Enough Already!

I don’t do well in hotels, so I always try to stick to the one’s that have some semblance of a cleanliness policy. I don’t tend to care about room size, bars/clubs in the hotel, fitness facilities or room service quality. Just give me a place where I don’t begin thinking too much about the people who were there before me.

The local news often runs stories where they go into hotels with blacklights to show you all of the things you don’t see. (By often, I mean every single night.) Those are always discomforting, but nothing’s worse than only needing your eyes to see ALL that is wrong with a room.

I stayed at the Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles last week. I figured that I couldn’t go wrong with a Hyatt, especially in a popular area. I’ll NEVER figure that again.

Ok, let’s start with the carpet. I usually don’t walk around a hotel without wearing something on my feet, but one look at this carpet and I was scared to take off my shoes. Best I could tell, someone stood in the doorway of the bathroom and peed wildly about the room. (If that’s the case, it would definitely explain the smell.)

But the rug wasn’t even the tip of the bacteria-berg. For the bathroom was a smorgasbord of filth unmatched by most public rest stop bathrooms.

For starters, that pubic hair you see in this picture is not mine:

And while it may be a little tough to tell from this photo, the tub is full of scratches.

How do tubs even get scratched that badly? Unless Johnny Depp stayed here when he began filming Edward Scissorhands and kept slipping in the bathtub while attempting to break the fall with his blades. Absurd? It is LA, remember….

The bathroom was also full of orifices, like this one:

I have no idea what that hole is but I found it in the top of the bathroom ceiling. It appears, at first glance, that it exists solely to be nasty. I think that people have been standing on the sink and blowing their noses in it. Make your way to the comments section if you have your own theories.

Then there was this hole at the floor of the bathroom.

Upon seeing that, I immediately began speculating that I wasn’t alone in the room. I stuffed a towel in the "crack" so I could be sure to have some privacy that night. While I can be very friendly, I was simply not in the mood to meet whatever four-legged beast called the hole home. If you go stay in that room (#718), I’m sure that you’ll find the towel still in tact.

At this point, I was starting to think that these rooms never actually get cleaned and that the duty relies on the hotel guests to tidy up as best they can before leaving. My suspicions were confirmed when I saw this hair painted into the wall.

If they’re not even cleaning the rooms before painting, what else aren’t they doing? Please, NOBODY answer that.

OK, enough about the bathroom. Let’s take a look at the rest of the room. The walls were pretty dirty and included a lot of marks like this one:

Apparently, someone who stayed there decided to high five the wall. The Hyatt must have taken it as a compliment (which they can’t be getting too many of) and left it up there to remind themselves of what a great job they’re doing charging $200 + for hotel rooms without ever having to clean them.

Is it insane of me to hope that the reason the room was so dirty is because they spend so much time making sure that the beds are clean? Call it a pipe dream, but it’s all I had to help me get to sleep. (By the way, I'm used to sleeping on my side, but all I could think about was my dirty bed. So I ended up sleeping on my back (coffin-style), my body tensed beyond movement.)

I woke up shortly after falling asleep because a bright light kept flashing into my room. I knew that we weren’t being invaded but had no idea where all the flashes could be coming from. (Perhaps the people in the room next to me were taking pictures of their walls in preparation for the “Dirty Hyatt” blog story that they were planning?) I couldn’t stand wondering about it any longer so I got out of bed to go see where all of the light was coming from. I went out onto the balcony and saw this:

In case you’re having trouble figuring out what that is, it’s a picture of Elle Macpherson’s ass. It runs constantly on a loop of other sexy video clips of Elle on a giant video billboard right outside of the hotel. I tried to reposition my bed so that I could watch until I fell asleep, but it was attached to the wall.

By the way, this has nothing to do with the dirty Hyatt, but something I always do in hotels that have nice views of the city in which I’m staying, is stand naked in front of the sliding glass door and pretend that I own the city. To further enforce the concept, I throw my hands up above my head and laugh like I’m evil. What TOTALLY ruined my buzz, however, was having to be naked while wearing shoes.

I eventually fell asleep, woke up and took a shower. Unfortunately, the shower wore off as soon as I stepped out of the tub.

I doubt I’ll ever return...

# posted by Brian Baumley : 6:07 PM  0 comments  

This is one line that you will NEVER see me standing in. They're on corners all over New York City - lines for the danish carts.

I'm not quite sure when it happened but at some point in the city's history, budding entrepreneurs discovered that there was money to be made in selling stale pastries on street corners. And so it began...they'd set up cart, and the customers would come pouring in.

My gripe lies not with the cleverness or convenience of the idea, but with the undeniable fact that it is OH SO UNSANITARY. God, people line up one after the other buying these danishes and there served up by a man who basically LIVES in the tiny cart with the food. All day, he's in there, sweating, breathing, sneezing, coughing - with all that food surrounding him - the pastries brushing up against his genitals everytime he leans forward.

I don't know why nobody has caught onto this yet. I know (and you know, by now) that I'm a germ freak, but anybody in their right mind can spot this bacteria hazard from a mile away. Ugh, the pastries just sit there, pressed up against the dirty glass that I'm sure the resident of the cart never gets around to cleaning.

All I'm saying is that the people serving up the food should be standing NEXT to the cart. There's no need whatsoever to get all up in it. I'd say something, but it seems like at this point, they've got a system and they're sticking to it. I still can't help but shutter every time I walk by, though...

I'm going to start by saying that I hurt myself at a wedding this past Sunday night. No, it wasn't a dance injury (although after reviewing footage of myself dancing, I'm not sure how I avoided a severe physical trauma). No, it was something far more embarassing...

I went to a wedding where the bride was Jewish and a lot of Jewish traditions were being followed. As far as I can tell, one major Jewish tradition at weddings is clapping. No matter what's being done, everyone has to clap while it's happening. Usually, the clapping is done while standing in a circle as parents are tossed about on chairs and violent kicking dances are taking place.

But clapping is also done when the bride and groom are kissing. Or when they're not kissing. Or when dessert is being served. The fact is, at the wedding I attended, people were clapping more often than they weren't. At one point, I grew tired of clapping but didn't want to be the only shmuck in the whole place not clapping. So I kept clapping...and clapping...and clapping, until...

This happened to my hand:



If it's not completely visible upon first glance, look beneath my middle finger and you'll see a bruise. Somehow, I bruised myself clapping. I clapped so damn much that blood vessels in my hand simply burst, as if to say, "No more clapping, Brian, it's too much!"

I should've known better. I felt the hurt coming part way through the night and convinced myself that I'd be able to clap it off. No such luck. Now it'll be at least 2 weeks before I can clap again or attend a Jewish wedding...

First of all, I just want to say that we WILL get to 200 posts on Enough Already...by hook or by more blogging, I promise it will be done.

I felt a hankering to see a movie today. I found myself in kind of an uncomfortable situation when I discovered that I was really torn between going to see World Trade Center...or Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Having to choose between the two just kind of felt wrong.

WTC is probably more of a destination movie for most people, but I was just kind of looking for a good flick and wasn't sure whether I was in the mood to laugh or weep subtly. I ended up going to see Talladega Nights and gotta say that I kind of left feeling empty. Don't get me wrong, great flick. I just don't think that I achieved the level of moral purpose that I might have with a WTC-type film.

I'm not a huge Nicholas Cage fan. Perhaps if Ed Norton, Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Leonardo Di Caprio or Mark Wahlberg played the lead role, I'd have gone to see it. And yes, those are my top five favorite male actors in no particular order.

I was walking through Times Square with a friend today - I almost passed out several times. Hot doesn't begin to describe it. My friend tried to use the gift of simile to describe the heat - "It's hot as balls," he said.

The majority of my male friends associate balls with extraordinarily high levels of heat. I thought for a second and realized that he was wrong. Since balls tend to be kept three degrees cooler than our normal body temperatures, "hot as balls" is really only 95 degrees or so. A more accurate statement would've been, "It's 10 degrees hotter than balls out here."

In closing, I don't mind people using balls as a unit of heat measurement, I'd just prefer that they be accurate.

For the record, I'm not in the habit of calling myself "B" - it was strictly for the sake of the title. So yes, my posting lately has not been "daily" as my website advertises, and that is with good reason. I'm not sure what the reason is yet, but when I find out, I'll let you know.

I think part of it is that this particular blog has run its course for me. I'm nearing post #200 and I've written about nearly everything I've wanted to cover. There was a point when this blog was evolving nicely, incorporating some ongoing themes while still sticking close to its roots, but lately, it's seemed to have become an unruly shrub (my worst metaphor, ever) and it seems like a good time to start anew. I think that I confirmed that for myself when I uploaded yesterday's M. Night Looks Like MJ posting...I felt so cheap.

So keep coming back here over the next few weeks as the countdown to the finale begins...I promise that my posts will be every bit as exciting as they have been in the past. You can decide for yourself if that means that they'll be good or bad.

There is still a little bit more that I want to do with this blog, including finishing up "The Chronicles of Baumley" series. Speaking of Chronicles of Baumley, for anybody who didn't see (which I think is just about everyone), I got a response to my Chronicles of Baumley entry where I talked about cutting my babysitter's jeans jacket in the 80s - the response came from the babysitter! 20 years later...talk about closure!!! Anyone who is unfamiliar with that particular entry can read it here: http://www.brianbaumley.com/2006/05/chronicles-of-baumley-hole-in-my-soul.html

OK, there will be a proper post tomorrow. Thanks, as always, for reading.

I saw Lady in the Water tonight. Is it me or is M. Night Shyamalan starting to look A LOT like Michael Jackson from the Thriller days?