes, I am indeed referring to the first-generation Macs, with the six-inch, black-and-white screen built into the CPU. This powerhouse computer boasted one megabyte of memory and a whopping 20-megabyte hard drive. And yes, I do mean megabyte, not gigabyte.

After outdoing Grantland Rice, Ernest Hemingway and Peter Vescey, all while enjoying a couple of ice-cold long-neck bottles of Miller Lite from the little cube refrigerator in my dorm room (remember those?), I copied my masterpiece onto a floppy disk. I’m still amazed that one tiny flash drive can hold the equivalent of a crate of floppies.

While e-mail did exist in a somewhat primitive form back in 1990, it didn’t exist in my fraternity house. I didn’t even have a modem. So I used the earliest form of data networking to transfer the story to the offices of the school paper, the Washington Square News: I walked over with the floppy. I was even prepared enough for disaster to bring a second floppy with the story on it, just in case, as there was no way I was making that trip twice.

And naturally, there was no way to receive the instant gratification I get when one of my stories or blogs enters cyberspace. I had to wait until Monday’s newspaper was delivered to my dorm.

The good old days? My ass. I’ll take the new technology, thank you very much.

floppy disc

I’ve never been good about things that involve “the last,” as in, “the last time I’ll ever go here,” or, “the last time I’ll ever see this.” But I’ve had to deal with quite a few instances of it over the past year-and-a-half or so.

I went to my favorite Hoboken bar, Ted & Jo’s, for the last time at the end of March 2008. The bar unfortunately closed, and the space is still empty and probably will be for quite some time. I still don’t really have a new bar, although Zeppelin Hall, the new beer garden in Jersey City, is quickly becoming a staple. I love The Shannon, but not so much on weekends, when the crowd is much younger.

I went to Yankee Stadium for the last time almost a year ago. Although I’ve started to enjoy the new ballpark more and more, I still miss the old ballpark terribly and wish the team had never moved. The new Stadium is nice, but the old one was home.

I went to my desk at my old job of 13 ½ years for the last time. I didn’t have any time to think about this one, as getting laid off was shocking and completely unexpected. I hadn’t been happy at my old job for quite some time, but I still think there would have been some sadness if I had the opportunity to leave on my own terms. The last year-and-a-half were pretty tough to deal with, as I was forced to leave the publication I had spent 12 years with and move to one where I didn’t fit in at all, but 13 ½ years at one company is still a pretty long time, and there were some nice memories mixed in with the bad ones.

I spent my last day as a single man July 31, but I couldn’t be happier about that and wouldn’t change a thing.

And last weekend, I spent what might have been my last weekend at my old beach house on Long Beach Island. I actually think from talking to the people who are still involved that the house will probably continue next year, but you never know. There’s a lot of change going on. People are taking new jobs, moving, getting involved in serious relationships, and the possibility always exists that I’ve spent my last night in the ugly monstrosity that I loved so much for seven summers.

Saying goodbye to things is tough, even if it’s for the better sometimes.

Long Beach Island

I confess to knowing absolutely nothing about construction. I’m lucky I can construct two screws into their proper slots in the process of putting together something like a TV stand. But nothing I build is going to cost $1.5 billion, like the new Yankee Stadium, or $1.2 billion, like the new Cowboys Stadium. Hell, if anyone gives me $1.50 or $1.20, they’re seriously wasting their money.

But I’d like to think that the higher-ups at my two favorite teams used some of the billions of dollars they spent on new ballparks to hire people who actually had clues about what they were doing. Yet evidence points to the contrary.

Video board in new Cowboys Stadium

Let me address the more recent fiasco first. During last Friday night’s preseason game against the Tennessee Titans, an average-looking punt by the visitors’ A.J. Trapasso hit the massive new video board. The video board is 90 feet above the playing field, which, as Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has repeatedly pointed out, is five feet higher than the league minimum.

Are you seriously going to tell me that $1.2 billion didn’t buy someone who might have raised their hand and suggested that this board was too low? First of all, punters are a lot stronger than they were when the 85-foot rule was adopted. Second, it’s just pure common sense. Trapasso’s punt wasn’t even that well-struck. What happens when Shane Lechler of the Raiders comes to town on Thanksgiving and crushes what would be a 70-yard punt, only to have it ricochet off the video board? Hell, even the Cowboys’ own punter, Mat McBriar, will likely bounce the pigskin off the video board, even though he claims that the team’s strategy is to aim for the sidelines.

I just find it amazing that this issue wasn’t raised at some point before board-zilla was raised to the rafters at Cowboys Stadium. I guess $1.2 billion doesn’t buy good help these days.

Right field in the new Yankee Stadium

Speaking of the lack of good help, let’s move to the Bronx, shall we? Again, not to sound like a broken record, but couldn’t a few bills from the $1.5 billion spent on the ballpark have gone toward a study of what the open design of the Stadium would do to fly balls? Straight-away right field at the new Yankee Stadium is a sick joke. Almost every pop fly hit in that direction somehow ends up in the stands.

Yes, I know, it’s already been proven that the fence in right field is more of a straight line to accommodate the manual scoreboard, making the distance a few feet shorter than in the old ballpark, and the fence is also a couple of feet shorter. But having gone to roughly the same number of games during both the last season in the old Stadium and the first season in the new Stadium, the only way those theories would explain the home-run boom would be if tons of balls were hit to the warning track last season. They weren’t.

And I can tell you from personal experience, as someone who goes to enough games and has gotten pretty good at judging home-run balls, I have been fooled by more balls that I judged as harmless fly balls ending up in the seats this year than in the previous 10 seasons combined.

Maybe it’s just me, because I will never see $1 billion (unless someone out there knows something I don’t), but I’d like to think if I were in charge of building something that cost that amount of money, I’d research every potential problem to make sure they didn’t occur.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to punt a football off a video board, then hit a harmless pop-up to right field and circle the bases.