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Thursday

14Jan2010

How the Riot Control Vehicle Saved Professional Soccer

Thursday, January 14, 2010

They call it football, but I call it soccer. I do that because I’m difficult.

The recent incident involving African soccer players being shot while traveling in their bus prompted Foreign Policy to have a loot at some of the worst soccer-related incidents over the last few decades. I must have missed where El Salvador and Honduras went to war over soccer—a war that killed over 2,000 people, in fact. How terrible. The incident that will always stay with me is the one that happened in Brussels in 1985:

Thirty-nine fans died (and 600 more were injured), mostly Italians, just before the 1985 European Cup final in Brussels — and the game was still played only a few hours later.

According to Liverpool fans, some Juventus faithful — having purchased tickets in the “neutral” section for Belgian fans — starting throwing missiles projectiles at English fans an hour before game time. In retaliation, a wave of Liverpool supporters rushed the neutral section, causing fans to flee toward a retaining wall, which collapsed, crushing many. Belgian authorities were criticized for deploying an insufficient number of police and for holding the match in an older stadium. Juventus hoisted the cup later that night after winning 1-0. All English football clubs were banned from European competitions for five years, and Liverpool received an additional two-year penalty.

When I was an international pop star for about nine months, I had to play those same soccer stadiums. Oh, they were unpleasant.

I remember that the toilet facilities were unacceptable. And the acoustics were just as bad. I had to sing to backing tracks and dance on plywood stages—nothing I care to remember.

Cover, “When You Dance” 12” SingleMy voice would echo around the stadium, and open rows of concrete are nothing you want to find yourself singing to when only 18,000 people show up to see you. Some nights were better than others. Some nights, I actually got to finish my set. I liked closing with “When You Dance (My Money) Falls Out of My PANTS!!!” because it was really an uptempo sort of a thing, with a lot of oohing and ahing and I would have my rear pockets full of kroners or whatever—something local and worthless, basically. Peej would load up two cassettes with springs in them, and then stand offstage. When the chorus would hit, the money would fly out of my back pockets and hit the fans that were blowing to stage right and stage left. Money would then waft out into the stands—chaos followed, of course. The trick was to only eject a portion of the money on each of the seven times we did the full chorus. Peej tried, but the controls were so tricky.

I was there when something called Depeche Mode was bottled off of the stage by the Dutch fans (well, European fans, actually). I was hit a few times, but my ability to dance quickly and get through a forty minute set in eight minutes worked in my favor. No, I wouldn’t go back to Werchter, but I did love Pinkpop and Glastonbury was as weird as I’ve ever gotten.

Anyway, when my musical career ended, I had to help Father while not neglecting my investment banker activities. I hit upon the idea of selling the Dutch and the Belgians riot control vehicles, and, lo and behold, we made forty sales in a matter of a week. Without proper riot control vehicles, I sincerely doubt whether they could have even had a continuation of their season after the terrible tragedy in Brussels. The key to designing the Western European Soccer Stadium Riot Control Vehicle was to make the water cannon powerful enough to nearly drown the stoutest of fans. This vehicle certainly has its heart in the right place:

Dutch Water Cannon Riot Control Vehicle

This is a rather well-designed vehicle, with protective skirting and no seams along the sides to allow a rioter to grasp or exploit. The reinforced cockpit looks exposed, but with that extra reinforced bar down the sides, I wouldn’t mind running down an agitated pack of Liverpudlians with it myself.

These vehicles saved soccer, in terms of how it is played before tens of thousands, in Europe. Without them, the authorities would have to mass cargo vans with machine guns mounted on them, and no one wants to see their team lose and then have to explain the multiple bullet wounds to their employer.

Norman Rogers | tagged

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Wednesday

30Dec2009

The Best of An American Lion (Part One)

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

I’m a Rockefeller Republican, Sir

Here are some of my best posts, and this covers the early part of the year when I used a lot more filler and didn’t care as much.

January

I was also the inspiration for this song

When you live in New York City, as I did for many years, and work in the business world, you tend to overlap into what some might call “the entertainment industry” and what others might call “the playground of whores.” I was never a man-whore, but I came awfully close on occasion. I won’t bore you with the details. There are prudes out there, of course. Let me just say that I practically invented the practice of running around naked on the roof of a building in which I did not live.

February

Being Pathetic is What is Recession-Proof

I applaud a good Ponzi scheme. It shows a willingness to win at all costs. I say “boo! boo!” in the catcall vernacular to those who get taken by Ponzi schemes. It shows laziness and an inability to pay attention. That’s why I’m able to turn my back on these people. Goodness, you can’t be spotted talking to a Wal-Mart greeter or a liquor store warehouse employee. You simply cannot be seen talking to a man who now sells insurance on commission for a shady outfit like AFLAC. That duck annoys me to no end. And I like comical ducks. I like them a great deal, sir.

March

Helping my old friend Candy Spelling sell her home

And, much like the Spellings, I have a chunky daughter who is a major, major disappointment. It’s a wonder I even let her into the house. Miranda is such a disappointment to me, on many levels. Yes, she can pilot a boat and straighten out administrative problems, but no, she can’t attract a decent husband anymore. No Ivy League man would ever taste her soiled goodies. The bloom is off the rose, Miranda, and without a man, you might as well give yourself a one way ticket to spinsterhood and stop off at the Big Ass mall and stock up on supplies.

April

Pointing out the obvious is what I do best

Let me just state the obvious—this is why you don’t tip the pizza boy or pay him a lot of money. True, once he realizes that the money he’s making won’t fix his Grandmother’s Plymouth after he burns out the motor making one too many runs to the fat kids in the husky boy pants in the trailer park who subsist off Mountain Dew and Meat Lover’s Pizzas, you’re likely going to have to recruit another one to take his place, but I digress. We have had a recent spate of shootings in this country. Now, nearly 100% of the blame for those shootings goes to mental illness. Some goes to liberalism, the rest goes to the fact that the raising of the minimum wage has allowed people to go out and purchase more guns and more ammunition. Think I’m wrong? I probably am wrong, and I really should point out that this is not what I really think. I’m just trying to make the day go by faster.

BONUS coverage, because April was a weird month for me:

The Slutty E-surance girl is back to torment me

My God, have you ever seen anything that perky? Those things make perky look like someone’s idea of being rode hard and put away wet.

May

I Have Never Worn Jeans or Sneakers

When I was 15, I got lost in the downtown Groton sewer system for about two months. I fancied myself living underground and becoming a kind of mole-rat person with super-sensitive eyesight and the ability to digest stolen food from a pizza restaurant that had a loose manhole cover behind it. I should write about my time as the Frisky Mole Boy of Groton. Technically, I wasn’t a mole—I was a mole rat. I didn’t do any digging. I subsisted off stolen or discarded food which I took down into tunnels someone else had installed. But I solved a few bank robberies, fell in love, and invented a curved stick that allowed me to run through sewer pipes while carrying pizza without falling. It was ingenious. Oh, and I had sex with forty women, caught eleven fugitives, and blew up a furniture store that was being used as an illegal gambling parlor.

June

Spraying Your Own People With Horrible Chemicals

Ah, the nostalgia of reading about sialorrhoea on a beautiful summer morning. Do all of the blogs you read talk extensively about how sialorrhoea can help restore democracy and freedom? Do most of them? Well, good for you.

Norman Rogers | tagged

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Wednesday

23Dec2009

Life Isn't Easy For Those Of Us Who Depend on Trust Funds

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

This is a familiar story:

Question: When our sister died ten years ago, my brother became the trustee of her five-year-old daughter’s trust. Drew invested Mandy’s money in a business he was starting, and Mandy received stock in return. The business folded this year, and now the stock is worthless. Shouldn’t Drew repay our niece the money he lost? He says what happened is nobody’s fault.

Answer: That’s just the way the investment cookie crumbles, is it? Drew’s probably also thinking that if his company had been the next Google, he’d be a hero for making Mandy rich.

Well, he’s right that a good outcome can obscure bad judgment. But he’s wrong to imagine that what happened to Mandy’s inheritance is nobody’s fault. It’s his fault. Moreover, your brother wasn’t just foolish or unlucky, he was unethical. First, instead of handling your niece’s money responsibly, he poured all of it into a single, untried business. If Drew either didn’t know enough or didn’t care enough to invest more wisely than that, he had an obligation to turn the job over to someone who did.

Ouch!

Many of you know that Rogers Defence Industries, the company that Father founded after he left the Pinkertons to go manufacture riot control vehicles, foundered in the 1970s, due in some part to the ending of the Vietnam War and due in large part to Father’s decision to make riot control vehicles that fired potatoes and broken glass at rioters.

The value of RDI was once estimated at a billion and a half dollars, and this was in 1967. If you divide up the company, amongst my two brothers, my sister, and my horrible, horrible mother and my not so bad step-mothers, my weighted slice of that is a good $300 million dollars.

Instead, we deposed Father and put him into retirement in 1979 (New Year’s Day, if I remember correctly). Chetley, my brother, took the remaining Riot Control vehicle division and spun it off into a small company with offices, factories, and warehouses in California, Mexico, and Germany. Chase, my other brother, took the dangerous chemicals division and sold it to the Chinese in 1987 for eight hundred thousand dollars (it’s now valued at $348 million), and Dierdre, the baby of the family, took the charity and weapons procurement divisions and now makes a pretty good living remanufacturing old army rifles for poor people who want to supplement their diet with deer hunting. I took the finance division and created Norman Rogers Investments, and I did rather well with the investment banking portfolio that I built up until President Clinton ordered the Justice Department and the SEC to shut me down in 1994 and sent me to prison for a crime they could not possibly have known that I committed.

Now, thankfully, I’ve never been dirt poor. I’ve been down, and I’ve been depressed, but I’ve never been poor. Father owned a lot of property, and whenever anyone in the family has ever needed money, we just come together and sell something that Father bought when times were flush. I can remember Christmas 1982, and how we were all down because of the economy. Chetley and I needed to buy new homes, because we were both getting divorced at the time, and Dierdre needed to buy another Chagall. Chase suggested we sell the family home, and tell Father it had been repossessed, and so we did it, we sold it for a nice profit, and we tricked Father into living on the Admiral Hassenpfeffer for six years.

Father owns a strip mall in Cleveland, Ohio that we can’t get clear deed and ownership of, and that has been Mr. Peej’s special project for the last few months. Once we figure out who should be paying us rent, we’re going to collect it, bank it, and then burn the place to the ground if it’s more valuable to us in that form. Father’s labyrinthine financial schemes and ownership arrangements will take generations to sort out.

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Monday

16Nov2009

Walk Fast or Die

Monday, November 16, 2009

My personal health has always been excellent. Thanks to a lifetime of being frisky—and I say that without any of that snarky blog nonsense intended—I have always been rail thin, active, and fairly happy.

When I was in prison, I put on about twenty pounds, but that was before they let me out on the road cleanup crew. Then, in the heat of the Minnesota summer, I dropped the weight and more. I got down to a fighting weight of 170 pounds, and being 6 foot three and a half, that’s lean enough for me. Nothing chases the gut away like picking up trash by the side of the road in an orange vest. There are days when I’m nostalgic—I really was good at finding roadside trash, and I specialized in organizing ways to get things out of what they called culverts and drainage ditches. I’m hovering below the 185 mark, and I don’t think I’ve strayed above that since 1994. This past winter, I did NO cross country skiing, hence, I’m still feeling like a summer bum and a lardass.

I implore you—as your President in metaphorical terms only—walk briskly, eat less meat, don’t put salt on anything, and don’t eat white bread. Get your grains and fibers, get what vegetables you can, and never eat anything served through a window. Find a hill near your home and conquer it. Conquer it and howl from the top, and tell the world that you will NOT be a fatass and you will NOT join the Michigan Militia without first being healthy and capable of holding a weapon properly. What? Did I go off topic again?

The gist of this article makes sense, but only up to a point:

Slow walking may not only mean getting to your destination later, according to a new study by French scientists: Older people who walk slowly are almost three times more likely to die of heart disease and related causes than older people who walk faster.

“The main message for the general population is that maintaining fitness at older age may have important consequences and help preserve life and (muscle) function,” one of the study’s authors, Dr. Alexis Elbaz, director of research at the Paris-based medical research institute Inserm, told Reuters Health by email.

He said the study, which appeared in the journal BMJ, also suggests that a test of walking speed might be used to test the health of elderly patients.

This is a no-brainer. If you walk slow, it means you are impeded in some way, either by a big gut or weak, spindly legs. If you make a conscious effort to avoid brisk walking or exercise, of course you’re going to enlarge yourself and eventually explode and die like a horrible, melting pile of sloppy meat.

Duh.

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Monday

09Nov2009

The Steady Calm of Mr. Peej

Monday, November 9, 2009

I can scarcely recall how many times I have faced death. Not counting the seven times I have ingested antifreeze, and the five times I have broken up bum scuffles that involved pitchforks, shovels or knives, or the dozen or so times my brothers and I used short fuses with old dynamite, I think I have faced death at least twenty-five times, if not more. I am not indestructible. I am not easy to kill. In fact, I used to tell people, you can’t kill me—I’m a Republican.

When you’ve faced death so many times, it becomes routine. I am accustomed to the rush of adrenaline. I know that hot sensation in my cheeks and in my elbows. I can feel my body begin to tense above the waist, and that’s when I know I’ll probably have a heart attack if I don’t take a few Bayer aspirin. My mind clears, the sounds in the background disappear, and everything becomes focused. Often, I am running when the sensation arrives, and my pace quickens, my knees ache but they carry me forward, obediently. My hands don’t sweat, but my forehead becomes moist fairly quickly. That’s what sleeves are for, I suppose. I know what it is like to hear the roar, to feel the rocks and the dirt rain down, and I know what it means to be alive. It’s second nature to me. What some call the Pucker Factor, I am not acquainted with. I have never felt any puckering, nor have I felt loose bowels come flying out at inopportune times. I feel nothing below the waist, actually. That’s why people can kick me in the nuts and not stop me.

This is why I share the eternal bonds of brotherhood with men who are my equal:

John Geiger has sifted through the survival stories of people like Sevigny for six years. Adventurers, sailors, prisoners of war and pilots, they all tell strikingly similar stories of being saved from death by a mysterious presence, he says.

In the book “The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible,” Geiger attempts to solve the mystery of that presence.

Most of the people who’ve encountered the Third Man aren’t mystics, says Geiger, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto and governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. They include a NASA astronaut, aviator Charles Lindbergh, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton (he coined the “Third Man” term) and atheists.

Third Man encounters aren’t restricted to exotic locales, either, Geiger says: He experienced a Third Man-like encounter in the study of his home while writing his book.

“When I give talks about the book, there are always a few people who will come up afterward to say they have similar stories,” Geiger said. “The debate around the book is not ‘are people actually encountering an unseen being’ but rather, ‘what is it?’ “

I don’t know if there is a Third Man in my life. As I have said, everything goes silent when I am running from an exploding car or throwing evidence into an old rock quarry or launching myself into the air after a semi-nude Eastern European porn star who is balancing atop an out-of-control jet ski.

Recently, we hired a delightful man named Peej who has become indispensable to me. Whenever I find myself about to dip my finger into a radiator and have a slurp, he is there, whispering in my ear, “no, Norman. That’s going to put you in hospital again.” Whenever I find myself challenging bikers to a game of tennis, he is there, whispering in my ear, “no, Norman—they have guns.” Whenever I’m about to take Father’s wheel chair and push it down nineteen flights of stairs, he is there to hold my arms, lock the brake with his right foot, and save Father’s life by using all of his weight to keep me from lifting my free arm and using the remote control to bring down the robotic arm that would hit Father’s wheelchair from the other side and send it flying.

He’s a good man, this Mr. Peej. I’m hoping he works out.

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Saturday

07Nov2009

Why Didn't I Get to Have a Bachelor Pad?

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Bachelors leave their bachelor pads and run with the bulls

The bachelor pad as a metaphor for never having to hold yourself accountable for not being an adult:

In 2008, the unemployment rate for men ages 20 to 34 in New York State was 7.4 percent. The countrywide average was 7.7 percent, while the state average for women in the same age range was 6.1 percent, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Numbers for 2009 are not yet available.)

Bachelors have been walloped, but many are taking their lumps and moving on.

Until a year ago, Jason Brooks, 36, a host of the short-lived MTVshow “Trailer Fabulous,” a solo artist and the singer in a band called Rehab, paid $5,000 a month for a 2,000-square-foot TriBeCa loft that he shared with his wife. Before that, he paid $3,500 a month for an apartment in a doorman building in the Financial District.

Now, says Mr. Brooks, whose stage name is Brooks Buford, he pays $1,600 a month for a tiny studio in SoHo.

“It’s such a bizarre shift from where I was to where I am now,” said Mr. Brooks, who is now divorced. “I catch myself trying to make excuses for this place. Like before anyone comes up, I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s like an airplane cabin.’ ”

Mr. Brooks, who says he lives off royalties from his past music career, also worked in information technology until he was laid off about a year ago.

In his old married apartment in the financial district, he said, two walls were devoted to shelves showcasing his vast sneaker collection. In his new single-again apartment, shared with a pug puppy called Brooks Junior, he needs a penlight to help him excavate footwear from the mountain of clothing jammed into his small closet — though he says it’s only one-eighth of what he owned in more prosperous times.

In still another past-life apartment, back in Atlanta, where Mr. Brooks is from, a grove of plastic trees surrounded his bed. In SoHo, he has a photomural of a forest stapled to the wall.

That’s nice. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

I suppose my bitterness is getting in the way, but bachelor pads are juvenile and ridiculous because I never got to have one. Four ex-wives, four children, and an incompatible lifestyle for me meant no bachelor pad. No where to put my collection of pornographic teakettles (they either have male and female organs placed on them or delicate European or Chinese detail paintings on the sides), no where to put my suits of armor (I own fifteen full sets), and no where to put my vast collection of miniature cars.

In the Eighties, I tried to have a bachelor pad, but my ex-wife was a freak show stumbling backwards on heels, so the judge awarded me custody of the children. This was done despite the fact that I showed up to court in a tuxedo, spats, a leopard-skin hat, with a bottle of brandy under my arm and a Times Square hooker holding my briefcase. No bachelor pad for me—I had to get a four bedroom loft near the financial district.

Anyway, allow me to sneer for a bit, and I’ll be fine.

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