About Tom Stortz

Enjoying my last few responsibility free years left.

A voice

I was actually able to pinpoint why I keep this blog while I was crossing the Ben Franklin bridge today. Most of the time I write that I never really know why I continue this blog and that I’m just posting to post. My initial reasoning to why I maintain it is because once I get enough people to read it, I can sell ad space and turn it into a profit center for myself. This is why I’d play into the Suri Cruise and Brandi Passante nonsense hoping for stardom even though it’s not giving my readers my true thoughts. It’s just a ploy and fakers always get exposed or it’s just a flash in the pan. Providing substance and novel ideas and thoughts is what builds a foundation.

I realized that this blog provides me with a voice. It allows me to get my thoughts out of my brain into a database. It’s me. This website is my life and when I pass on it will always be here. This proves I existed and what type of a person I am. It doesn’t really matter who reads this or whether they comment or anything else that I sometimes complain about. This blog isn’t about you, it’s about me. Catering to an audience is not the right mixture. If I want to write about Iron Mike Tyson, I should write about him. Maybe I want to write about how I thought Marlon was the cooler Wayans brother and how Sean ruined that show on the WB. I can’t worry or let other dictate how I think. I absolutely do this in my life. It’s hard not to. Stay true to yourself and things will work out for the best. Hopefully this blog will take off so I can profit now…

By |2012-10-16T21:42:39-04:00October 16th, 2012|My Life|0 Comments

50/50

Instead of writing about a part of the movie ala here, I’m going to give my thoughts on it. 93 on rotten tomatoes and Sam’s recommendation slotted the movie 50/50 in my life. My general overview was that is was well scripted, contained good acting, and was a poignant movie. There were multiple times that I can say I was almost brought to tears. A movie that brings that type of emotion can never be bad. I thought the viewers ability to develop empathy for the characters involved throughout this movie enhanced an already great picture. I’m going to break it down a bit further with varying thoughts I had throughout.

The acting was phenomenal by Joseph-Gordon Levitt specifically. A good actor is one who plays the part so it appears natural. He absolutely nailed the emotional range of his character and condition. The sadness, the dealing with cancer, the anger, just everything about his character seemed legit. Seth Rogen is completely genius but for a completely different reason. He acts like a real person in real life when he acts in the movie. He’s not like goofball Adam Sandler funny, he’s like real 2012 how people act funny. The jokes in the movie are hilarious (see below), and Rogen provides comic relief for such a serious movie while still feeling like a serious best friend. My favorite was the first joke below for such reasons. I recognized Anna Kendrick from Twilight (just kidding…no I’m not) and at first I thought she was sort of ditzy and dumb but she really did a tremendous job transforming from therapist (following procedure) to a genuine person (expressing herself). Plus I sort of crush on her and just liked the character (her) in general. The mom plot line was perfectly structured and I didn’t really see the need for the Dad but I probably missed something. Fantastic cast though that wasn’t overly complicated and each served their unique purpose.

Here are a few random things I thought about in the movie:
– When Adam and Kyle are sitting on the bench towards the end, I started thinking about what you’d even talk about to someone who was close to you and about to die. The “it’s going to be ok” act is phony so it’s just a complete build up emotionally of really not knowing what to say. Remembering good times and just expressing friendship and how close human relationships can become seems about right though. If it was someone close I think I’d say “I’m so happy to have met you on this Earth.”
– I really liked when the one patient didn’t come back and Adam asked the other guy “what happened”, and the response was “what does it matter, his heart stopped beating.” That really put things in perspective of how one day you can be here and the next is never guaranteed.
– I didn’t really touch on the Adam/Rachael relationship. Like the rest of the movie, Rachael seemed real to me. Scared of the sickness, not willing to commit but not going to abandon her boyfriend who just got cancer. I liked how she tried to get back with him because I think it’s so typical in relationships and Adam saying “get the fuck off my porch” was a great line.
– I think the movie also shows how one person can effect so many peoples lives. Let’s just say he died, his Mom would be all alone. Seth Rogen lost his best friend. And the therapist is constantly thinking of what could have been if he lived. Dying is permanent and as a human you don’t really think about it like that. It’s just something off in the distance. The world keeps on turning.
– If you read the last point, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that smoking cigarettes is one of the most selfish acts a person can take part of. You are knowingly expediting the process of death. A big fuck you to everyone around you. Now this reasoning can obviously translate to saying anything that is risky or damaging is selfish. Don’t take this one too seriously.

I don’t usually write this much about movies but good movies are ones that touch emotions and leave you thinking. I’d honestly be curious what people think about my take on this movie and if you had any other thoughts about it. Over – under 2 real comments that don’t include Sam? I’m hoping the over on this one.

Some of the better jokes from the movie:
Kyle: I fucking nailed that cunt! Can you believe that?
Claire: Oh, God!
[disgusted at his swearing, Claire walks away from Kyle and he follows behind her]
Kyle: I don’t usually say that.

Kyle: Has she been sucking on your dick, been giving you blow jobs?
Adam: No. She doesn’t like to.
Kyle: She does…No fucking shit she doesn’t like to! Who likes putting dicks in their mouth? You do it cause that’s why they call it blow jobs! It’s a job!

Adam: You just always hate my girlfriends.
Kyle: That’s not true. Okay, it is actually. But it’s because you always date people who are fucking dickheads, man. You date needy bitches. Why?

By |2013-03-15T03:17:23-04:00October 16th, 2012|Movies|0 Comments

2 Business Observations

There have been two odd business, or bad business, practices that I have seen in the past few days. The first deals with Dunkin Donuts and how they process orders and management. The 2nd is the Mood Cafe in our apartment building which has a single digit customer total after 2 weeks in operation.

Dunkin Donuts, or at least this one, has this idiotic business practice where the person who is making your food calls out your number when the order is ready. The problem occurs when I happen to throw out my receipt or am not given one. I don’t know my order by number, I know it by identification with what you just made. If the person was like “sesame seed bagel with cream cheese”, I’d know it was mine. If she’s like 742, I have no idea. The management there is also horrendous because they just hired a new manager (who probably is in charge of this number fiasco), and everyone of the old employees wants to quit. The especially sad part is that this place always has a line out the door even with shoddy work.

The Mood Cafe is an Indian/American food establishment that opened up on the bottom floor of our apartment complex. They aren’t getting any business and I no exactly why. First of all, the parking lot to the building has a gate that is open from (6am-4pm) and is down the rest of the time. This isn’t a welcoming parking lot. There isn’t mass traffic around the area and it just isn’t a good location for a restaurant. I can also see that their thinking is that the residents of the building will probably eat here. This is flawed when I walk by the restaurant and never see anyone inside. It’s intimidating / scary, that no one eve eats there. I predict the Mood Cafe will be out of business in 6 months.

By |2012-10-16T18:44:15-04:00October 16th, 2012|My Life|0 Comments

Small Doses

Sam, your pointless update was about 1:52 minutes too long. Unless the material is good, everything on youtube should be under 1 minute. While I was looking at Philly Bar Stool today, they had a EatDaPussy45 give a monologue for 9:24. I can’t sit there for that long. My attention span is about one minute and I’m sure that’s more than the average person. We need to be more succinct in how we do things.

Today at work JC was talking for what seemed like minutes straight and I was just staring right at him. Not making a reaction or anything, just looking at him and listening. He started yelling at me, telling me I’m making faces at him. Not actually making faces but not communicating in the conversation. I’m thinking, “how am I supposed to communicate when you talk for 3 minutes straight, I sit there and listen, and I’m still not doing what you expect out of me.” Then when he brought that he thought I was mocking him and I still continued telling him I have no idea what he was talking about (and I started to get a little pissed at this point) he said “why are you getting so angry”? Anyone knows the one way to fuel a fire is to tell a not angry person that they are getting angry and they immediately get angry defending they aren’t angry. It’s really a neat trick. Point is that things need to happen quickly. Mindless talk and blah blah blah just isn’t the way things get done. Hit em quick and hard.

By |2012-10-15T20:16:59-04:00October 15th, 2012|My Life|0 Comments

Iron Mike Tyson

After watching the video on Sam’s blog containing a bus driver uppercutting a girl who obviously wasn’t expecting that kind of a move, I googled the upppercut. After looking through the searches I came across the top 10 Mike Tyson Knockouts.

Young Iron Mike was vicious. He won his first 19 fights by KO, 12 in the first round. So this got me really interested in what happened along Mike’s life and further career. He grew up without a father and never really was close to his mother. He was arrested 38 times by the time he was 15. He was taken in my Cus D’amato and started training to become a fighter. He was a dedicated student to the sport and you can see how unbelievable he was in his early career. His top boxing form came in 88′ when he was just 22 and beat Michael Spinks in the first round to move to 33-0 and owning all the heavyweight belts. Around this time his personal life began interfering with his newly found fame.

He had married Robin Givens who claimed that he got her pregnant and demanded marriage. They went ahead with the marriage and she says she had a miscarriage. To let you know how things ended in Mike’s words (which are probably made up), “The best uppercut I ever landed was on Robin Givens.” A few years after the Spinks fight Tyson was involved in the biggest upset in boxing history when he lost to Buster Douglas who was a 45-1 shot. A year after this fight he was sentenced to 3 years in prison for raping Ms Black Rhode Island.

In 1996, 5 years after the Douglas fight, he fought Evander Holyfield and suffered the second loss of his career. We all know what happened the 2nd fight when he had an ear sandwich courtesy of Evander. He was 33 at the time of the first fight and these fights against Evander were essentially the end of his career. If you watch tape of Mike in his youth and then again at 30+, it’s like watching a different fighter. He seemed just your typical boxer and not the KO artist he was supposed to be.

What I find so interesting is that he was just a kid off the street of Brooklyn who propelled to the top and then didn’t have the street smarts to make it all work out for himself. He is reportedly bankrupt and is pretty much known as a novelty act at this point. Teddy Atlas, a longtime trainer and put a gun to Tyson’s head for grabbing his 12 year old relatives ass, calls Tyson “a shooting star.” He was never meant to be the best heavyweight champion of all time, he just didn’t have the smarts. A truly fascinating story on a rise to the top and eventual downfall.

By |2012-10-14T14:27:50-04:00October 14th, 2012|Sports|0 Comments

Shee Shoutout

I want to compliment the Shee on his golf behavior, which in my opinion, has vastly improved. I had no idea how to use the commas in the last sentence so I just made it up. Anyway, old Shee used to slam clubs and be ultra competitive at times. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in being competitive but it just doesn’t rank high in my value system unless I’m going out of my way to compete. I believe the goal of any round of golf is to shoot as low a score as possible and I can’t tell if being competitive improves performance. I think it boils down to choosing when to be competitive. So today wasn’t one of those days and we just kind of knocked the ball around and it was a good time. It was my first time playing in about a month and I was pretty sporadic so the round didn’t even get a chance to be competitive. I was 9,7,5,9 to start and shot a 102 which was actually a decent comeback once I got striking the ball with more consistency. Golf is supposed to be fun because it will never really amount to any achievement other than a personal one. I even hit a deer with my ball today. The guy was about 50 yards away right in my shot that was through the trees and I hit a low liner (and trying to hook it around) that skipped right into his shin bone. He seemed unfazed. All in all a fun round.

*I’m actually editing this published copy because I left out the best part. We were playing with two girls who were on the high school golf team. They told us their TEAM is 8-4. These girls however could not have been imperative towards contributing to that record. They were some of the worst golfers I’ve ever witnessed. The one girl was pretty dopey and would look backwards during her back swing. Her putting stroke was the atrocious. She’d blast 5 footers, 15 feet. I started feeling bad for them and was going to give a few pointers but the Shee said it wasn’t my place to do so. The one girl picked up on the first 3 holes which blew my mind. These girls should find a new hobby.

By |2012-10-13T21:26:08-04:00October 13th, 2012|My Life|0 Comments

The Windy City

I know its been a few days since I last posted but with that wait you’ll get a much better than usual post. Jeff and I went to Chicago (actually Rosemont) for a metal roofing trade show. We sell a fair amount of sheet metal hand tools and this show fits specifically in the industry. Taking a booth at a show like this proves to be expensive so attending is a cheaper option with similar results. Here is a picture of the show. You can click on the pictures for better views.

We took a class on soldering which is the process of joining two pieces of sheet metal. We also met some of our vendors, potential vendors, competitors, and customers. These shows are sometimes difficult to know how much value you really get from them but they are necessary because you have to not only think out of the box but get out of the box. Ideas are really flowing at these types of shows and we come away with a much better perspective of the industry.

I booked a late flight on Thursday which gave us a chance to take a 45 minute train from Rosemont into the heart of Chicago to do some sightseeing. The train was $2.25 to the city which was a great relief considering we were paying 10 dollars to take a taxi from our hotel to the convention center for 1.5 miles. We visited Navy Pier first and had lunch at Harry Carey’s which is a pretty popular restaurant in Chicago. I snapped this picture of Ari’s suit from Entourage. They have so much memorabilia is unreal.

After lunch we walked over to the area where Soldier Field is. In that same spot they have a museum, aquarium, and planetarium. We only had 2 hours and decided to check out the planetarium. For a mere 20 bucks we got to see a really great perspective of how tiny the Earth is and how insignificant we are. Also the funniest part of the trip happened when the teacher leading the planetarium asked people what a certain constellation was and some random (super stoned) guy came up with the answer “StickMan”, which you can decide for yourself whether it was a good answer or not (picture below). We then walked back to the L and got to the airport with plenty of time. I was running the time management and gave us buffers all over the place and we literally ran into no problems whatsoever which should be a thumbs up for Chicago.

It was a really fun trip and today was super busy going over the last few days. I’ve been partaking in Ck4’s favorite pastime of “processing orders”. I’m hoping this is the start to really taking our business to the next level and things really seem to be heading in a positive direction. Hope this post was better than most.

By |2012-10-12T16:22:34-04:00October 12th, 2012|My Life|2 Comments

My life is a circle.

I just went back to my archives to relive my Octobers in 2009 and 2010. Nothing has changed. I’m still the same person as I was back then. What is the Joe Walsh quote from Life’s Been Good To Me? “Everybody’s so different but I haven’t changed.” Or what about Eddie Vedder? “I changed by not changing at all.” I think that this particular quality is both good and bad.

Good because you stay true to your value system. This isn’t exactly well put when your value system is drinking, gambling, and working but it’s at least what I like to do. This isn’t an all encompassing sentence either because I’ve been doing other things too but there is still a general theme throughout those posts. I believe it’s bad because you really aren’t doing anything but surviving, which for me should at least count for something. Time just keeps passing and then it eventually runs out. I just don’t know what I should be doing. People love getting married and raising a family but I’m not going to do that if I don’t want to do it. Once you get married and have a child your freedom is limited. This is a personal choice that every human being has to make and I’m not prepared to make it. So after reading this you should know that I have no answer other than figure it out for yourself. My goal is to make enough money to do anything I want to in life and not be hindered by financial decisions. Then I can feel more comfortable moving on. No one has a guide to this tiny existence.

By |2012-10-08T22:39:42-04:00October 8th, 2012|My Life|0 Comments

Winter Is Coming

Most people, I’d hope, know what this title is from but for those who are missing one of the best shows (and book series for that matter), it’s Game of Thrones. I believe we can all feel the weather dropping some degrees and it also is getting darker earlier. This leads to different activities like the end of baseball, the start of basketball, and the continuing glory that is football. New TV like Dexter and Boardwalk keep Sunday nights entertaining. Going out on weekends becomes a tad more cumbersome. Nevertheless, time continues and you must do the best with what life offers.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Chicago with Jeff for 3 full days. We are attending a sheet metal show which is where a fair amount of new business has been coming from. I’ve only been to Chicago once and didn’t get to really experience which will be a good life experience. It’s better to go with someone else, rather than yourself, because you don’t really need to worry about doing things all by your lonesome. It gives you someone to sit at the bar with instead of looking like a creep and makes conversation easier with two minds instead of one. It should be amusing and rewarding.

By |2012-10-08T21:22:19-04:00October 8th, 2012|My Life|0 Comments

Living in Fantasy

I feel pretty boring writing about football each week but that’s what I’ve been doing so that’s what I’ll write about. Primetime, our co-ed Football team name, won with a 2 score win over the opposition. It was a decently competitive game with Ck4 picking up 2 Td’s in his out of retirement game. I hurt my hip on the first play of the game and have been nursing it the last day or two. We played better but are still a far cry from a football team. Marcedes (Jkash) and his myriad of catches helped our first half scoring. People read if I mention him if you didn’t know that.

Ck4 also beat me in Fantasy Football for probably the 12th year in a row. That’s not accurate but it certainly feels that way. I also picked up a loss in Evan’s league which has me at 1-4 and if I don’t pick up some wins the 3peat won’t even have a chance. I can’t really explain it either but my fantasy leagues have just been lousy. I’m 3-2 in my 100 dollar pro league, 2-3 in Steve’s 100 dollar league, and 1-4 in Bake and Evan’s league The rotoworld draft guide has seemingly done more harm than good. Never say die though.

I had a pretty solid run in the NFL gambling wise. I’m not sure where I left off but Bovada has been giving me random free bets and couple that with some luck and I turned the 100 deposit into 527. I’m actually in for 2 hundred which makes me only net 327. However, I was 3-0 on NFL bets yesterday (not including my 15 dollar 5 team parlay and 10 bucks on Jackie Battle scoring the first TD of the game.) The Viking and Bears were superb picks and I was money on the Saints for a c-note. All signs point to the Texans tonight which obviously has me skeptical. I’ll probably hem and haw and then put a light bet on the Jets even though I’m certain they suck. Betting is funny though sometimes because betting with your heart is never as good as betting with your head.

By |2012-10-08T13:54:26-04:00October 8th, 2012|Sports|5 Comments

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