the true meaning of christmas

hi. you shouldn't see this. I just need the comments.

How To Be A Good Bar Patron

Have some self respect.

First off, I need to take a moment and state that YOU personally are as responsible for the quality of your drinking experience as the bar itself. Bartenders do not live to serve you, and oftentimes they don’t even particularly enjoy it. Generally speaking they are intelligent individuals who have taken the job because it is good money. However, all things equal, they would prefer to be patronizing the bar than working at it.

To make my point a bit more clear, when you go out you are in a room full of intoxicated people begging a few individuals to give them more of the liquid that has made them so drunk in the first place. Imagine what that looks like from the other side of the bar. The speed at which you get a drink, and the quality with which it is poured or mixed will be greatly influenced by the bartender’s impression of you. Trust me, you will be snubbed at the bar if you are an asshole. The quality of the service you receive will be relative to your behavior there.

So, here are a few pointers on how to be a reputable bar patron:

• Honestly, and I can’t stress this enough, tip the bartenders. There are a wide variety of excuses that I have heard, ranging from “I’m broke” to “I’m British,” to explain away why people are cheap bastards and don’t leave tips. You might have several mistaken impressions about this custom.

  First, you might think that you are “rewarding good service” with your tip. This is actually a rather logical mistake. You are not “rewarding” service, you are paying for a service. (This service includes coming in hours before the place opens to get everything ready, staying hours after the place closes cleaning up, washing all the glasses, carrying in and out all the kegs and trash, and generally making it the kind of place with an atmosphere that you will enjoy, not the vile mess you leave it as when it closes.) Truth be told, you will not always get good service the first time you walk up to a specific bar. The bartenders don’t know you and they already have a group of people that they want to serve quickly. Your goal is to become one of these people, or suffer as one of the rude and thirsty.

  A good way to do this is to leave a good tip after your first drink. If you think you are waiting until you get remarkably good service, you will never get good service. If you don’t want to pay for service, it would be more appropriate to stay home and serve yourself beers from your fridge. Much like yourself, these people don’t work for free.

  Second, people think they are tipping if they leave the twenty-five to fifty cents they got in change from their beer. Attention: your bartender is not a vagrant on the street who needs change for the bus. Tips must be green in color if you want them to have the desired effect. At the very least, you should leave a dollar. This applies even if you are buying the Old Style on special for a dollar. Oh, and if you order some huge quantity of drinks, one dollar or even two probably does not cut it. Tipping at a bar is different from a restaurant – it is not 15% of the total order, but rather a dollar for every 1-2 drinks.

  Third, you might think that your bartender does not notice whether or not you left a tip. What are you a moron? Do you really think they don’t check? Do you think they are blind? This is money we are talking about here, of course they are looking, even if a lot of times it looks like they just walked on to the next customer. Trust me, they make a note of it.

• The next point should seem quite obvious to you. Don’t be rude. Don’t think that the staff owes you anything. Don’t ask them to “make it strong” instead of just ordering the double. Don’t ask them for pens, paper, or any other items from Office Depot. Most importantly, don’t think they won’t choose to serve someone standing 5 feet behind you if you haven’t treated them well. It happens, I have seen it happen, I have talked to bartenders who say they do it. I have heard bartenders discussing rude patrons days after they were in the bar. Unless you have some odd masochistic desire to be referred to as “that fucking rude asshole,” then act as politely as you’d like to be treated at your own place of employment. A well placed please and thank you couldn’t hurt. But, being gruff and surly could.

• Don’t become too much of a drunken idiot. As much as you don’t want to wake up the next morning afraid of what you might have done the night before, most of the people at the bar don’t want to watch it. Try your hardest to maintain, at least when dealing with strangers, some composure. Do not, and I repeat, do not EVER, vomit on the floor/bar/table. And let’s be fair, 99.9% of the time when you are going to get drunk and puke you know you are going to puke ahead of time - you just don’t want to. Give up, go to the bathroom, go to some alley, go anywhere acceptable. Trust me, it might be embarrassing to show weakness while you and your friends are having some kind of bizarre schnapps drinking contest, but it is far worse to throw up in front of them.

  Similarly, if you ever feel the need to get in a fight with someone, please don’t. I am not just saying that because chances are good that the person you are thinking of fighting is me, but because you will get kicked out, sometimes permanently barred from entering the establishment. There are really very few occasions I can think of where it is worth it.
  

So, to sum up, by tipping your bartenders, being polite, and maintaining some shred of dignity while drunk, you stand a much better chance of having a good time.

Monthly Contest

Welcome back ginandtacos.com viewers. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a monthly contest so for the first month we are going to hold one that is near and dear to our hearts: who is the greatest action star ever?

We here at ginandtacos.com will always believe that the superhero to cranky, middle-class civil servants everywhere, Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) of the Die Hard series is the best we’ve seen. But lately, we have heard more and more that the gothy computer nerd Neo (Keanu Reeves) from the Matrix series would come out on top.

(Note: save your emails. We are talking about the McClane and Neo from their first respective movies. We are also arguing about American action heroes, even though I still believe that McClane could take out Jet Li or Gordon Liu we’ll save that for a different day).

Both Neo and McClane have starred in excellent action movies that were immediately turned into crass and shameless sequels. But more importantly, each represents the trials and tribulations faced by their respective classes in their own times. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a better look.

Neo is the proto-typical late 90s dot-com web-surfer. He meets women in online chat-rooms (that somehow look like Carrie-Anne Moss), feels all detached and out-of-touch with his computer job, and worries endlessly about his life. That is, until he learns that that everyone who is not like him or his goth attired friends do not actually exist. Sorry rest of the world. It’s true that The Matrix is as self-obsessed as the aspiring dot-com barons it profiles – but the other thing about it is how clever it is. There are all kinds of nifty allusions, to Blade Runner’s grunge chic, to martial art flicks, to the Baudrillard books scattered around Neo’s apartment.

John McClane does not care about simulacra or other nifty allusions – all he wanted to do was sneak away from the crappy office party his wife dragged him to in order to take a nice long dump with his shoes off. Unfortunately, terrorists come between him and his small dream. The villains that plague Die Hard are all taken from the buffet of mid 80s middle-class white male anxieties. Remember when, before their 12-year-and-counting major depression, when the Japanese were going to economically bury us all? Die Hard does – McClane is stuck in the Takagi Building. The villains are straight out of that mold of villainous Eastern Europeans that we believed existed before the Iron Curtain fell and Bulgaria became a leading player in the Coalition of the Willing.

And that’s the major villains – we aren’t even counting the estranged wife, who, after taking her maiden name, fills her life with career ambitions for a major company (a situation that is the bane to male civil servants everywhere); the investigative reporter, cynically out for a quick story and played by the same guy who was the villainous E.P.A. goon in Ghostbusters; and that obnoxious yuppie that is always calling everyone babe and doing coke (how 80s!). You also have to include bosses among the bad guys: everyone on the police force, from McClane to his sidekick (Reginald Veljohnson) to the Police Chief is usually getting yelled at by their pushy boss, complaining about how much of a dick their boss is, or getting condescended to from the FBI (ask a cop someday how he or she feels about the FBI – go ahead, I dare ya!).

Sure Neo has to fight off kung-fu fighting computer programs and giant spider robots, but has he ever had to deal with a pushy boss? A pushy wife? While fighting terrorists? No. That’s why he should win, outright, but we put the contest to you, our loyal viewers:

So that's 4-4, it's up to you, the viewer, to cast the deciding vote. Click on our comments button and cast your vote along with any further arguments you'd like to bring to the table - we'll tally them up at the end of the month. Now go!