Call Me...The Mojito Man

You encounter lots of different characters in Central Park on a Sunday afternoon: tourists, families, college students, joggers, rollerbladers, bums, rats, etc. But on a recent outing to throw the Frisbee around, I took note of a separate breed of park dwellers: the alcohol pushers. These peddlers walk around and sell bottles of water, soda, cans of miller light and other quality beers to people like me, who do not plan ahead and supply their own beverage to relinquish their thirst. These field peddlers are a normal component of the park society, as they often supply my company softball team with cans of coors light before the game to help us get pumped up, as well as after the game to help us drown our sorrows.

But I noticed something different on Sunday. A man carrying around a blender (with no cord) offering to make mojitos, daquiris and other tasty blended beverages. A more perfect idea simply does not exist. This man is set out to make millions, as he apparently is the only person in all of Central Park that is equipped to take on such a task. I asked him about his business strategy and he informed me that he’s been written about everywhere, which apparently only consists of Time Out NY and the New Yorker. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. This guy? In the New Yorker? Come on, they don’t profile desolate street bums in the New Yorker, one of the most well-respected literary publications of modern day times.

Well…apparently they do. The Mojito Man’s real name is Junius. He carries a cordless Black & Decker blender with him. And the New Yorker claims “one of the most enterprising men ever to vend without a license in the Park.” And apparently his genius idea is paying off, as Junius cleans up at about nine hundred dollars each week and plans to vacation in Hawaii during the off-season to run the Honolulu Marathon.

My favorite part of the article is when Junius describes how this stroke of genius came to him via divine intervention:

“I walked into an Odd Job store on Fourteenth Street, and there was a shelf full of Black & Decker cordless blenders. I hadn’t even known such a thing existed. I said to myself, ‘That’s divine intervention!’ I bought three. Spent everything I had in my pocket. The next day, I went back, and the blenders were all gone. I haven’t come across one since. Divine intervention!”

I will never judge a man carrying around a cordless blender, and smelling like the East River, ever again.

Hobo is the New Highbrow

I attended a “highbrow BBQ” sponsored by New York Magazine this past weekend and wanted to share my utter disgust with you, attentive reader. A $25 ticket allowed you to attend the event, with promises of a “full set” from indie band Islands; free beer from Sugar Hill Brewery from 1-5 and a gourmet BBQ “meal” from Top Chef contestant CJ Jacobson. Not one of these three promises were met.

Let’s start with the beer: it ran out. After about an hour. I guess they didn’t realize how thirsty we’d all be in the 80 degree weather on an asphalt parking lot along the FDR Drive (which, by the way, they dubbed as New York City’s first solar-powered “Green Energy, Arts, and Education Center”).

Left to our own resources, my friend and I were forced to find other sources of refreshment. A half-full bottle of Patron did the trick, mixed with some warm Vitamin Water. Kinda tasted like a Mexican pospsicle. But less delicious.

Next – the food. While I ate my entire plate along with the scraps from my friend, I was really eating out of contempt. The highbrow BBQ consisted of a poorly-filled pork taco, a piece of corn, some watermelon/tomato salad (albeit delicious) and a small peach cobber. I could have ate about 5 of these dishes and still would have been hungry. It didn’t help to see Chef CJ smoking and drinking in the back near the food. I guess you need to numb the pain with something.

Lastly – the band. I’ve only heard a few songs from Islands and they actually sounded incredible live, despite the poor sound system (most likely due to the fact that it was solar-powered – rock & roll is not ready to go green, I’m sorry). When the lead singer shadowed Ray Charles by putting on a pair of sunglasses that were completely white with paint, I should have known things were taking a turn for the worse. But it wasn’t until he stormed off the stage in the middle of a song, leaving his bandmates in a state of bewilderment and embarrassment that I knew the shit hit the fan. If that wasn’t bad enough, his bandmates had to convince the crowd, or what was left of it, to clap and yell to encourage their narcissistic band leader to come back out on stage to finish the set. White boy came back out, didn’t say a word about what just happened, finished the song, and left. It. Was. Awkward.

All in all, I had fun since the weather was gorgeous and it ended with me and my friend getting a real meal followed by loitering on a bench eating ice cream cones. I also learned some valuable lessons:

1. Don’t expect much from $25 in NYC

2. Tequila can be mixed with anything, as long as you close your eyes and think happy thoughts while drinking it

3. People who wear sunglasses (on purpose) that look like as if they were in a battle with a bottle of white-out are emotionally unstable

Puppy Custody

This is a video of my friend Muller’s puppy. Okay, it’s not really his puppy, but it resides at his house sometimes. Well, only on the weekends. Actually, only on the weekends every other month. Okay, he hired a really cheap lawyer and now he’s going through a terrible custody battle with the puppy’s mother. Leave him alone alright, it’s hard enough that he only gets to see the dog every waning crescent moon.

Lunchtime Exercise

So I brought my running sneakers into work today and was going to go for a quick run along the West Side Highway during my lunch break. (The dailynuzzo captors are now allowing me a one-hour lunch break to comply with Guantanamo standards.) But when I reached into my gym bag, I realized that I brought the wrong pair of shoes.

“Dammit! I brought my BURGER Shoes again. Oh well. I’ll just have to find some ketchup.”

If you’re in the mood for some lunchtime exercise, you can get your pair of Nike Air Max 90 Burger shoes too, designed by some fancy Swedish dude when Nike asked him to create a “Nike sportswear icon.” Because, you know, it’s easy for a Swede to say that American sports and fastfood go hand-in-hand. Those Swedes are always spot-on.

Daily Nuzzo Update – The “As If You Really Care” Edition

There are lots of reasons why I have not updated the blog during the past month. It’s funny, since they are all the same reasons why I started the blog in the first place: bouts of public drunkenness followed by an inevitable sense of shame, rocky relationships with friends and significant others, run-ins with the law, trouble with people/organizations that I’m in debt to, a disappointing baseball season and an overall aversion to being social.

I know I have let the tens of my fans down this past month by not regularly contributing to the blog but I promise you this: it will probably happen again. This kind of reminds me of a sign that I saw in my local Washington Mutual branch the other day, listing the only three things you can depend on in life: taxes, inflation and death.

Things are looking up, up, up!

Man Likes Beverage; Dislikes Lies That Come With It

My friend Olivia works at a well-known and highly-regarded market research firm. Thus, she, along with most of her colleagues, spend the majority of their days interpretating qualitative data, crunching numbers and writing angry letters to the Snapple Beverage Company. Below, I’ve copied an actual email that was sent by Anthony to Snapple:

I must first start by stating that I love your diet lime green tea and diet lemonade iced teas. The only problem I have is that on your diet lemonade iced tea packaging you are attempting to say that “Kris” a “mixologist” at your company created this flavor one day by accident, when clearly this is an existing drink and idea created by Arnold Palmer (also known as a Half and Half). There are other brands that are also selling the same product, and I understand that you cannot actually call your drink an Arnold Palmer (Arizona already does this), but to make up a completely fabricated "cute" story about how the drink was invented is a lie. And though perhaps “Kris” was unaware of what a half and half or Arnold Palmer was and that is already existed, I imagine that as a juice, tea, and drink company you would know of all the varied combinations and drinks available. I guess that it is fitting that a drink that can be characterized as being the perfect mix of sweet (the iced tea) and sour (the lemonade) illicit the same emotions from me as I drink it; I am happy that I have a great tasting diet beverage in my hand, but angered that I have to read propaganda and lies on the side of the bottle.

I have never seen such passion for the written word as I do in this impeccably detailed note. I applaud your efforts Anthony, and perhaps Snapple will respond to you now that your message is going to spread all over the internet, like a beautiful California wildfire. Never deny the pull that the dailynuzzo has on the social media universe.

Baby Tanning...Jihad Planning. We're Going Back to Filly.

“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is by far the greatest television show ever to grace…the FX network. My friends, September 18 cannot come soon enough.