Is my favorite roller derby girl name of the week.

[Somehow, this didn’t get published from Denver International Airport. Their wi-fi is free, but spotty at the end of the A terminal. Better than LaGuardia’s, though, which charges you.]

She is wearing as much gaudy jewelry as 50 Cent, and not as well as he does. She lives in Westchester. She grew up in Yonkers. She is wearing a fur thing that I don’t understand, green and brown tartan pants. Brown suede shoes. A smug smile.

She has an anesthesiologist son who lives in Denver.

“Why else would I be here?” she says, within earshot.

I am now forced to listen to the rest of her hate speech. A tamer moment:

“They say, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’ I got here. I see the mountains. I got the idea.”

A nice young man from Ann Arbor — now of Brooklyn Heights — lazily defends Denver and Boulder.

She is sure that SUNY schools are better than CU-Boulder. I make a note to Google “SUNY-Buffalo and Nobel.”

She’s not opposed to all non-New York locations.

“Boca,” she says. “The action’s there.”

I look forward to making sure she gets on the plane and gets the hell out of Colorado. Read the rest of this entry »

More airport chronicles.

I find myself passively agreeing as the driver tells me, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” He has the Dominican accent that has become more defined and distinctive to me over the last several months. I have lived in Harlem since June — it is now November — and I am ready to leave my — description stricken to protect the potentially innocent — neighbors, everything.

But the driver is telling me, “It’s a challenge. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. It’s as simple as that.”

He is making it in New York. He says that, as far as journalists are concerned, New York is the place to make it. If I want to raise a family or whatever, he says, if I want to live a different pace of life, that’s fine, do it somewhere else, but if I want to make something in my life, do it in New York.

He drops me off and, dazed, aware of my shortcomings, fears and insecurities at a little before 5 a.m., I want to buy a book at the airport. The bookstore is closed. I buy a bagel and a bottled smoothie, put them in my bag, and get in line for the security showdown ritual. Read the rest of this entry »

For my tenth birthday, my parents took me and a bunch of my friends to a Rockies game in their first year of existence. At the time, we were living in L.A. and I was a big Dodgers fan — well, a tiny Dodgers fan — but we always rooted for Colorado teams, too, because my parents lived in Boulder when I was born.

So we were Elway worshipers in the heart of the Raider Nation (remember when they played in L.A.? Bo Jackson? Marcus Allen? Tim Brown for the first 40 years of his career?). But when Colorado got a baseball team, I was excited because baseball was really the only sport I knew the rules to.

I got a Rockies kids’ jersey with the number ten on it, we all went to beautiful Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine and sat in the pavilions. Later, either Andy or Shaun told me what was in hot dogs and I didn’t eat them for seven years. Two or three years later, my family moved back to Colorado. We occasionally scored amazing seats to Rockies games — front row, right at first base. The up-close profile view of Andres Galarraga was a little terrifying. But I liked first basemen (tall, skinny kids play first base all the time in Little League) and he threw me a ball once, so he was my favorite player.

The Blake Street Bombers. High-altitude baseball made Dante Bichette, Vinny Castilla, Galarraga and Larry Walker important. (Funny how you can’t really name a pitcher before 2005 that was significant to the Rockies, outside of David Nied.) Pinstripes. LoDo. A mascot that is, somewhat perplexingly, a dinosaur.

Once, in a surreal moment that has made me believe I don’t likely deserve another cool birthday party until the end of time, I got to throw out the first pitch at a Rockies game. A 30 mph heater to Quinton McCracken.

They made the playoffs once. It was 1995. They won one game. This was cause for major celebration. I think we — Denver — nearly rioted.

So: a playoff sweep? I mean — a sweep? And the Rockies are on the winning end? Unbelievable. Did you see them celebrating? This is like the World Series for the Rockies. Except that there’s another series which, if won, would put them in the real World Series. There wouldn’t be enough champagne in the world. Even at elevation.

So here’s this, which I’ve said before, though admittedly not as frequently as many people: Go Rockies.

Saturdays are when I’ve decided to put just whatever here. Juuuust whatever. So today, I’ve decided to round up a few video clips of babies laughing because after a little while it gets downright scary. What’s your threshold?

Cuban President Fidel Castro wrote an opinion column this week mentioning “the seemingly invincible ticket that might be created with Hillary for president and Obama for vice president.” And Fidel’s the expert on invincibility: I have never once seen that guy without a cigar and I have never once seen him dead from smoking lots of cigars.

…

Because I’m from Colorado, I’m one of very few folks out in NYC who know anything about Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo. A lot of what he has to say is about immigration, but he’s kind of branching out now, which you have to do as a presidential candidate. So, for example, he’s made an interesting policy choice in telling New Orleans to go f— itself. While all of the news outlets are busy reporting sob stories about how post-Katrina New Orleans is still a mess and just as unprepared as pre-Katrina New Orleans, Tancredo says, “You know? How about I don’t care? How about that?”

Dude is a tactical brillius (obviously a combination of the words brilliant and genius). When all the candidates are talking about infrastructure in the wake of like, just a few deaths and catastrophes, Tommy Tank Tancredo is all about the greenbacks. Yo, we need that money so we can institutionalize racism and drop bombs of hatred. That stuff doesn’t pay for itself. So. It’s not like he’s a one-issue guy.

Some of the funniest things (to me) on the Internet right now: Read the rest of this entry »