Gloomy day here in NYC, but warmer at least. There are positive reports coming from Spumoni Gardens South (which reminds me: I saw Mario Battale this week on Food Network haunting the kitchen of the Brooklyn original -- he devoured a slice of Sicilian and approved of its quality).

Notice the colon in the previous sentence. It's not only grammatically correct, it's also symbolic. It's not quite a dramatic pause, but it does introduce food.

And we all know where that leads.

We're going to the mattresses here in Florida. Like Fat Clemenza says: sometimes war has to happen every few years; it gets rid of the bad blood. Big Vin is in the hospital and we're all on stand-by to see what we can do. If anyone is in the Juptier area and wants to visit, just look for the hospital room with the provolone hanging over the bed. They have Vinny heavily sedated -- an IV drip of Cinzano and orange soup. He's got a few issues to deal with: pneumonia, infection, other nasty stuff. But he's got a very hard head. Very big and very hard. Vito and I are booked now to return to LGA tomorrow morning. Still not sure who I'm going to roust from bed at 5:30 tomorrow morning to take us to the airport. I'll save it for later tonight -- make it a surprise.

Anyway, we're all headed back to the hospital. Everyone's optimistic, even though we know it's a long hard road ahead.

I just spent over six hours trying to boot a PC and get it properly configured for... children's games. Yep, at this very moment John Paul is playing Freddi Fish -- and has been at it for over an hour. Well, at least the effort was worth it.

But the roadblocks strewn in my path!

First, it won't boot properly. Meaning, it won't boot at all. I keep landing in IBM's hard-coded error/testing screens. I messed around with the configuration until it finally booted -- probably a fluke, but there was plenty more to come. Once booted, I reached for an OS update, which went fine until the HD ran out of space. Odd, I thought -- I don't remember this HD being only 2 Gb in size.

Well, it hadn't been. I had to find the boot partition and activate the rest of the drive. Oh, and format it. All of which I did. Then I did the rest of the OS updates, rebooted, and got... an error.

So I looked up the error messages online. They all seemed to have one thing in common: check the voltage on the backup battery. Screw that -- I went to the old-and-busted ThinkPad I've been cannibalizing and ripped the backup battery from there. Installing that cleared most of my errors.

Except for the one about NTLDR being missing.

More online searches revealed a plan to copy some W2K files onto a floppy disk (a floppy disk!), boot from that, then copy the missing files.

The boot part work (whew!), but the missing files weren't missing. So WTF?

More poling around revealed that by activating the D: drive on that earlier partition work I'd de-activated the C: drive -- where the OS lives.

That cleared it all up. I set up a restricted-rights user for the boys (who have a habit of claicking randomly on everything, hitting keys, and totally fucking up a configuration) and installed Freddi Fish. Which leaves me here. Blogging. With the Simpsons on in the background. And a bottle of port in the kitchen, calling my name.

Did you ever notice:

When Mastandreas make conversation, their sentences are most often punctuated by colons.

That observation was first made at the tail end of the infamous "Vito Storms the South" tour of 1997. Which should not be confused with the "Roto-Virus Tour" of 2000.

Not so sure about turkey sausage. You know what I think works out very well, though? Sausage and peppers -- with chicken cooked with it. White meat, thighs -- whatever. Just throw it into the mix and let it all cook together.

Forgetaboutit.

The Pros and Cons of Turkey Sausage

Like patient paparazzi
Vidalias and Cubanelles
Quietly anticipate the arrival
of their dish's number one star.
On the advice of the experts,
a last minute substitution,
Pork is fired,
Turkey gets hired.
The end result? A dish renamed "Gigli".

Now this is truly odd -- a room full of Mastandreas and all we have here is eerie silence. It's unnatural. It's unhealthy. Mastandreas not telling stories? Next there'll be Mastandreas eating macaroni without gravy. Espresso without Anisette. Bagels without swiss cheese.

I got an IM from Steve earlier. He said he had Mark with him. I call on them to post here the tales of this weekend's adventures. I also call on Vito to get signed up with this thing and send invites to our long-lost cousins in Bari. I call on Bazzukajoe to relate to us all that he has eaten while driving in his car this week (with footnotes on the crumbs that accumulated on the floor mats).

As for me, I'm home with da boyz while Alane shops at Kohl's. Maybe she'll buy me some socks. Got the news on TV. They're interviewing a moron who has just declared that favoring tax cuts is the equivalent of class warfare. I am disgusted. I watch TV to get disgusted.

What would Uncle Viny say?

Can you believe this guy?