Bruner Blog

Whoever
dreamed up the branding on this
should be shot.

Guess who won?


UPDATE:
Joke’s on me. Turns out this is the 9th year of Ice Wars, so it was not a post-Sept. 11 concoction. But the name is still ridiculous, particularly in this post-9/11 world, so they should still be shot.

I
love the Everlasting Blort for pointing
out stuff like this Neiman Marcus Halloween Christmas ornament. As if it weren’t
insane enough already (who wants a Halloween themed Christmas ornament?), there
is also the question, as the Blort points out in its headline for this item, of
“the importance of proper font choice.”

Thanksgiving was fun at the Bruner/Haspel residence. Seven Hungarians, one Italian and two Americans, including myself. Dinner was quite the success (thank you very much). Then about 11:30pm, another five or six Hungarian filmmakers dropped by to drink the last of my beer. Somewhere around 1am, I let them talk me into going out to a Harlem jazz club. Originally we were aiming for Showmans on 125th St., which I’ve never visited, even tho it’s just a few blocks from my place. We got there to find it closed and pushed on to Lenox Lounge, which is perhaps a mile east of my place, quite the stroll given the sub-freezing temperatures here in NY of late.

The scene inside Lenox Lounge was worth the walk. 2am after Thanksgiving and the place had about 20 people in the front bar section, the jazz in the back room already finished for the night. Needless to say, the crowd is almost all black, tho giving no sense that this crowd of Eastern Euro trash was the least bit unwelcome. It’s a cool ambiance: art deco decor, great juke box, uninhibited slow bumping and grinding, zero pretentions.

Soon after we settled in, a beautiful woman came over from the bar to chat with us. She happily informs us she is an actress and model, the first African American woman to be “one of the David Letterman girls,” she mentioned among a list of her credits. When I said that I recognized her from the Letterman show, she acted like this was something on her resume she couldn’t really comprehend herself. “White people humor!” she snorted in amazement, as if I could relate. “We do this one routine, ‘Does It Float?’ where we drop something like a microwave into a big tank of water and Paul and Dave talk about whether or not it will float,” she explained, with an expression of utter disbelief.

Personally, I love the “Will It Float” segment. They had it on tonight’s Letterman. Always good for a laugh. (FYI, a bag of road salt sinks.) But what would I know, I’m just a silly white guy, and that kind of stuff is funny to us, apparently.

She was quite the character and said other even wackier stuff, but I’ll spare her the Google liability and leave it at that (thankfully for her sake I missed her name).

(Speaking of Letterman, Liza Minnelli was his guest tonight. Yes, she’s seen better days, but she sang a song off her new album, Liza’s Back (a follow-up to her prior smash album “Liza’s Front,” Dave quipped), titled “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?” and, boy, that lady can still sell a song.)

I passed on entertaining the Magyar movie makers again tonight at the Bulgarian Disco, but you may be able to read about it shortly here or here. Saving my strength for Saturday night’s vodka latke Chanukah party. Friend Kevin asks, “Doesn’t your crew ever get sick of each other?” Fair question, but thankfully not so far.

Quite smart, apparently. (Or at least very, very full of myself.)

Long before I started blogging, after I taught myself the rudiments of HTML and set up the Bruner.net homepage (not much changed over the years), I set up the Bruner Family Network, devoted (such as it is) to the genealogy of the Bruner family name. Granted, I know virtually nothing of genealogy, my own family’s or otherwise, but I have written up what my dad has told me of our family history plus a bit of research on Ancestry.com, back when such searches were free.

(I learned, among other things, that great-great granddad George Washington Bruner changed the spelling from two ns to one, and that the earliest ancestor that I can track my own Bruner lineage back to is Johann Daniel Brunner, born in 1754 in Pennsylvania, pre-Revolutionary War. Fought in it, I suppose. We don’t know where his parents came from.)

Anyway, the Bruner Family Network was kind of a set-it-and-forget-it project. A year or so ago, I figured out the guestbook feature, where one or two folks a week leave an entry, having found the site mostly through a search engine. I read all the entries, but I don’t even regularly reply, as I have no information for them about who might know more info about their great-great-grandmother, and what else am I going to say, “Hi, isn’t Bruner a great name?”

Today’s guestbook entry, however, is worth noting. It’s from Rick Bruner, a web marketing expert based in New York City. Not me, the other one. In fact, this Brooklyn-based Rick Bruner says he lives right down the street from another Rick Bruner. Apparently, this city is lousy with us. Who knew? (I threw away my white pages, as it was just taking up space and I always use the Net anyway. If anyone has one, I’d be curious to see how many Rick Bruners are listed in NYC. For “Rick Bruner” exactly, SuperPages has only me, at two addresses (old and new). Including Richards and Rs, there are only a few more of us statewide.)

This other 20-something Brooklyn-based Rick Bruner (of Ricksville.com) is a web design expert. Which is in fact quite fortuitous, as I have been looking for a competent designer for varoius client projects. Designers are generally so flakey I’ve had several bad experiences, but who can you trust if not another Rick Bruner?

In fact, I’m already hoping our would-be partnership goes so well that we could eventually set up our own agency, The Rick Bruner Agency (or something, we’d work on the branding). Ideally, we’d hire only other Rick Bruners. If necessary, we might even consider cloning.

UPDATE:

Rick Bruner replies:

I think my wife would freak out seeing an office full of Rick Bruners.

Nice to hear from you, although I guess I should tell you my birth name was Richard. Oh well. I went by Ricky as a child Not Rick E.
And later the Y was dropped and the name Rick just fit so well….

There is a Bar on 20th street called “No Idea” and they have name night where if you have the name assigned that evening you drink free. We could convince them to have a Rick Bruner night. Who knows with your site and popularity, we could drum up all the Rick Bruners in the world. I’m sure for free beer they would do it. And any Rick Bruner not into free beer, well he should change his name to Todd or something else….

Anyway nice to know there are others out there somewhat like me. (even if it’s only in name.)

Take care

Rick Bruner

I too am Richard and was Ricky through high school. How freaky is that? (Not very freaky, I suppose.)

I was joking with Elizabeth that at the Rick Bruner Agency, we could go around referring to ourselves in the first person plural all the time, like “Rick Bruners will get back to you on that” or in the ambiguous third person, e.g., “Rick Bruner doesn’t like that idea.”

I think I’m going to have to become friends with this guy. I don’t even care if he’s a jerk, the potential for the goof is too funny. We could hang around together in bars just waiting for the opportunity to be asked to introduce ourselves, then with deadpans we’d pull out our respective business cards and then, when challenged, our drivers licenses. Would be a total chick magnet, I’m sure, were we not both married.

If there are any other Rick Bruners reading this, please drop a note. Two words: free beer.

All Mark (notice he tops my “Friends Who Don’t Blog But Should” list):

Rick,

My childhood best friend, who lives in Florida, offered to send me three
very valuable bottles of vintage champagne, but soon discovered that to
do so would be a violation of state law, possibly a felony. I did a
little research, and discovered an incredibly complex patchowrk of state
laws governing the intra- and interstate shipment of alcohol, including
wine.

It is completely forbidden to ship wine anywhere using US Mail. UPS and
Fedex will ship it only among so-called reciprocal states, those who
have agreements for the legal shipment of alcohol, such as California.
But Flordia is among the most restrictive states.

On the other hand, it is perfectly legal for almost anyone to ship a
handgun, rifle or shotgun from anywhere to anywhere. An unlicensed
person can ship a rifle or shotgun by US Mail. (Unlicensed persons
cannot ship a handgun by US Mail, but licensed ones can.) UPS will
accept handgun shipments by Next Day Air only. Rifles and shotguns can
be shipped by UPS ground service. UPS will accept shipments of
ammunition. FedEx will only ship firearms via their Priority Overnight
service. Ammunition must be shipped as dangerous goods.

What kind of country is this? Well, it’s one that ruled by the large
industrial interests, that’s what. Most if not all alcohol shipping
restrictions are in place to protect businesses, not individuals,
although some laws, like those in Florida, wax poetically about how the
laws are protecting the citizenry. What is it doing, however, is
protecting the status quo three-tier distribution system in that state.

And it will only get worse with our current administration. Much worse.

Mark
www.wineinstitute.org
www.freethegrapes.org

Mark points out this Reuters story, Equip Americans with Terror Alert Beepers? and adds his comments:

This hairbrained idea is surpassed only by the (hopefully) now defunct
TIPS program for spying on US citizens…

My first question is…after the beeper goes off, then what do you do?
By their own definition (see below), this sytem is being proposed
because “media broadcasts may spread news too slowly” for the kinds of
emergencies they envision it would be used for. Can you imagine 7
million people in New York City simultaneously reacting to a nuclear or
biological alert? What would the beeper say? “Terrorist with nuclear
backpack reported on 39th St. and Park Ave?” Hell, I can’t even get
accurate, up-to-date traffic reports! This could turn out to be as
effective as the old “duck and cover” exercises of the 50s and 60s.

Just got a note from yet another one-time Budapest expatriate journalist who just set up a blog: Harry’s Place. I think I’m not supposed to mention who it is, as he writes for a major news service that doesn’t care for its journalists to blog, but he lives in Italy, if that helps. (And, no, it’s not Tim Randall. That was Harry’s Bar you’re thinking of.)

I did a double-take this evening flipping thru the current issue of the New Yorker (Nov. 25), thinking that my friend Elizabeth Spiers was secretly a successful poet (see page 78). Closer examination proved the poet spells the name Spires, and a phone call to my Liz confirmed it wasn’t a typo. If she’s actually living a secret life, I’d prefer to think it would be as a superhero, not an obscure poet. Who knows…

Mark read my recent plot idea for an episode of the West Wing and replied thusly:

Rick,

I like your idea for the West Wing episode, but I think it might be a
little too far out to depict the whole Internet down, unless it’s the
April 1 show. But I think it could be a good vehicle for speculating on
just how vulnerable we have made ourselves to the technological
foundations we more or less take for granted. I mean everything from
basic electricity and water and oil to all the things that have been
built upon this infratstructure, like the food distribution system,
financial system, communications, etc. Just think of all the things you
come in contact with every day that can be traced back to a few basic
infrastructure components. Scary. Think of it. People get pretty
weirded out when the electricity goes off for a few days after a big
storm or an earthquake. But what would happen if the disruption were to
be much more widespread? (I think it’s called France!)

Mark

I agree compleletely.

A few days ago I posted a survey under the title Existential Survey: How Much Is ‘The Pure Life’ Worth? probing the question of what a life of sobriety (no booze, caffeine, cigarettes, pot or other fun nauty indulgences) and of austere eating would be worth to you in financial terms. I just noticed that the number of survey respondents has surpassed 100 (106 as of this blogging). That’s big skip up from less than 20 last time I checked. I must have gotten a link from someone with a lot of traffic, but I don’t track my log files on this site right now, so who knows.

Anyway, to celebrate this milestone, I thought I’d share a summary of the results to date:

Screenshot tally as of this posting.
Click here for the latest tally.

• 8% of respondents said they already lived the monkish life, tho I provided no mechanism for distinguishing between those whose sobriety was a matter of necessity (health, far-gone addiction) versus a natural inclination towards purity.
• 27% place a relatively low value on sobriety, based on adding the above staight edges to the additional 19% who would be willing to live an abstenimous life for the lowest annual stipend, $100,000. Perhaps to those of you readers who live in the heartland and work as nurses, teachers, firefighters and other noble professions $100,000 a year sounds like a lot of money. But to me, a post-Internet Boom Manhattanite, $100,000 seems like a decent living wage, but not exactly what I would call great wealth.
• Nearly three-quarters placed a high value on sobriety, as the remainder from the above would require at least $500,000 a year in exchange for giving up beer, cigarattes and cake.
• 44% could go clean for a lot of money. 19% would do it for half a million a year, and another 25% would do it for at least a million (the larger share, 15%, wanting $10 million).
• 25% of Bruner Blog readers would not straighten out for any price. Fully a quarter of my site visitors would appear to be such hardcore abusers of drugs, fats and sugars that no amount would be enough for them to forego. Interesting.

I’ll drink to that.

Reuters reports:

Laptops have always been a hot item but a 50-year-old scientist didn’t realize to what extent until he burned his penis.

Reminds me of a dirty limerick:

There once was a man named Gene
Who invented a fucking machine
Both concave and convex
It could serve either sex
But, oh, what a bastard to clean

Thanks, as usual, to Mark (for the link; the limerick is my contribution).

Bumping the thankless Nick Denton from the top position in my Friends Who Blog linky love section is that of none other than my lovely wife, Adi! Yay! I’ve been nagging her for months to give it a try. Only catch is, it’s in Hungarian, so I can’t really understand what the hell she’s saying about me to the world. Titled: “Adi a nagyvil?gban” (or “Adi in the Big World”). We just set it up 10 minutes ago, so depending on how soon you see this post, she’s still working on the color scheme, etc.

What do you bet Nick gives her link on his blogroll just to spite me?

Everybody’s favorite Apple Computer stoner spokesperson breaks her long media silence and gives an interview to Brown University’s Daily Herald. Details on MarketingFix.

There are two memorable dates for you. These invites are for friends only. Weird strangers reading my blog, thanks for visiting, but please don’t enter my real world, at least not at either of these parties.

But, for the gang, we decided to have a Thanksgiving potluck for anyone who has nowhere better to go. RSVP ASAP so we have some idea of what we’re in for. For Thanksgiving, I’ll do a turkey (notice I don’t say “we”), you bring a side dish, appetizer or desert, plus booze.

Friday the 13th is a wild holiday dance party, so bring your boogie shoes and a date or two. Plus booze. (Do we notice a theme here? BTW, if you haven’t checked it out yet, the votes on the Vice Survey are pretty interesting.)

If I know you and you need directions to our place, drop me a line.