A Collection of Crazy mike Cab Adventures: Part One

This past weekend I had another close encounter with a cab driver, a situation that was exacerbated by my level of drunkenness. This brings the noteworthy stories that involve drunkenly dealing with a chicagoland cab driver to three. I would like to share these stories with you now.

DISCLAIMER: It is part of offical ginandtacos.com policy to not make this webpage into a livejournally diary of personal stories (current music - jade tree comp), but it is our policy to show the highs and, as will be apparent soon, lows of excessive gin and taco consumption. I hope you understand.

Jamaican Love Advice, February 2002.

Fellow ginandtacoer Erik Martin (who will be writing again shortly after his release from the Betty Ford clinic next week) and myself were drinking around the southwest burbs of Chicago. We had just seen an afternoon movie, whose name escapes me, and we wanted to spend the rest of the day bendering it up around the area.

The level of abuse was quite extensive. It can only be explained by a picture of a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts* and a bottle of the then-legal ephedra supplement Yellowjackets ("Feel the Sting!").

* To give an idea of how the night went, at the second-to-last bar, I said "when we get home we should eat all those Krispy Kreme donuts." To which Erik's face turned into a look of shock and he responded, "But Mike, we've already ate all those donuts." This should also give you an idea of how my next morning went, which was not well.

We started at the highly-recommended, willing-to-put-up-with-a-lot Berwyn locale The James Joyce. After getting too drunk to drive, we called a certain man named Andrew, who, god bless him, left his Mom's birthday party early to pick us up from across town. Except he then forfeited his role as designated driver, because shortly after he arrived we had him full of so much whiskey that he couldn't drive (or hold a shot glass, of which he broke one). We needed to get a taxi.

What we got was a large, Jamaican man with a thick accent, who really enjoyed talking with us. As I was going through a bit of a relationship struggle at that point, I asked him for his advice on the situation. After mumbling out the quick facts, he cut me off by asking:

Cab Driver: Does she fuck you good, man?
Me: Ummm, sure.
Cab Driver: If she fucks you good, you make her your wife. You keep many girlfriends on the side.

We really had no idea of how to react to that, except to demand he take a picture with us so we would remember the exchange in the morning. That picture looks like this:

It's funny, because from a thousand different cultural texts ranging from "Sex in the City" to every "romantic comedy" staple throughout the decades, there's this real assumption of "the wise old cab driver who gives Important Romantic Advice that saves the day." He probably thought he was acting out this role as he was talking to us.

But he wasn't. The advice - stay in a bad relationship and make it better by cheating a lot - is the exact worst advice you could ever give a human being. But he didn't think so. And in a way, that makes me very happy.

a little more geekery.

A9 Blockview maps.

Everyone, if you haven't already, check out a9's online map service. It's not as streamlined and user friendly as google maps, but it does offer a new feature for several cities.

Click on one of the cities listed, and then click on the map - you'll find a series of pictures in the bottom right corner. Keep playing with it, and you'll see that you can view images block to block across the city. It becomes addictive.

Google Talk

Google Talk appears to be offically open for business. As it's in beta-test, it requires a gmail account (yell in the comments if you need one) to register. It's compatible with AOL-IM (and many others), and features voip. I'm curious if the recent stock offering is part of a move to allow google talk to call into phone networks; we'll have to wait and see.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, lives up to the hype (reviews here). Picture a sandbox world, like Grand Theft Auto, except you get to smash just about everything available. Run up the side of buildings and do a piledriver off the top, punt cars and use lightposts as javelins - the level of destructive creativity is amazing. The demo I played allowed you to take a car, rip it in half, and make metal gloves out of it. I've heard you can flatten a city bus and use it as a skateboard. Brilliant!

"But Mike," you say, "I'm too old, and too mature to play a video game. Especially one based, on all things, The Hulk. For shame." Lame, but understandable. Here's a quick highbrow beard that you can place around your enjoyment of this game, if you're the type that needs it - Thomas Pynchon's essay on the Luddite movement:

[Luddites] were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry...[their] anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass. There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect....When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass -- the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero -- who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?

...[the novel Frankenstein] remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine...To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint.

Before you point out that I'm advocating to "deny the machine" by playing a digitial simulacra of denial on a machine, all I can say is you were the one with the problem, and that Frankenstein was also printed on a press, and I can't even hear you as I'm riding a tractor-trailing symbol of capital-technocratic hegemony as if it were a skateboard:

TAKE'EM OUT! YOU GOTTA KEEP'EM SEPARATED!

So how often does your priest, rabbi, clergyman, etc call for somoene to be assassinated? If you're a card-carrying member of the Christian Coalition, the answer to that question is "occasionally". That word, of course, lacks a pejorative sting. But the fact that the answer isn't "never" is ridiculous enough to preclude arguments about scale.

Furthermore, how often does your clergyman lecture you on politics? I'm an admittedly lapsed religious practicioner, but after 18 years of Catholic education I can't remember one instance of a Priest ever standing up and delivering a homily about the Supreme Court, the inheritance tax, or whacking a world leader. Why? Well I always thought the reason for this was obvious - we don't go to church to get lectured on current affairs, and religious groups are tax-exempt, non-profit, non-partisan organizations for whom engaging in political advocacy is illegal and inappropriate.

"Apparently I am an elected official of some kind."

Yes, Pat Robertson (who entertains me less than James Dobson simply because he's bat-shit insane as opposed to calculating and rational) is calling for the United States to make haste to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Quoth the rocket scientist:

"If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war."

"(He is) a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us badly."

"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

One of my favorite people in this world is very religious and often says that the media loves making Christian leaders look stupid. In reality, the only thing that makes them look stupid is accurately quoting them. To claim that the media is framing them is just another weak variant of the "I got a bad grade because the professor hates me/because I'm black/etc" excuse.

The media didn't make James Dobson tell his followers that SpongeBob SquarePants is subliminal gay propaganda. The media didn't make all these tools anoint themselves as physicians and constitutional scholars overnight during the Terri Schiavo ordeal. And the media didn't do anything to Pat Robertson today that Pat Robertson didn't do to himself.

If these religious nutjobs have suddenly decided that they're political figures and sources of public policy information, then they (and their followers, even the ones who don't buy most of what the Robertsons and Dobsons say) have to deal with the fucking consequences.

If Robertson (and Dobson, and Reed, and Falwell) appoined themselves de facto advisors to the Republican Party, then welcome to the jungle. Don't start bitching now. "Oh, the media's making fun of me." That's politics, and you chose to make yourself a part of it. If you don't like it, stick to religion. After all, that's what you tell the IRS your organizations do, right?

ARTICLE IV: THE RIGHT TO GET BLOWN THE FUCK UP

Am I the only one who has a hard time taking the daily horse-race coverage of the Iraqi Constitution seriously?

Unless it's bulletproof or made of some sort of Earth-space metal compound that repels terrorists like Kryptonite, I really can't see how this document changes or will change anything. Let's all shit ourselves with excitement - a government that couldn't run its Iraq for five minutes without a massive occupying force from the U.S. has a Constitution! This is even neater than those elections they had!

The Council debates the use of the phrase "cannon fodder" in the Iraqi Army charter

That Iraqi Assembly sure is cute. They're like a high school student council with more spirit. As you recall from your high school days, the primary function of the student council was to teach kids how democracy works - you debate, bargain, and vote with big smiles on your faces in order to legitimate decisions over which you have no control to begin with. And if you start getting any big ideas, the Principal comes down the hall and straightens things out.

I wonder if they included something about getting a new salad bar in the Iraqi National Cafeteria?

"Hey, where did this 'Article 27 - Oath of Undying Fealty to Exxon' come from?"

Keep this in mind as we watch Washington react to the rumored nationalization of Iraq's oil reserves and the use of sharia as the foundation for the legal system in the draft "Constitution". Something tells me that a few last-minute suggestions from Washington will end up sneaking into the final product.