Author: Mike

Wanted to bring the hateration but I can't – Brokeback Moutain is an excellent movie.
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I was concerned about seeing it as I tend to be allergic to movies that make an aesthetic out of flattering the tolerances and cultural superiority of it's perceived audience of art-house regulars and/or Oscar judges. But I didn't get any of that. It's a simple, tragic love story that is one of the more finely crafted movies America has put out in some time.

It reminds me a bit of Vanity Fair referring to the book Lolita as "The only convincing love story of our century.
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" Hundreds of movies are churned out each year cast in the genre of "romance" or "romantic" and yet the best love story I've seen from the US is about two gay ranchers who hook up on fishing trips and, over decades, become paunchy and start to bicker like an old married couple (or more like the two old guys in the Muppet Show balcony if you'd prefer). Sandra Bullock should be ashamed of herself.

I do find it amusing how, even in a movie about gay cowboys, director Ang Lee leaves his mark. At times it feels more like his Sense and Sensibility than the actual honky tonk cattle ranching atmosphere where it's set. Everything from the skylines to the clothing to the landscape is so picturesque that if the acting didn't hold up (which thankfully it does) the whole thing may have dissolved into an modeling shoot or gay camp.

And the modeling shoot aspect of it is funnier when you consider that in the original short story the characters are unabashedly white trash. Consider what is said during the 'climax' of their first time together:

They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack's choked "gun's goin off," then out, down, and asleep.

It would have made for a more interesting movie if the phrase "gun's goin off" was used during the romantic scenes, but sadly it was taken out. Go ahead and believe the hype and see this.
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On the "Intro" to his first album – "Return to the 36 Chambers" – Ol' Dirty Bastard tells an audience about a girl he met for 10 minutes who ends up giving him gonorrhea. The story goes : "Yeah, I love the girl but I had to cut the bitch off / Yeah the bitch died / I killed the bitch / She suffered a long painful death / bitchy ass go bitch had to go.

"

Isn't everything in the presentation? Usually when people commit crimes or do other things they want to cover up their justifications and stipulations go from narrowest to broadest. Another way of repeating Ol' Dirty's story is picturing him telling the cops "Didn't know her anymore / I knew she had died / I killed her / funny, I actually tortured her / I did so with premeditation." Isn't that what we all have come to expect?

Ol' Dirty – also mindful of your civil liberties
God bless him, not so with George Bush's White House. I encourage everyone to flip through the 42-page white paper the Department of Justice released justifying his secret NSA wiretaps. The argument is in the first three pages. What I find amazing is that it goes from the broadest possible argument to the most specific, instead of the other way around. Here's the reasoning, straight from the memo, in the order it is presented (all quotes, my numbering):

1) The NSA activities are supported by the President’s well-recognized inherent constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and sole organ for the Nation in foreign affairs to conduct warrantless surveillance of enemy forces for intelligence purposes to detect and disrupt armed attacks on the United States.
2) Congress by statute has confirmed and supplemented the President’s recognized authority under Article II of the Constitution to conduct such warrantless surveillance to prevent further catastrophic attacks on the homeland.
3) The NSA activities are consistent with the preexisting statutory framework generally applicable to the interception of communications in the United States—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”)…

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FISA also contemplates that Congress may authorize such surveillance by a statute other than FISA.
4) the constitutionality of FISA, as applied to that situation, would be called into very serious doubt. In fact, if this difficult constitutional question had to be addressed, FISA would be unconstitutional as applied to this narrow context.
5) Finally, the NSA activities fully comply with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

That's the order. To read it backwards we get: 5 – We didn't break the law.

4 – It's not even a real law. 3 – The law doesn't cover this.

2 – We were told we could break the law. 1 – It doesn't matter anyway, no law covers the President here. And that's the order you would expect, no? I'm loving that the initial assumption (as well as the loudest) is that the President can pick and choose laws to follow in these situations, and that the more diplomatic and reasonable assumption that the President was abiding by what he believed to be the *actual* law is thrown in at the end of the paper as an afterthought.

Do check it out. As Andrew Cohen wrote "The first time you read the 'White Paper,' you feel like it is describing a foreign country guided by an unfamiliar constitution." I felt like it was the legalese of a cowboy sheriff of an Old West town, someone who was not under the impression that the government is more than one man shooting bad guys in the town square with frontier justice.

If there's any political philosophy which is based on the ideas of narrow interpretation of the Constitution, and of using the branches of government to check each other, they may not want to back up this cowboy anymore.

As the large suburban mall was closing last Thursday at 11pm (!), and I grew increasingly desperate to get all my obligatory gifting done that night, I went to the "smelly crap store." Here's an analogy – "Best Buy Gift Cards:Men::$20 spent at the Body Shop:Women." It's the best way to reinforce gender notions (men like blinking lights and circuits, women like candles and lotions that smell like the color magenta) for the least amount of energy, care, thought or concern.

I expected to get in and out of the store taking a minimal (though not-inconsequential) amount of offense. However inside I saw a display table of something that disturbed me enough to share with you all – Memoirs of a Geisha Beauty Collection.

I have not seen the movie or read the book, and it is the season, so I'll step softly here. But does anyone really want to adorn themselves with the scents/makeup of a child sold into sexual slavery entertainment, whose virginity is auctioned off to pay off debts, whose role functions to give hope and dreams for comfort women and any other host of "a lot of work had to be done at the hierarchical level to convince a culture this was an art form" issues etc. etc. You can watch the poor ad copy writer struggle, describing the perfume as "captur[ing] the mysterious sensuality of geisha by highlighting the warmth of the wearer's skin with a scent that is understated, exotic and completely sensual."

For the record though, if any (and I'm assuming there are a few) of our readers have mail-order brides, I think I just found your present for you. And for those of you with Real Dolls you wanted to take into the Geisha realm she (the doll that is) would appreciate it as well. And before you comment, no problem, you're welcome, and have a Merry Christmas Happy Holidays all of you from ginandtacos.com.

Speaking of Lord of the Rings: I'm not the biggest McSweeney's fan, but sometimes they hit it out of the park. And I couldn't stop laughing when I read the Unused audio commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for Return of the King. There's a larger version of it in book format, that includes a mock Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter commentary session for Aliens (I'm dying to read that). Here are some excerpts from the webpage to get you to check out all four parts:

CHOMSKY: Now here Denethor is about to commit his act of protest against the madness going on outside the gates—heroically burning himself in protest of Gandalf's colonial war.

ZINN: There's a sacred quality to this. It's imbued with spirituality.

CHOMSKY: And beauty. And symbolism. Of course, Gandalf corrupts the holy sanctity of this suicide ceremony by riding in on Shadowfax.

…

ZINN: Sam's jealousy has taken a dark turn. He completely lacks sympathy for Gollum's plight, and uses Gollum's mental illness—I think one can call it that—as a justification for his own murderous thoughts.

CHOMSKY: You're right. Sam has clearly said that he would kill Gollum if he had the chance, whereas Gollum struggles with whether he should kill Sam or not. Is not Gollum the more ethical of the two?

…

ZINN: I would like to point out the discipline with which the Orcs march out of Minas Morgul. You know, I think they're a handsome people. I know Men are taught to demonize them, but I think their culture is lovely, cooperative, and utterly unstandardized.

CHOMSKY: This is an insurgency that feels at home in its own land.
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Orcs don't feel the need to put on false identifying garments that somehow unite them, as the men of Gondor and Rohan do. Orcs are united by the very fact that they're from this place.

ZINN: I agree. But I also think it's unwise to view Orcs uniformly. Do all Orcs want to massacre Men?

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Surely some Orcs want to do that, but it seems very far-fetched to argue that every single Orc is bent on killing every last Man. It's interesting to note the one group of Orcs that did employ the symbols of Man—the white hand of Saruman—were all wiped out … by Men.

…

CHOMSKY: Let's not forget this victory is not that of Men over Orcs, good over evil. It's the success of a vile pact between Aragorn and the dead over the vital, living forces of a Mordor insurgency.

ZINN: We've been accused of being Orc apologists. I don't think that's fair.

CHOMSKY: I admire their pluck and I'm impressed by their loyalty to one another and their homeland, but I don't want to glorify them either. For example—

ZINN: The Orcish hazing that goes on.

CHOMSKY: Yes, Orcs do seem to haze one another. Calling each other "slugs" and "maggots," and what have you.

ZINN: But they're pulled from the earth. Being called a slug or a maggot might not be such a bad thing from the Orcish perspective. In the end, we shouldn't be talking about humanizing Orcs. Perhaps we should be talking about Orcanizing humans.

No more video games. This isn't that hard for me compared to breaking my, say, taco addiction, or someone else trying to quit smoking. The quantity of video games has been going down in my life for the past several years, having peaked (of course) during sophomore year of college. But it feels urgent after having read two editorials this past week about completely different things (college admissions, the declining quality of newspapers) that both hit below the belt.

First up, Russ Smith's editorial about the declining quality of newspapers starts with this story (all italics this entry mine):

Last Sunday I was in a cab driving down to Fells Point—Baltimore's equivalent of today's gentrified East Village—with my 13-year-old son Nicky, explaining that there was no way an Xbox 360 would be under the family's Christmas tree later this month. Although Nicky has been a gamer since before he could read, in the last year he's lost interest, preferring to spend lots of time downloading music and making short movies.

My wife and I were tickled at this development—not that he admitted it, but the unread copies of PlayStation and Electronic Gaming Monthly on his desk told the story—since the appalling prospect of our elder son gabbing for hours with clerks at Entertainment Boutique or GameStop when he was 25 was reason enough to consider a move to Sicily or St. Lucia. Unfortunately, Nick belatedly got caught up in the hype for the new Microsoft product and was trying to build a case for one of his parents to wait in line for 25 hours at Best Buy when the next shipment comes in. I wasn't buying his rationale, but just for the hell of it decided to test the magnitude of his desire for this cash-eating—$400 for the machine and then games at 50 bucks a pop—monstrosity.

*sigh* While shopping for Christmas presents I had indeed stopped inside a GameStop in the mall and ended up chatting about how turn-based games peaked with Masters of Orion and the first X-Com circa 1994. And I'm now older than 25. Not only do I have the worry that I am letting down my own parents, but I'm also evidently letting down the parents at the New York Press. Great. That was rough, but the Washington Post, writing about a crisis with male college attendance (really? who knew?) kicks this out:

…We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry — men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses and John Robertses and George Bushes — and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.

But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their thirties, by which time the world has passed many of them by…

Now, however, the boys who don't fit the classrooms are glaringly clear. Many families are barely involved in their children's education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every academic area. Many of the old principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of 30 kids, about five boys will begin to fail in the first few years of pre-school and elementary school. By fifth grade, they will be diagnosed as learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, behaviorally disordered or "unmotivated." They will no longer do their homework (though they may say they are doing it), they will disrupt class or withdraw from it, they will find a few islands of competence (like video games or computers) and overemphasize those.

Yikes. This hits harder and longer than the previous jab. Not only because I clearly have an "island of competency" in video games, but I have to stop and consider that everything I enjoy (books, comics, movies, etc.) and the way I enjoy them (geeky, obsessive) functions as an anti-social "island of competency" that I enjoy due to incompetency with dealing with the "mainland." I still don't know if I've recovered from this thought.

But at least I'm leaving on a good year for gaming. For any of you who have done a hard drug once and never again out of fear at how good of a time you were having, you can understand why I cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft after two months. The game was simple too good (or in another context, the game was cut "too pure"), and I was afraid I was going quit my life to play this game, bottoming out by selling everything I own just to buy a magical sword. But 2005 was the year of WoW, and it deserves it. The game doesn't have any of the pitfalls of the other online universe games I've seen, which are usually just too repetitious to enjoy beyond a few weeks. I did play long enough to enjoy the hell out of the following animated .gif when I found it later:

This was also a good year for comic-book video games*. For those of you like me who enjoy such things, I can highly recommend Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Ultimate Spiderman, and X-Men Legends II. Each can be completed in ~10 hours (so perfect for rentals). The Bagley-inspired comic graphics of Spiderman, along with the Bendis-written wit, make for a fun game. The Hulk sends destruction all across the sandbox map, while X-Men Legends II gives you fun of composing an X-Men team of heroes and villains (Magneto, Wolverine, Rogue, and Jean Grey = awesome), and the usually exclusive joys of leveling up and button smashing.

* The fact that I can even make such a statement means I need to quit.

So that is that. It was a good year, but I have to start admitting that I'm too damn old for this. The next wave of technology will require a level of mental and time commitment that is astounding when I look at it, and it now feels like the appropriate time to head out the exit door. The only question left is what other "islands of competency" are secretly crippling me?

Earlier we told you about the ginandtacos.

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com's 2005 Dion Rayford Award winner – the winners were two kids who broke into an Arby's while drunk to cook food. This year we'd like to also congratulate a runner-up for the award, given "for going above and beyond the call of duty to enjoy alcohol or low-priced Mexican food.
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"

According to reports, a man was purchasing a burrito from a 7-11 at 2:30 in the morning. All fine and good. This man did not have enough money with him for the purchase, so he went to his car to get some cash. At this point another man in the store tried to purchase the first guy's burrito. When guy #1 returned from his car to see another man trying to poach his tasty late-night snack a fight broke out.

This happens more than you would imagine (though less than I'd like). You might say "But the 7-11 is full of burritos.

" We would call you a relativist and a moral coward, but this level of heroism isn't what we reward around here. What is important is that the first guy's 75 pound pit bull, who was waiting in the car, instinctively jumped out of the car and attacked the second man who was trying to steal the burrito.

Pets make great companions, and can often do neat tricks and whatnot. But to see an animal escape a car in order to defend his master's burrito purchases on instinct alone (initial reports say the the man's girlfriend did not let the dog loose) brings a tear to my eye. We could all use that kind of companion in our lives.

Pit Bull, ginandtacos.com honors you with a 2005 Dion Rayford Runner-up award. You may very well be put down for this, but it will be for an honorable and virtuous act. We should all get to have such noble ends in our lives. We'll keep track, and if the word comes down that you will be killed for defending your master's right to purchase and eat the burrito he heated up in a 7-11 microwave at 2:30am, we'll create an email writing campaign to save you. God bless.

For the historical record: Channel 12 Chicago Fox showed, right after the commerical break after the Sox swept the world series, the disappointed faces of H.

W. Bush and Barbara Bush in the Houston stadium.

The idea that the Chicago southside not only won the World Series, but also ruined the day of that aristocratic wealth-bearing family in the process, just makes the whole damn thing even better. "Barabara, how do you say that name….

Pier-zan-ski?" It couldn't have been better than if they were then thrown in a pool afterwards.
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Picture to follow if I can find it later.
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God Bless Chicago. God bless everyone reading this. God bless it all.

It's well known the city of Chicago is trying to keep us down, with their noise violation tickets and anti-public-urination ordinances, but did you realize Mayor Daley is trying to fuck with your chances on the day of The Rapture? For quite some time, Chicago has been trying to add runways to its giant airport O'Hare.
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Part of where they are supposed to be built is over St. Johannes Cemetery. The city has agreed to move all the remains and monuments located there to other locations and cover all of the costs.

Just as it looked like the bulldozers were ready to go, another court order showed up demanding a halt. Here's the tribune's coverage (free reg required):

In their filing, the attorneys said the city's plan to relocate more than 1,300 graves in St. Johannes Cemetery violates a federal law designed to protect religious freedom…
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The opponents argued that any removal "of the remains of a Christian once he or she is committed to the sanctified final resting spot [could prevent] the physical resurrection of his or her body on the Day of Resurrection."

At first I thought this was a lawyer's trick so cynical it was compellingly beautiful (like some sort of jaded rose), but no, it's the true believers. From the Becket Fund (protecting the free expression of all religious traditions):

aside from the historical significance, the desecration of the cemetery would be a savage affront to the congregation's beliefs. The congregation believes that to remove the remains of their fellow believers from the place they have been laid at St. Johannes to await the day of resurrection would be a desecration of holy ground.
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Disturbance of the believers laid to rest is not something that they believe should ever happen other than at the direction of God himself on his appointed day of resurrection.

The funny part is, with the Left Behind series having sold more than 60 million copies in the United States, the defense will be a hundred times better off by not arguing about compelling interests, and instead findind a theologian or priest to get on the stand and say "Oh yes, if those graves are moved they can still definitely be resurrected on the final day."

At the end of the day, I'm sympathetic to the cemetery's argument. I hate seeing the old bulldozed over for the new and more profitable. But something about this latest lawsuit just screams of a cynical exploitation of the power of belief, and our deference to religion. For shame.

I was quite disappointed when I learned that the much-circulated Suicide Bomber VW Ad appeared to have been a professionally made spoof, not meant for actual release. I very much missed the thought of "How could anyone in a professional role have thought this would be a good idea?
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", which although one can get it easily enough by checking out current movie trailers or network television, is fun when it comes around in advertising.
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Luckily, I have a new favorite:

Click here (pdf) to see a large detailed image, and here for a story. Before you think that muslim groups are just too sensitive here, or the ad is being misinterpreted, evidently the sign on the side of the building in question translates as "Muhammad Mosque." Whoops.

When historians are pouring over the record to make sense of the first decade of this new millenium, in all it's Hobbesian misery of skyscraper infernos, flooded cities, Republican machine-building and unilateral militarism, I hope they take a quick peek at this ad.
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You can almost hear the *whack* of the back-slapping. It's not just the military-industrial nightmare of "Team Osprey." What's really interesting is the way religious imagery ("Heaven…Hell…from above"), the consumer hard-sell of a sports car ("faster…farther…quieter"), the marketing department design and the corporate-talk ("capabilities extended. Options multiplied") all unite in the destruction of a small mosque and its neighborhood. This mix, people of the future, makes up the air we breathe these days. Wake me up next decade.

And if anyone comes across this ad in a magazine, holler in the comments.
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I want a copy.

Here at ginandtacos.com we receive several dozen emails each week centered around a certain topic, of which the following is an example:

Dear ginandtacos.com,

Being a fan of drinking, gin, and tacos I am drawn to your webpage. Your gin reviews, guide for being a good bar partron, and drinking games are all wonderful and show you are worthy of 'gin' in your domain name – but what about 'tacos'? I've been all over your page and their [sic] is not a lot of impressive material about mexican food. Are you really a fan?

Rosario Salois
Baco Raton Fl.

*sigh* This is something we worry about: how to best show our appreciation of all things tacos.
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We held the Ginaissance, which gave our webpage a lot of new taco related material. Yet the public questions our dedication. This is odd, as if you were ever around us you would know that our love for steak wrapped in a flour or corn shell is second-to-none. Last weekend I flew into Berkeley, California. Here are two random stories, highlighting the love our page has for all things tacos.

Burrito #1 – Midway Airport Chicago, September 23rd, 7:23pm (Flight Boarding Ends 7:25pm)

I was running late to the airport. It was the late where you enter the airport, pre-ticket and security, and see a "Now Boarding" for your flight. I was starving and had to use the bathroom. Worse, it was a four hour flight on Southwest Airlines, an airline that saves you money (god bless them, everyone) by not serving any food. For other reasons, I would not be able to eat once I landed in Ca., so I raced. I got my ticket and swept through security in record time, and had about 2 minutes left for boarding when I arrived at my gate.
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Luckily there was a burrito stand right across from the departing gate with no line and a bathroom right next to it. I quickly purchased a large carne asada burrito. But I still had to use the bathroom, and the clock was ticking. I feared I wasn't going to get another chance to go until we were in the air, and in the adrenaline rush of running through the airport my brain didn't realize that I could probably have taken food on the plane with me. A choice had to be made – and if you can't tell what I did you probably don't belong at this webpage.

Now there are not many places in the world where a man can eat a large carne asada burrito in one hand while standing and urinating into a urinal with the other hand, but Midway Airport, on Chicago's southside, is one of them. And I was that man. The people standing next to me didn't blink. I like to think they viewed me as a spiritual brother-in-arms. Some of them may have thought "now why didn't I think of that?" It was a good burrito (Rating 7/10), and I got on the plane just in time.

Two things: (1) I'd like to get a comments poll going as to where that action lands on a continuum between 'hardcore' and 'horrendous' and (2) though I very much liked all the people I met and places I visited in Berkeley, I never really felt that if I was to immediately start eating a very large steak-filled burrito while urinating at the same time I would be treated as a brother-in-arms by the people around me.

Burrito #2 – San Francisco, Mission Area, September 25th, 2:15am (Bar Time 2:00am)

Someone in our group threw out the idea of us all getting mexican food after the bar we were at kicked us out. Naturally I agreed, and we all walked to a nearby taco stand.

Now I realized I might have been in a little over my head, seeing as I was in a part of town that I took to be some sort of weird combination of hipster and hippie hangout (if anyone can explain the Mission part of SF, particularly around 24th, please do so in the comments). But then I thought: I've been to the always dependable La Bamba's in Champaign past bar time, where all the guys who didn't hook up pour out of the frat bars wanting to cause a scene. I've also eaten tacos in Wrigleyville, both after bar time (see Champaign) and accidently around the time of a Cubs game, where it's even worse. I thought I could handle this.

I was wrong. The line was crowded and folded into itself twice, so I was surrounded on all sides by people.
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And by people, I mean the most bizarre mix of hippie-hipster I had ever seen. White men with dreadlocks and converse shoes. Then there were the straight-up hippies, wearing things that looked like woven rugs for clothing and sporting even longer dreadlocks. There was a group of transexuals – or to be more accurate, short body-building men with dresses and breasts. Then there were even more hippies smelling even worse. The awful smell of patchouli, BO, and disreputableness was blocking out the sweet nourishing smell of cumin. I was ready to bail and say "No burrito is worth being around these many hippies!"

Then I thought of you, our readers. And that I couldn't look any of you in the eye if I had run. So I stayed. Rating: 5.5/10. The shell wasn't cooked right, and the grease was causing it all to dissolve. The meat was bad, unspiced and spongy, even with the credit I'm willing to give the place serving to drunk people in the middle of the night. They did give free chips, but they didn't have a three taco deal (and their menu was unclear on their two-taco meal).

So question what you will, but never question our dedication to tacos.
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Ever.