Where I’m @

20010429

From Massachusetts.
Got pulled over by a cop on the way here yesterday. Before I even got out of the city at that. It was actually pretty cool, partly perhaps because I can’t remember the last time I did anything that the cops cared about. Even at the anti-NYPD rallies in ’99 (lord, was it that long ago?) I was one of the tame ones.
So anyway, I’m moving nicely up Riverside Drive in the zippy little wine-red rental job and come around a bend and there’s this van coming out of a parallel parking spot. It's not like there’s an enormous amount of room in front of me, and there’s no turn signal on the van. I don't plan on stopping, seeing as how it’s New York City, and as I nudge around the van, who's stopped pulling out basically as I get to it, I lay on the horn. Not much, just a bit of a one-second “Hey, idiot! Real drivers coming through here!” Did I mention that at some point, some point even before it was too late to stop, I noticed that it was a police van? Turns out that swerving around a police van and honking on the way past are the wrong ways to deal with a police van making bad driving decisions. Turns out that you shouldn’t expect the cops to follow good driving practices according to the generally accepted traffic behavior in their municipality. So as I said long ago, the cops pull me over, give me the general hard-as-nails stare and talk, run my license and the rental agreement through the special cop database (I’m guessing that Cop DBA is not the plummest position at the NYPD), and tell me that “By speeding and honking at me you’re telling me . . . you’re telling me . . . I don't know what!”, throwing in a scold about not wearing my seatbelt (which I took off when I was stopped [along with turning off Eric B. & Rakim's Don't Sweat the Technique], thinking for some reason they were going to ask me to get out of the car — don’t ask me why I thought that) just for free. Fortunately for me, I guess, I remembered the ACLU what-to-do-if-you're-arrested card I got at some rally, and put on my best Stepin Fetchit face, saying “I didn’t mean any disrespect, sir; No, sir, I don’t drive very much in New York; Well, sir, I’m just trying to get to the Third Ave bridge, that’s why a white boy with no visible baggage is in a rental car at Riverside Drive around 135th St.” Golly, and he let me off with just a warning. Maybe New York really is safer now, so much so that the cops don’t have anything better to do than to harass people who irritate them instead of getting trained in how not to shoot an unarmed citizen until he would have been dead if he were a full-grown male bison.

20010426

Ick. It's been a full couple of weeks, but I'll have to tell you about it some other time. Please do come back, as it shouldn't be the same amount of time (has it really been three weeks?) before I slap up a few tasty bits.

20010404

Finally am just about done with the redesign of these pages. In fact, if you're reading this, you'll probably notice a difference. You'll also notice that you can't access the blogarchives yet. (Well, you probably just notice that you can't access them now, but the proper way to look at that is that you can't access them 'yet'.) Take a look around and lemme know what is wrong, like the fact that the other links in this set of blog entries cause JavaScript errors (this page fixed 04/29/01). Tidying up will continue indefinitely.