I got a ticket yesterday. More precisely, I got a fake ticket yesterday, because it was the only way for the cops to get the crazy angry person to shut up and go away.

I had a little work project that was kind of important. Namely, I needed to get over half a million dollars worth of servers packed up and loaded onto a truck (the same ones that were supposed to be shipped out on Friday). To do that, we needed to park the truck. Unfortunately, just as we were pulling into the commercial loading zone that we’d been patiently waiting for for twenty minutes, some clown in an SUV whips around the truck and starts backing into it.

I stepped out into the street and waved him off. He kept coming, until his bumper was about three inches from my body. Then he jumped out and furiously accused me of trying to steal his parking space, shouted at everyone within reach (including a completely unrelated moving company that was working across the street), and then ran off claiming he was going to find a cop to take care of me, leaving his car blocking both the parking spot and the street.

We found a cop first. When he returned with his dry-cleaning (he later claimed he really was making a commercial delivery, but that box never left the back of his SUV, and the cop saw him picking up the suit…), she was already writing up his ticket, and informing him that he was two minutes away from being towed.

He shouted at her. He shouted at us. He shouted at her sergeant, when he showed up. He harangued the bums on the sidewalk, telling them what horrible people and criminals we were. He tried to get the cop to give my truck driver a ticket for blocking the road. He tried to get the cop to give me a ticket for illegally attempting to reserve a parking space.

He got several tickets, which he’ll have to pay for. To shut him up, they wrote out a phony ticket for me, which will be dismissed when the cop deliberately fails to appear in court (her exact words: “this is bullshit, don’t pay it”). He tried to get my name so he could go after me personally, and the cop patiently explained that he had no right to that information.

And to think that this was actually better than my day Friday, which involved the world’s most carelessly ambitious contract Unix sysadmin trying to get me to let him work unsupervised as root on a production server that I’m responsible for (“Hi, Mark!”).

17 Egyptian exchange students, all headed to Bozeman, Montana. Six show up as scheduled, the rest are eventually located in: Richmond, Virginia; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Manville, New Jersey; Dundalk, Maryland; O’Hare International Airport; and Des Moines, Iowa.

Money quote:

"None of the students is considered a terrorism risk."

I’d feel a little more confident about this statement if they’d been found in, say, a Las Vegas casino hotel in a room filled with booze and strippers.

So where’s Dundalk, anyway? Why, it’s the home of the Dundalk Marine Terminal, whose major clients include the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia. Lots of bulk cargo coming in through there, from all over the world.

Manville just seems to be a wide spot in the road that’s half an hour away from the Newark Liberty International Airport and McGuire Air Force Base, the sort of neighborhood where one death every two-three years changes the murder rate from 0.0 to 9.7.

I’d like to think that there’s an innocent explanation for all this. I just can’t think of one.

Driving home from class tonight, someone hit my car. His lane was closed ahead due to construction, and I guess he decided that he’d rather merge in front of me than behind me. Sadly, he ended up trying to merge through me at about 75-80 MPH, and then decided to run for it. I caught up to him long enough to get his license plate number, and then he was gone (making a fast exit from 101 South to 85 South, then running a red light to turn onto Central Expressway South).

Worse news for him: a witness pulled over and stayed to make a statement to the police, and his memory of the incident was a good match for mine.

The damage? Several deep, long scratches along the driver’s side, from about the side mirror forward to the front of the wheel well, with the finish scraped off of the tire rim in several places. The witness said my car was pushed to the right about a foot and a half by the impact, and he was surprised that I wasn’t hurt. No apparent mechanical damage, and it drove home fine.

I’m fine, and I have excellent insurance, so even if the sorry bastard is uninsured, all will be well. It could have been a lot worse. In the cop’s experience, an impact like that at that speed could have easily caused my front tires to lose traction with the road, sending my car rolling sideways down the highway. He figured that the relative size and mass (my “small” SUV versus his smallish hatchback/whatever) are what saved me.

The (surprisingly small) damage. Aside from the scratches, the door rubs a bit when you open and close it:

[update 10/11/2006: My insurance company ran the license plate number and came up with a 2000 four-door Volkswagen in Sunnyvale, color unknown. Given the location of the accident, that suggests that I got the number right.]

The Internet has failed me. Or, at least, my search-engine skills have failed to turn up the nugget of information I’m currently interested in.

Wednesday afternoon, in preparation for my upcoming vacation in Japan, I applied for a passport. The man at the downtown post office who took my picture and processed my application was really cool, and when he found out where I was going, said “man, I haven’t been to Japan since 1964, as part of the Olympic volleyball team”.

I didn’t hear his name clearly at the time, and I was in a rush to get to a doctor’s appointment, so I didn’t hang around and talk more with this former Olympian.

But I’m curious. And my web search has failed to answer the question “who was on the US Men’s Olympic Volleyball Team in 1964?”. I might have to go to a library and look it up in a book made out of dead trees.

Or call the passport office and just ask him. That’d work, too.

Driving in this morning, I reflected on yesterday’s sighting of the usual group of “9/11 was a Republican plot!” nutcases on University Avenue, and felt inspired.

"Chickenhawk," you say,
to silence your opponents.
Get a job, hippie.

Here’s a nice demonstration of how the Republican Party started winning national elections, and why it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future:

In addition to winning hearts and minds, one must also acquire a clue.

12/7/2005

Oral final exam for Japanese 1. Get fitted for a tux.

12/9/2005

Fly to Las Vegas, to...

12/10/2005

Walk my sister down the aisle for her wedding.

12/11/2005

Turn 39, then fly home for...

12/12/2005

Written final for Japanese 1.

12/13/2005

Buy my first suit.

12/14/2005

Last class for Japanese 1, deliver small gifts to the teacher and her two assistants. While this could be interpreted as oseibo, in truth two of the gifts were an excuse for the third. I'm quite taken with the youngest one.

12/15/2005

Three-hour flight to Minneapolis, three-hour layover, two more hours to Dayton, Ohio, in order to be...

12/17/2005

Best man at my brother's wedding.

12/21/2005

Flying home to sleep it off.

I’m a bit fuzzy on just how many brothers and sisters I’ve acquired in the past week, a lively mix of Canadians and Ukrainians.

PS: my mother did not in fact die from the shock of seeing me dress formally twice in the same century.

I love the Internet. Whenever someone writes about how a certain group of people behave, inevitably commenters will prove his point by example. Either they’re not reading past the first paragraph, or they’re so self-absorbed that they simply can’t recognize themselves in his words.

The third possibility is that they’re just drive-by commenters who don’t even bother to read the words of someone who disagrees with them, and just regurgitate reflexively.