Huh...

Luis and I were just thinking, and neither of us could come up with a single movie trailer that uses a female voice-over. In a world where we listen to the same "IN A WORLD..." guy over and over, why isn't there room for a woman to strut her stuff in the movie trailer genre? I understand why action movies might want to align themselves with their core demographic by using a husky male voice, but why does a similar voice try to sell us saccharine romantic comedies?

I can't remember which movie theatre chain does this (perhaps Clearview?), but one of them shows a reel all in sillouette that illustrates the evils of leaving your trash, talking during the movie, etc. In each instance of wrongdoing, it is the woman who screws up, talking during the movie or not taking her trash with her, while the male sillouette lectures her. WTF!

I would love to be proven wrong here. Can someone come up with a trailer that has a female voice-over?

A food hangover?!

We all know that weird things can happen to our bodies if we ingest large quantities of something... I've had a few nights of boozing where I've actually drunk myself sober (something that's hard to explain and understand unless you've had it happen, too). I've seen videos of what happens when you down some ipecac. But I've never experienced what happened to me this morning: a food hangover (for lack of a better term).

Going back a bit, I'd like to explain yesterday's activities that led up to said "food hangover"...

For starters yesterday I had my new-hire lunch with the CFO from my new job. Really cool guy, and he took me and a bunch of other new people to Churrascaria Plataforma. For those of you who've never been there, it's a Brazilian steakhouse located near Times Square. The way it works is that you get a coaster that's red on one side and green on the other. Waiters are constantly walking around the restaurant with different cuts of meat (beef, pork, lamb, sausages, chicken, etc.), and if your coaster is green they'll stop and offer you some. They'll then slice off a piece for you right then and there, and you grab it with a pair of tongs they give you. Really good stuff, even if they are Brazilians (just a little Argentine pride, ;-)).

So I have a bunch of meat for lunch, as well as some of the things from their salad bar (the CFO warned us not to go overboard with the salad bar, to leave room for the meat), and I try to control myself (knowing what awaited me that very evening [more on that in a minute]), so I end up throwing in the towel earlier than I normally would. I'm still stuffed, however.

Some explanatory photos:

Back at the office I proceeded to do nothing productive for what was left of the afternoon (we finished lunch around 2:15pm, so we didn't get back until approx. 2:30pm), and planned on meeting up with Liz, Frankie, Mike and Gaetan for dinner later that night. And guess where we were heading? The mecca of all that is beefy: Peter Luger, in Brooklyn.

(As a parenthetical, I lived about two blocks from Luger for a year, but never got sufficiently organized to make a reservation a few weeks in advance.)

When we decided to head to Luger I was surprised that we were able to find an available slot only about two weeks beforehand, even if it was on a Monday night. Now, you may be asking yourselves: "Luis, why on earth did you make a dinner reservation at Luger on the same day that you were having lunch at Plataforma?" Well kiddies, that wasn't the plan. Originally I was supposed to go to Plataforma for lunch on the day that my company was taking us to Atlantic City, but the CFO had to reschedule. When the rescheduling e-mail went out last week I nearly cried when I saw the date: September 19th. We had already made the reservation at Luger, and I wasn't about to change it. So I just braced myself mentally, spiritually, and stomach-ly, for the barrage of meat that 9/19/2005 would entail.

So going back to last night, we get to Luger right on time, and after a 5 minute wait we get seated. At this stage I'd had about a 6-hour break between lunch and dinner, so I was feeling fine and ready to eat again, :-). Despite everything we heard about the service being rude, our waiter was a guy who certainly knew his stuff, and he guided me through the order process. We wanted a typical Luger meal, so we get everything he suggested. There were 5 of us, so we ended up ordering 5 slabs of their bacon (ridiculously good), tomatos & onions (we didn't realize that we needed to add their famous steak sauce to them until we were about halfway through), 3 steak-for-2s (giant porterhouses; two medium-rare and one medium), creamed spinach and fried potatoes. Oh, and we also had Brooklyn Lager (yum!). We somehow managed to leave room for dessert, and split a great sundae and apple strudel amongst the five of us. They even gave us official Peter Luger chocolate coins!

So what was the final damage? $85 a head, which we were all happy to pony up. We had a veritable mountain of food, no one was still hungry, and it was all delicious.

The steak itself was really good, and I think it lived up to the hype pretty well:



However, and I know Liz agrees with me, we both feel that the porterhouse we had at Keen's was not only better, but cheaper. This is not a slight towards Luger at all, since we all really enjoyed the food. Having said that, however, now that we've eaten there once I think in future we'll be sticking to Keen's when we need our steak fix.

Anyway, back to the main point of this post, my so-called "food hangover". First off Liz and I were feeling incredibly full, bloated, etc. when we got home. She'd pre-emptively had some ginger before the meal, and I had one at dinner. I was feeling ok, just stuffed beyond belief. When I woke up this morning, however, I had an absolutely splitting headache. I don't usually get headaches, so it must've been something from last night.It couldn't have been alcohol-induced, since I only had one beer (and they were in McSorley-size mugs, so they weren't particularly large, shall we say). I've never heard of food, of all things, causing a headache, especially since I'm used to eating large quantities of meat from growing up in Argentina.

The only remaining option was that it was food-induced. While its origins remain a mystery, there can be no doubt as to what calamity befell me this morning: I had become a victim of a food hangover! Fortunately I'm feeling a bit better now, and will probably be able to stomach some lunch in a bit!

Luis

Atlantic City, baby!

Yeah, so this post is coming a bit late. I've already gone and come back from Atlantic City, and only ended up $40 down (shocking, I know), but I figured I'd treat our readers to some storytellin' love...

So we left work at about 3pm, and walked over to 45th and 9th to hop on the bus. We had a solid 70-person squad, I believe, so they split us into two different buses. Needless to say ours was the fun one:

Each bus had a cooler of cerveza (and some cider and soda, for those so-inclined), and Roman even brought a bottle of Vox Green Apple vodka, that went really well with the cans of Red Bull that we bought at the deli. Ashley baked some chocolate banana bread, and while it was making the rounds it fell on the floor, so I never got to sample it (I'm sure if Liz had made some it would've been much yummier anyway, ;-)).

Once we got to the Borgata we each got our room-keys (yep, no room sharing!) and had about an hour of free time until happy hour and dinner in one of the hotel's conference rooms. I went to my room, vegged out on the bed while watching some TV, and eventually got changed and headed down. At the happy hour I met a bunch of new people from the firm (this trip is for FinOp [Financial Operations], of which Compliance is technically a part of, but I had never met most of the traders, bigwigs and such), had me some Grey Goose tonics, and eventually sat down for dinner. I focused mainly on the parmesan-crusted filet mignon, but everything else was good, too, as were the dessert cannolis, cheesecake and eclairs!

Around 9:30pm is when our free time began. I decided to hit the blackjack tables, and after finding the $10 tables I started waiting for a seat (there were only two left by this time, and the other were all $15, $25 and $50 minimums). I ended up playing for about two hours, and despite being up around $70, I ended up down $40, which ain't so bad. My goal was to make it to +$100 and call it quits, but I hit a bad streak and lost like 6 or 7 hands in a row (and when you're upping your bet when you lose, as you're supposed to, those losses start adding up!), so I decided to quit and cut my losses. In retrospect I should've kept playing, I think, since I had decided that I was perfectly willing to lose $200, so I should've tried to get my money back. Oh well, fortunately A.C. is only about 2-2.5 hours from the NYC, so I think Liz and I will be going back sometime soon.

After calling it quits at the blackjack table it was time to hit the dancefloor. The Borgata has its own nightclub, called Mixx, right in the middle of the casino floor. We had a VIP area specially designated for us, and we all got a stamp on our wrists that says "SMOOTH", hehe. We had a self-service bar that kept being restocked with Grey Goose and tons of mixers, which wasn't so bad:

I was there with Inacio, Roman and company until about 3:30am, when they closed up the place. I enjoyed a bit of clubbing, since it had been a while since I got to "shake my skeleton" for a few hours, as a friend's mom used to say. I think I wondered back up to my room around 4am, and hit the hay.

In the morning most people were getting their massages/facials/spa treatments, since we were allowed to charge $100 to our rooms. After brunch I still had about an hour to kill before our bus back to the city, so on the fly I decided to get a haircut at their salon, and it looks pretty nice! I also picked up some Art of Shaving products and some nice shampoo/conditioner, to hit my $100 mark.

The busride back was pretty uneventful, since most everyone were exhausted, so I just put my headphones on and zoned out for a few hours. I got home around 4pm, which was earlier than expected, and my pup greeted me with kisses and hugs, which is exactly what I had been wanting! So all in all it was a great trip, and lots of company-paid fun. God I love my new job, :-)!
Hugs,
Luis

P.S.- here's another funny pic from A.C. (don't ask):

My new favorite band

I'm not (that) embarassed to admit that it's My Chemical Romance. Have you seen the video for Helena? No? Go watch it.