Why Australians won’t let kids blow out birthday candles. A great documentary short about an NYC hoops legend. And MJ at 50: A terrific read

I love Australians. I’ve truly never met a person from there who isn’t fun and awesome and super-cool. (Disclosure: I’ve only really known like 4 Australians, so my sample size is small).

Anyway, I love the Aussies. But I’ve finally found a reason to dislike them: Their ridiculous school health officials.

Two weeks ago the No Fun Police decided to ban kids from blowing out birthday candles at school. Why? They said it’s to prevent the spread of germs.

“Children love to blow out their candles while their friends are singing ‘Happy birthday,’” a document released by Aussie officials said. “To prevent the spread of germs when the child blows out the candles, parents should either provide a separate cupcake, with a candle if they wish, for the birthday child and [either] enough cupcakes for all the other children … [or] a large cake that can be cut and shared.”

Are you freaking kidding me? Yes, there may be some germs spread when a kid blows out the candles. There are also germs spread every time a kid wipes his nose and rubs it on his desk (which happens all the time in elementary schools), and when a kid hits another kid, and when two kids are playing together and one gets dirt all over the other one.

There are germs in the world, people, you can’t avoid them! So let a kid blow out some freaking candles, will you please?

Ugh. The sissy-fication of the world continues.

**There may not be a human being alive who’s seen more New  York City high school basketball than Tom Konchalski.
When I used to work for the basketball magazine SLAM and talk to players from NYC, they spoke of Konchalski in reverential terms; just being mentioned in his regular newsletter meant they were on the radar and on track to get a college scholarship.

Konchalski is a scout, one of the most trusted in the nation, and for reasons I can’t quite fathom, he’s suddenly getting a lot of national publicity. He doesn’t own a cell phone, an answering machine, or use email. He is a dinosaur and yet still is highly trusted and deemed important by every college basketball coach in the country.

ESPN’s Grantland site, which I love, did a four-minute mini-documentary on Konchalski, and it’s terrific. Watch it above, and appreciate one man’s single-minded dedication that has helped thousands of kids attain college scholarships.

**Finally, there was a ton of publicity last week about Michael Jordan turning 50 years old. Because it’s mid-February and ESPN and others are desperate to fill the supposed void in the calendar (hey folks, ever hear of college hoops and NHL hockey? Talk about them!), the Greatest of All Time’s 50th was a huge event.

I avoided just about all of the Jordan love-fest, but I kept hearing how great ESPN writer extraordinaire Wright Thompson’s profile of MJ was. Turns out it was even better. Thompson got some terrific access to Jordan, and I came away thinking that A, he’s still as competitive as ever, and B, he might be able to score 20 a game right now, just because he would will himself to score.

Read Thompson’s story here; it’s well worth the time.

The original basketball “Dream Team,” in their own words. The joy of buying a parking space in New York. And The Daily Show mocks Fla. governor.

A tip of the cap today to the late Henry Hill, who died Tuesday night. Hill was the basis for Ray Liotta’s character in “Goodfellas,” which is the best mob movie ever made (and yes, I’ve seen “The Godfather.” It’s a fantastic movie. “Goodfellas” is better. Here’s hoping wherever Hill eats his next meal in the afterlife, the chef doesn’t use too many onions. 

I did something I never thought I’d do on Wednesday. But I guess it officially makes me a real New York City resident.

I bought a parking space. Yep, in a couple of weeks it’ll all be mine: a wonderful 12 feet by 20 feet piece of concrete, with one line on each side letting the whole freaking world know that THIS space belongs to me.
It’s always sounded crazy to me, buying a parking space. It seemed so silly; purchasing a hunk of ground when my whole life I’ve always found free spots.

But you know, I’m moving to Manhattan, I’ve got a car, and, well, it’s next to impossible to regularly find a legal parking space near my new apartment-building home.
And so I talked to a guy, got a great Groupon deal on a monthly rental, and here we are. (Hey, at least I didn’t have to pay what this guy is asking for a spot.)

So I now own a space. I feel like such a grown-up. I think I’ll just drive around and park in it for hours on my first day. Or maybe I’ll run outside on the street and yell at those  poor schlubs trying to find a legal spot “Hey buddy, can’t find a spot? Sucks for you, I got one right here!”

Nah.

**So there’s been a whole ton of hype lately about the 20th anniversary of the greatest basketball team ever assembled, the 1992 U.S. Olympic Dream Team.
It was the first time NBA players were allowed to play in the Olympics, and there’ll never be a better collection of hoops talent: Magic. Bird. Michael. Charles Barkley. Patrick Ewing. Karl Malone. And so on.
Their games were a joke, so lopsided were they. Their opponents were in awe, and the basketball they played was so beautiful.

The NBA TV channel did a fabulous documentary on the team last night (it re-airs  Friday at 10:30 p.m., and a bunch more times after that), the gifted SI writer Jack McCallum has written a book about the squad, and my old colleague at SLAM magazine, Lang Whitaker, has penned this terrific oral history of the squad. There are some fantastic stories in here, about the day a team of college players whupped the Dream Team, about the egos that clashed at the beginning, and other good stuff.
Definitely a great read about a team that was truly the greatest ever.

**Finally today, I ranted a few weeks ago about the awful governor of Florida, Rick Scott, and his attempts to purge voters from the rolls in the state. Fortunately, we have The Daily Show and John Oliver on the case. Enjoy the hilarity here.

Celebrating two extraordinary lives that ended Thursday, Gary Carter and Anthony Shadid. And some awesome winter photos

I was going to continue with Good News Friday like usual today, but the tragic deaths of two wonderful human beings Thursday forced me to shelve that idea. Each of them deserves to be thought about and appreciated today.

The first death that saddened me was that of Gary Carter, the Hall of Fame catcher for the Mets and Expos. Carter was 57, and had been suffering from a brain tumor.
There’s no way to picture Gary Carter without thinking of his smile. It was enormous, room-filling, and so genuine. There might not have been a baseball player alive who enjoyed the game and showed it more than “The Kid.” He was the cornerstone of the 1986 Mets, and a catcher who played the game with verve, passion and a whole lot of skill for his whole career.

He was mocked, in the media and by his peers, for his “good-guy” persona, and he seemed too good to be true (he even wanted to take his wife on road trips, which in baseball circles is kinda like worshipping the devil).

But Carter was the genuine article, a decent man who enjoyed life and played the game the right way. He will be immensely missed. Two fabulous tributes to Carter I read Thursday night were this from SI’s superb Tom Verducci and this story from my buddy Pearlman in the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s video of Carter’s last hit in the major leagues, from September, 1992 with the Expos. The outpouring of love can be felt through the screen…

The second death I mourned Thursday night is a man who was legendary in my former profession as a journalist. To say Anthony Shadid was a foreign correspondent is like calling Einstein an inventor, or Michael Jordan an athlete. For three newspapers over 15 years, most recently the New York Times, Shadid saw the horrors of war up close, reported on them, and then wrote some of the most beautiful prose you can imagine.
So many people in journalism are great reporters. Others are great writers. It’s very, very rare for someone to be both. Shadid went into the worst places in the world and survived, putting names, faces and humanity into the stories of Iraqis, Afghans, and recently, Libyans. Only 43 years old, it is cruelly ironic that after surviving battlefields forever, he died of an asthma attack.

His friend Tyler Hicks, a world-class photographer and with whom Shadid had been kidnapped with last year, carried his body from Syria to safety in Turkey.

Shadid was a giant in the field, and his loss is a great one. Here is a story he wrote to win one of this two Pulitzer Prizes, here is his obituary from the N.Y. Times, and here is a link to some of his other “greatest hits.”

Gary Carter and Anthony Shadid. Two very different men, but both leave an immeasurable hole in the hearts of many.

**And now, a few happy thoughts. I’m on vacation for a week starting today, as the junior high I’m working at closes for mid-winter break (thank you, Presidents Lincoln and Washington for this holiday! The exhausted teachers of America salute you!).

College basketball is getting insanely exciting as it usually does in mid-February; Michigan State got a big win Thursday, my Duke boys pulled another David Copperfield act (seriously, this is the most bizarre Duke team of my lifetime as a fan), and Florida State pulled off another miracle, too. Can’t wait for March Madness.

And here’s a lovely gallery of people skating through the winter. These pictures hopefully will bring a smile to your face, as they did mine. They’re courtesy of Boston.com’s The Big Picture, a site I love and tout frequently on here.

Good news Friday: A riveting piece on Michael Jordan’s h.s. coach. Around the World in 5 minutes: A thing of beauty. And a groom goes all-out on the wedding dance

What’s the biggest myth in the history of sports? Not Babe Ruth’s “called shot” home run. Not that college sports are really “amateur athletics.”

It’s that Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player in history, was once cut from his high school team in Wilmington, N.C.
That story has been told thousands of times on TV, in newspapers and magazines, and by Jordan himself. About how he was cut in 10th grade, and worked hard to improve, but he never forgot the pain of being cut and that’s what drove him, yada yada yada.
Except that story is 100 percent, patently false. Always has been. When I got my first newspaper job out of college, as a sportswriter for the Wilmington Star-News, I learned within 10 minutes that the Jordan story was bogus. MJ was never supposed to be on varsity in 10th grade; the coach told him he’d be assigned to JV. There was no cutting, no crying, no nothing.

That Jordan has continued to perpetuate this myth is fascinating to me; the media, of course, lapped it up, because it’s the ultimate “Hey, if Michael Jordan can get cut, anyone can!” story. It makes His Airness out to be an underdog, and who doesn’t love that?

Of course, while everyone else bought into the myth, there’s one man who could’ve cleared this whole thing up in three seconds: Jordan’s high school coach. But Clifton “Pop” Herring  has been incredibly hard to find over the past 25 years (I know, I looked for him a bit while I was in Wilmington), due to some bad luck and some serious mental illness issues.

But the supremely-talented writer Thomas Lake found him, and wrote this extraordinarily good story about Herring and the myth of MJ in this week’s Sports Illustrated.

It’s Friday, go ahead you have time to read it. While it could be a tragic story, I actually end up feeling good at the end of it. I hope you will too.

**This was extremely cool. A guy spent a year visiting 17 countries and taking 6,237 photographs, then combined it all into a five-minute time-lapse video that shows you the world.

Enjoy the grandeur…

**Finally, this is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

I don’t endorse the use of Justin Bieber music, but this was pretty damn awesome. A groom and his groomsmen go all out to perform a dance for the bride on her wedding day. I think my favorite part is at 2:33, but it’s all pretty hilarious.

And while we’re here, because this is so much fun to watch over and over again…

The year Jordan played baseball. And a batshit-crazy pastor in Florida

Looking back on it, sports historians are likely to be puzzled.
Wait a minute. You’re telling me that in 1994, the greatest basketball player in the world, the greatest basketball player ever, quit at the height of his ability, to play minor-league baseball in Alabama?

Yep. It doesn’t make any more sense the more you think about it. But 16 years ago Michael Jordan, fresh off his third straight NBA title with the Chicago Bulls, and with his father’s murder fresh in his mind, decided he wanted to be a baseball player.

It didn’t go all that well. The skills don’t exactly translate; Jordan played in Double-A in Birmingham, and hit. 202.
And then, after one mostly failed year, Jordan came back to the NBA and was his old self again. It was a weird, weird story, though I remember I admired Jordan at the time for having the guts to try something at which he might fail.
Jordan’s year in the minors is chronicled in the new ESPN 30 for 30 movie, “Jordan Rides the Bus.” It was directed by legendary sports movie writer/producer Ron Shelton (“White Men Can’t Jump,” “Bull Durham,” etc.), and I had extremely high hopes for it.

And it was … pretty good. There are great interviews with Jordan’s old teammates, a pretty funny scene with his Birmingham real estate agent, and lots of footage of Jordan swinging and missing.
Shelton didn’t get an interview with Jordan for the documentary, but if nothing else he did debunk the long-held conspiracy theory that Jordan was forced to retire by NBA commissioner David Stern, due to Jordan’s serious gambling problem.
What I took out of the movie was how a place like Birmingham can be totally transformed by the spectacle of having Michael Jordan hanging out there for a summer. Everyone in town went nuts, like every other city in America would’ve.

Shelton did a good job with the movie, but I think it could’ve been a little better. He’s set the bar so high with his movies, it’s hard to reach it every time.

**Yep, nothing like a good ole’ crazy pastor to get my blood boiling.
Terry Jones, of the Dove World Outreach Center (sounds like a harmless name, right?) in Gainesville, Fla. has decided to help the world get along.

He and his church recently announced that on 9/11 this year they’ll be holding a “Burn the Koran” day, to, and I quote “bring to awareness to the dangers of Islam and that the Koran is leading people to hell,” adding that, “eternal fire is the only destination the Koran can lead people to so we want to put the Koran in its place – the fire!”

What a disgrace for a human being Jones is. Here he is on Chris Matthews’ show the other day:

The violently unhappy Wendy’s customer who owns a Taser. And Cleveland really, really wants to keep LeBron

Sometimes, my dear readers, I have to look far and wide, to the four corners of this here Internet, and the four corners of the globe, to find a fascinating, humorous, or otherwise interesting story to share with you.

Other times, I am blessed. I live in Florida, and crazy stuff seems to happen here all the time.

Tonight, I only had to look at the website of my own newspaper, the Daytona Beach News-Journal. There I learned about Melanese Asia Reid, 20, and her friend Katrina Mari-Alyce Bryant, 23. The two ladies were at a Daytona Beach Wendy’s drive-thru Monday morning, and apparently they weren’t happy with the way their order was given to them.

So Reid and Bryant got out of their car, and ran into the restaurant wielding a Taser.

Let me repeat that. Wielding a Taser.

What did the guy do, forget to throw in a few extra ketchups? Leave the mayo off the burger?

They began chasing the poor employee around and trying to stun him with the Taser, but to no avail. They eventually fled, but were caught when (and I love this part) they later called the manager of the Wendy’s to complain, and shared where they were calling from when asked.

Oh man, so many jokes, so little time. When they say fast food can kill you, they’re not kidding.

Or how about this for a new slogan: “Wendy’s. Our food is so good, you’ll be shocked!”

OK, I’m done now. Check out the story here.

**LeBron James has been getting all kinds of criticism since the Cavaliers blew that series to the Celtics a few days ago. I think much of it is unwarranted; not to get off on a rant here (hat tip, Dennis Miller), but a lot of the same criticisms of LeBron were made of some guy named Jordan when he played for the Bulls in the late 1980s: Great individual talent, not a true leader, never going to win a championship, yada yada yada.

Anyway, so many are criticizing, and yet the people of Cleveland, New York and Chicago are begging for King James to play for them.

Gotta hand it to these Cleveland folks for this brilliant idea: A remake of “We Are the World” with LeBron thrown in. Hilarious:

A really creative marriage proposal. An MJ sighting. And why you should watch hockey now.

So I’m a hopeless romantic at heart, which is why I love creative, different marriage proposals that fellas do.

This one in particular made me smile. Tim Gregory, the head softball coach at Glen Este H.S. in Ohio, was madly in love with rival Milford H.S. coach Christy Foster.

The two dated for two years, and Tim was thinking it was time. When the teams played on April 7, Gregory and Foster came out for the traditional pre-game meeting with the umpires.

Then Gregory pulled out a ring, and right by home plate he asked Foster to marry him.

She said yes. But then Gregory’s team went out and won the game, 1-0.

She’ll be paying him back for that one for the rest of their lives.

***Even sportswriters who’ve seen lots of superstars over the years get a little excited seeing certain guys. They’re beyond the normal athletes, you know, the ones in the stratosphere.

So I got a little thrill when, while covering the Orlando Magic-Charlotte Bobcats Game 1 Sunday night, I walked out of the media room before the game and looked up to see Michael Jordan.

Wearing a beautiful chocolate brown suit that probably cost more than my car, he was there because he’s now the majority owner of the Bobcats.

I’d had one other MJ encounter before; a few years ago at an NBA pre-draft camp he was sitting in my row and I had to climb over his legs to get out of the row.

I know he’s just a guy, but still, Michael Jordan is Michael Jordan.

**Finally, I know I’m preaching to a deaf choir when I talk about the Stanley Cup playoffs in hockey. (Give it a try in HD. It’s amazing the difference). But the first few days of the playoffs have been outstanding. Really, really great.

High scoring games, dramatic overtime winners, upsets brewing .. Just fabulous.

Here’s my hockey blog that I update every day or two for the News-Journal.

And then this happened last night, in overtime. San Jose’s Dan Boyle shot it into his own net to cost his team the game. What an excruciating play; the Sharks absolutely dominated this game, outshooting Colorado 50-16!

The best replay starts at about 1:01:

LeBron makes a rare bad move, and the craziest guy I’ve ever seen on TV

So I’d say LeBron James is probably my favorite current NBA player. Ever since I first heard of this incredible talent, when I worked at SLAM magazine and my colleague Ryan Jones said to me one day, “There’s some kid in Akron, Ohio named LeBron James who’s a sophomore and who everybody is going nuts about,” I’ve followed the kid fairly closely.

I think so far, he’s done a very admirable job handling the spotlight. In the few times I’ve interviewed him, I found him to be intelligent, thoughtful, and pretty funny. We once had a brief discussion of Malcolm Gladwell while some other sportswriters in the gaggle looked on quizzically.

Anyway, LeBron makes very few public missteps. But I think he made one this week, when he suggested not only that he would give up No. 23 in honor of Michael Jordan, but that everyone in the NBA should stop wearing it as well, thereby retiring that number.

I don’t know, exactly, why James said this. Part of me thinks it’s some sort of reverential “getting in good” with the man he hopes to replace as the G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time). Part of me thinks Nike pushed him into it, as an homage to Jordan getting in the Hall of Fame this year, and to sell more LeBron jerseys with a different number on it (Remember, MJ wore No. 45 when he came out of retirement the first time).

Part of me thinks LeBron just thinks he’s that powerful, that he can, like, make other people honor Jordan as much as he has.

I don’t know, it just seems a little strange to me. LeBron might want to rethink this one. After all, isn’t the greatest way to honor MJ to become the second-greatest player ever to wear that number?

It’s just weird.

**So you see a lot of crazy people on television. But this guy fascinated me to no end. On this month’s HBO Real Sports, which I shamefully only got around to watching on Saturday, there was a story about Ashrita Furman, a New York man who owns about 92 Guinness Book of World Records titles. He does stuff like juggle under water with sharks swimming around him, and pogo stick in the Amazon River.

You would think he’s a total nutjob, but believe it or not, after watching the piece (and I highly recommend checking it out on HBO or HBO on Demand if you can), I actually like the guy. This is how he keeps himself sane, and this is what makes him happy, and if he’s not hurting anyone else, what’s so bad about what he does?

Anyway, here’s one typical Ashrita Furman attempt (if there can be such a thing):

An inglorious end for the Great Gretzky, and a hilarious Ricky Gervais rant

Sports fans have been incredibly lucky over the last 30 years.

Let’s say you’re like me, and started to become interested in sports around 1983 or so. Just since then, we have been privileged to watch the greatest basketball player of all-time (Michael Jordan), the greatest tennis player of all time (Roger Federer) and, apparently, the greatest golfer ever (Tiger Woods. I say apparently because I loathe golf and refuse to care or pay attention to it).

Maybe you could get an argument on a few of those from people. Some will argue Rod Laver or Pete Sampras is better than Federer, and there was a golfer named Nicklaus who seemed to be pretty good once.

But no one, I mean NO ONE, argues that Wayne Gretzky is the Greatest Hockey Player of All Time.

Name a record in the NHL record books, and he holds it. I don’t know if I’m so into hockey because of No. 99, but he certainly had a big part of me loving the sport as a child (And yes, there will be hockey on this blog. That and college basketball are my other winter passions. )

I loved it that my beloved New York Rangers were Gretzky’s final team; I can still see him skating around MSG one final time after his last game in 1999, as the adoring masses cheered.

Fast forward 10 years, and Gretzky is hardly being adored. Thursday he resigned as head coach of the Phoenix Coyotes, who are in the midst of a truly messy ownership squabble, even by NHL standards. Gretzky may have been fired by a new ownership group, which is battling the NHL to own the Coyotes (why anyone wants such a pathetic franchise is beyond me, but hey, it’s not my money).

So instead of being pushed out, the Great One jumped. Truthfully, his stint at coaching was a disaster. In four years he had a 143-161-24 record, and Phoenix missed the playoffs all four years. Did he have much talent to work with? No. But he certainly didn’t make the talent any better.

Gretzky joins a long list of superstar players who were bad coaches. Magic Johnson. Ted Williams. Larry Bird. Bill Russell. These guys were legends, but they just couldn’t translate their brilliance onto others. I remember Magic vividly becoming angry after one Lakers practice, saying he just couldn’t understand why Point Guard X didn’t see that coming, or why he didn’t make that play.

The answer, of course, is that the guy wasn’t Magic Johnson, and Magic never could come to terms with coaching players who just didn’t have his gifts.

I hope Gretzky is back in the NHL at some point soon; he deserves a hallowed place in the game for as long as he lives.

But no hockey fans in Phoenix are boo-hooing his departure today. As a coach, Wayne was a failure. Maybe that’s the real reason he left: He knew he wasn’t getting it done, and it was killing him.

***I know there are a legion of Ricky Gervais fans out there, but I’m not really one of them. The British comedian who starred in the original “The Office”  in England just isn’t usually my pint of ale.

But I thought this was truly hilarious, a brief discussion of the terrible lessons we get from nursery rhymes:

A great Obama speech, breakfast keeps kids virgins, and my wife’s new Mark Harmon obsession

Thursday is here, and time for another “grab-blog”, a word I just coined to describe a grab bag kind of blog, a smorgasbord of stuff in my head this evening:

** So Barack Obama gave a great speech Wednesday night, really making his case for health care (of course, Republican Congressman Joe Wilson had to show his manliness by screaming out “You Lie,” which was among the most disrespectful things I’ve ever seen in the presence of the President. Just disgusting. Can you imagine the outrage on the right if a Democratic Congressman had done that?)

But for my (limited) money, his speech to kids on Tuesday afternoon about hard work and staying in school was equally phenomenal. Check it out here.

I will say, though, that he repeated a myth that sadly still lives on: He said Michael Jordan was cut from his high school team. Having lived and worked in Wilmington, N.C., Jordan’s hometown, I know this story is 100 percent false. As explained to me by Chuck Carree, who covered Jordan in high school for the Wilmington Star-News, what happened was that the varsity coach at Laney High school, Fred Lynch, told Jordan he wouldn’t play much on varsity that year. So at tryouts, he suggested Jordan play JV, which is what Michael did.

This story has been mis-told so often, even Jordan and Lynch tell it like the cut story is the truth. But it ain’t so.

**So there were two phenomenal stories I heard this week on the brilliant NPR quiz show Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me (a weekly must-listen for my wife and I; Charlie Pierce and Adam Felber just kill me).

First, apparently some enterprising researchers in Japan did a study of 3,000 people and discovered that those who ate a good breakfast when they were teenagers lost their virginity 1 1/2 years later than those who didn’t.

I’m a little baffled by this story, as it leaves me with many questions, the foremost being: Was my daily bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch the reason Kristen Eck never gave me a date? Could I have been gettin’ some all through high school if only I’d have been hungry until lunch? And what are those kids who don’t eat oatmeal or toast doing for those 15 minutes in the morning?

– The other story from Wait Wait that I loved was that of the administrators of Thorpe Park in Surrey, England, declaring that roller-coaster riders will no longer be permitted to throw their arms in the air during the ride when its hot out. Why? Apparently the stench of B.O. has been annoying other park-goers.

God, there are so many jokes to be made here. Like, I would expect this would happen in France, but England? And, given that we’re talking about a roller coaster here, this sure gives new meaning to the term “the smell of fear.”

**OK, so, Mark Harmon. My wife is a wonderful woman, but from time to time she gets temporarily obsessed with things. Like two years ago, she was constantly wanting orange soda, all the time, for like three weeks.

Currently, my beloved is spending every waking moment watching reruns of the CBS show “NCIS.” I have no earthly idea why; it doesn’t seem to be a particularly interesting or creative show, the acting from what I could tell is dreadful, and well, it’s been on forever and she’s never cared before.

I do know she thinks Mark Harmon is kind of hunky, so maybe that’s it. But seriously, she’s watching like three episodes a day. I’ll start to worry if a DVD of “Stealing Home” arrives in our mailbox.

**OK, so I’ve been watching several hours a day of the U.S. Open (here’s my new blog about Melanie Oudin’s exit Wednesday) and I just can’t take it anymore. I have to vent about this Chase commercial that they show every six seconds.

Here’s the premise: Guy and a girl are out on a date, and they go to a restaurant. Woman asks if guy has ever been here before, and he says “no.”  Then he notices on the menu that it says “cash only.” So while the woman is reading the menu and talking about every item on it out loud, our guy gets up, leaves the table, leaves the restaurant, dashes across the street to a Chase ATM, gets money out, then dashes BACK across the street, back into the restaurant and sits back down.

The whole time, the woman hasn’t noticed he’s left; when she finally asks him what he wants, he’s just sat back down and says “the halibut.”

So this is what I’m thinking: Why would a guy want to go out with a woman who is so bubble-headed and full of herself that she doesn’t even notice that you’ve LEFT THE TABLE? Wouldn’t that be a sign that maybe this chick is a little self-absorbed, that she’s just reading the menu and talking to you while you’re not even there?

If I’m Chase commercial guy, I’m dumping this girl and finding someone else.