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I am sure most of us have been there at some point in time. You were young, possibly too young to be drinking legally, and found yourself at a house party. It was a good time. There were two kegs of whatever Miller of Busch product was the cheapest.
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Perhaps even a jello shot or two was distributed to the masses.

All in all, it was firmly situated in middleground between "good time" and "why the hell am I here".
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At some point, the balance was shifted. Officers of the law show up. They inform you that your music is too loud, and that they don't feel that people under the age of 21 should be consuming alcoholic beverages. So, you slowly stumble home thinking to yourself. I can't wait until next weekend- or potentially tomorrow depending on the remaining quantity of beer/vodka/cheap gin/carlo rossi sangria/whatever is left.

However, it would seem that Lincoln, Nebraska does not want you to finish your remaining keg of Natural Light. They have proposed a new initiative (which sounds vaguely like an Animal Houseesque "double secret probation") where houses where parties were "busted" would be tagged with a red sign for 120 days. During this time the house is subject to much sticter "anti-partying" police attention.

Although this seemed like a somewhat odd, potentially slightly fascist bit of local legislation, my first reaction was:

"Yeah, well it is Nebraska. Honestly, did these college students expect much less?"

My surprise came when I read a bit further and realized that the move was proposed by a 21 year old kid named Ed Caudill who is fed up with the noise and litter in his neighborhood. I mean really? What kind of jackass is this guy?
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I am willing to bet he is an engineering student who secretly resents the fact that he is never invited to these parties- I don't know, its just a guess.

I even understood the (presumably older) woman who was concerned about what red tags would do to her property value and proposed (hopefully in jest) that the students themselves be made to wear the tags.
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But a 21 year old? He should be drunk and at these parties, not at city council meetings complaining about noise and litter.

Honestly, I don't know what variety but I can say with some certainty:

-Ed Caudill, you are a loser.

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.

"Whilst for an adult the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child's point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling."

The closest thing to a tortured barbie picture I could find in my (albeit exceptionally short) internet search.

Recent marketing research has found that young girls tend to mutilate and torture their Barbie dolls. This, I am assuming, is not exactly what Mattel had in mind.

By what Mattel didn't have in mind, I of course mean:

"The meaning of 'Barbie' went beyond an expressed antipathy; actual physical violence and torture towards the doll was repeatedly reported, quite gleefully, across age, school and gender,"

really??

The researchers are quick to point out that this is not in fact anti-social behavior, but rather an innocent rite of passage into womanhood.
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I am not entirely certain that I would agree with this. However, since their sample group of 100 children seemed to indicate that this behavior is quite widespread I suppose we will just have to accept their conclusions.

Either that or just use it as another excuse to accuse the British of being fucked up.

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.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans, rapper Kanye West voiced the opinion that perhaps George Bush's failure to act in a timely manner was the result of latent racism in the White House. This great civil rights commentator raised the question all of us were thinking. And, if I can recall correctly, he placed the complicated issues at hand into a vernacular the world would understand.

It would seem that 50 Cent takes issue with Mr. West's claim. Mr. Cent proclaimed that in his expert opinion "I think people responded to it the best way they can." He added that: "What KANYE WEST was saying, I don't know where that came from." Who knows where these, the great new pundits of our day, will go next?

The sky really is the limit.

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.

Loyal ginandtacos.com readers who happen to spend entire days glued to a computer (either at work or merely for recreational purposes): I need your assistance.

World Series tickets go on sale via Ticketmaster at 12:00 noon (central time) on Tuesday, October 18. I am going to be doing everything in my meager power to get tickets, but I am only one man. If any of our readers would care to join in on the effort, I will gladly reimburse you for the tickets (along with a commission for your services). Tickets go on sale at 12:00 and will be sold out by about 12:02. Getting tickets online in such circumstances is always a crapshoot, and getting more people in on the action increases the odds exponentially.

Games 1, 2, 6, and 7 are in Chicago. I prefer games 2, 6, or 7 and lower deck tickets, but for the love of God anything you can get will be greeted with the most fervent thanks on my part. A maximum of 4 tickets per person are allowed – feel free to purchase either 2 or (preferably) 4.

Tickets are pricey ($125-$185 depending on location) but you'll have a check in your hands for more than the amount of the purchase price within 48 hours. You have ginandtacos.com's word. And that word is bond, bitches.