My normal method of dealing with depression isn’t working. Listening to the collected works of George Carlin on repeat isn’t cheering me up, and frankly if I listened to any Bill Hicks right now I’d kill myself. I guess I’ll try some Pryor.
Archive for the 'Travel' Category
Apparently the old CAB Rule 240 still applies:
Rule 240 — which states that in the event of any flight delay or cancellation caused by anything other than weather, the airline would fly me on the next available flight — not their next available flight.
If i walked around with my right pant leg permanetly cuffed up to my knee, wore bike shoes, carried an Alien Tool instead of a Swiss Army knife, rode a converted fixed gear bike, told people that Chicago is flat so you only need one gear and scrawled “Campagnola is Art” all over the place I’d be cool.
Screw that noise. Bonneville is flat, Chicago has ridges and bridges. I want at least ten gears, a mirror, lights fore and aft, fenders and a rack. Track tires are for tracks, you morons. I want a lot of tread on the road, expecially when it rains. We also have this thing called traffic, which is full of self absorbed idiots on cell phones driving cars that outweigh a stupid fixie by 2 tons, so I want brakes (this is why most fixies travel little faster then I do–panic stops are a bitch when your legs are the brakes). And I want a helmet, if i had a hundred bucks I’d wear a armored motorcycle jacket–road rash isn’t pretty when all your wearing is designer bike shorts and shirts (actually if i had a hundred buck I’d either be replacing the wheels that were stolen off of my bike, or my bike).
And kids, if the rules hadn’t been changed back in the twenties, Lance Armstrong would be riding a recumbent with an aero flaring.
Despite their obsession, fixie posers aren’t nerds. They’re way too stupid. But Rat and Tall bikers are, and they’re totally cool.
Let’s say you’re a tourist visiting chicago. Let’s say your looking for a rollicking good time, so you drunkenly get into a cab and ask the the cabbie to take you where the whores are. Now depending which one of Chicago’s cabbies is behind the wheel, you’ll either be
- Taken for a ride.
- Lectured.
- Beaten.
- Ripped off.
- Thrown out of the cab.
- All of the above.
- Most of the above.
- Taken to where there are whores.
This is where technology can be your virtual friend, and at least partially cover your back. You can now figure out where the hookers are and even (with a little work) ascertain how dangerous the neighborhood they’re in is! Head over to Chicagocrime.org and check their page for types of prostitution arrests, then check the map that goes with what you want (like this one of Houses of Ill Fame). Pretty slick. So you’ll know where to have the cab take you, and not get taken for a ride.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for using Chicagocrime.org to find drugs, gambling, and great places to steal cars. You can also use it to find out where the crime happens in your neighborhood or beat (and they provide RSS feeds!). Ain’t Web 2.x mashups great?
Twittervision–it’s a mashup of Google maps and Twitter. you watch little cartoon voice balloons pop pen with the Twitter messages, anchored in theory to the location they were sent or registered from. The humor lies in the fact it doesn’t always work, so “Hi, I’m at home in Beijing!” popped up attached to Texas. Oddly enough it works on dialup. It’s billed as the “Ultimate maps mashup timewaster” and I agree. But it’s also hypnotic and thought provoking. I imagiine we’ll reading soon about someone going nuts trying to asses the gestalt of Twittervision.
Google Transit and Google Ridefinder–not available in all areas. Transit uses rapid transit schedules, GPS and Google maps to plot a printable mapped itinerary. Ridefinder shows you the real time position of available cabs in your area, again using GPS and Maps, although not every cab company is represented. Proof positive that even with all the rules it’s next to impossible to get a cab on the south side of Chicago (although i was able to track a suburban 303 cab wander across Pilsen and Lawndale, the cabbie most have been looking for drugs). Transit doesn’t work for Chicago because, THAT WOULD BE HELPFUL AND USEFUL AND THE CTA DOESN’T DO THAT (except for a few bus drivers I’ve met that haven’t been broken by the system and the CTA personal and private security people who work the Howard street station after 9pm Sundays–they are warm, friendly, helpful and know their shit). Have fun playing with it for the cities it does work in. Note to Unger–it works for Austin.
Have fun playing and don’t forget to imagine all the possibilities good and bad with all this new technology.
In February, astronauts aboard the ISS (the cut down low rent double wide orbiting trailer that makes humans the laughing stock of the galaxy) will toss a Russian space suit overboard. Instead of making the usual good riddance to bad trash joke, or bitch about them creating yet another traffic hazard in orbit, I gotta hand it to them. Anyone with a police scanner or a ham radio will be able to tune in to the satellite/spacesuit. NASA seams really jazzed about this.
Alana has posted some photos from her recent trip to Thailand. See Alana with Thai toilets, Thai motorcycles, Thai food, Thai people, and Thai booz. And remember, it’s spelled “Alana” but it’s pronounced “Elayna.”
