~Saturday~ I was up at 8:30, and off to my 10:00 Manbites Dog Theater board of directors meeting by 9:30. We had a productive meeting, which was accompanied by some Bruegger’s Bagels and coffee. Isn’t it all about the food?
After the meeting, I drove over to the American Tobacco Campus, the area in which Curtis (curtimack) lives, and where I met him for a nice lunch at Mellow Mushroom. I had their sausage with grilled onions and green peppers sandwich and he had their club sandwich. We both ordered the half portion, which I really appreciate seeing on a menu.
It was nice to meet Curtis, as he’s been reading my blog for a while now, and now I have a “real” face (that is, he has a small profile pic on his comments, but that’s not the same), and a nice personality, to put with the words whenever he comments in the future.
I found this article in the online version of The Week magazine interesting, 6 Lotto Winners Who Lost it All:
| Michael Carroll, a $15M British winner, at first lavished gifts on friends and family, but soon started spending on less admirable causes: Cocaine, parties, cars, and, at one point, up to four prostitutes a day.
Janite Lee, a wigmaker who immigrated from North Korea to St. Louis, won $18M, which she used to better her community, sinking millions into the construction of a nondenominational church and a reading room at Washington University. She also donated so much to the Democrat National Committee that she was ranked 31st on a list of “soft money” donors—right beneath Boeing. William “Bud” Post won $16.2M in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but a brother tried to hire a contract murderer to kill him and his sixth wife, a landlady forced him to give her one-third of the jackpot, and a conviction on an assault charge after Mr. Post fired a shotgun at a man trying to collect a debt at his deteriorating dream house. In 1996, the cash-strapped former millionaire auctioned off the rights to his remaining lotto payments. Oh and you should read what happened after that. 🙂 Wayne Schenk, a Vietnam veteran, thought the $1M New York lotto he won would pay for his costly lung cancer treatments, but the 51-year-old was wrong. His request to receive a lump sum were rejected, and he received one $50,000 payment—well short of the $125,000 initial outlay required for the specialized care—before he passed away in 2007. Evelyn Adams won New Jersey’s state lottery twice—and managed to squander her $5.4M total winnings. A compulsive gambler, she spent the bulk of her payout at Atlantic City casinos. She now lives in a trailer. Jack Whittaker, a West Virginian won a $315M Powerball jackpot on Christmas Day 2002. Strangers descended on him demanding a piece of the fortune, and he turned to alcohol and strip clubs. He also lavished cars, diamonds and cash on his granddaughter, 17-year-old Brandi Bragg. Bragg’s life as a normal teenager spiraled out of control; she spent tens of thousands on shopping sprees, diamond stud earrings for boyfriends, chartered planes to Vegas—and lots of crack cocaine. Oh and there’s more, including offering a local woman $10,000 to strip. This guy wins the high drama award by far. You should read what ended up happening to Brandi. |
I had a lovely two-hour nap in the afternoon, after which I headed to the gym, where I did 225 (15 sets of 15 reps) ab crunches, which I haven’t done in a while, and although I reduced my reps from 20 to 15, I know I’m still going to be feeling it tomorrow.
After that, I did 40 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine for a 793-calorie burn. I finished 15 minutes before closing time.
I made the mistake of going to Flex for Underwear Blackout night, arriving there at about 10:30, and where the number one question of the night was, “Where’s Joe?” It was good to see Alex, who was there hanging out with a guy named Glen, and who ended up being the subject of the second most often-asked question of me tonight, “Who’s that?”
It was fairly dead there early on, but it got more crowded as the night went on. It’s funny to watch the management trying to figure out ways to get people in their underwear, other than the bartenders who are required to, that is.
Tonight, they’d put up a big curtain across the stage, behind which you could only go if you were down to your underwear. I asked three different people at three different times what was going on behind that curtain, and the response was the same thing all three times, “Nothing.”
At one point in the evening, Rick came over to me and asked me why I was back in the corner by myself, and why I didn’t get down to my underwear and join them. “Uh, because I don’t want to grope, or be groped by, my friends?” Besides I was enjoying a heartfelt exchange on our Salon Entelechy Ning around a sequence of blog posts that I culled from my first semester in grad school when I was taking a class with Brad in January-April of 2004.
I left there at around midnight, glad to be gone.