Night Hack Animation

This cartoon clip is sort of ridiculous, but worth one watch (only once).

I'm not exactly fond of it how it portrays cabdrivers.

Actually, it's what I strive not to be: an impersonal grunt.

But that is precisely what many of us are. So let it be.

Funny he refused service to the teenage girls, the little boy, and the detective....

but he gladly took off with some guy and his horse.

I would have kicked the horse out of my cab for farting jelly beans too.

Thank you John, at Dublin Taxi, for sharing this.
Taxi Guy. - Free videos are just a click away

TAXI BLOGS OF THE WORLD

Taxi bloggers hail from cities all over the world. San Francisco. London. Dublin. Sydney. Melbourne. Canberra. Perth. Edmonton. Madison. Munich. Philadelphia. Boston. DC. Portland. Las Vegas. Bangkok. Porto Alegre. We're a loosely knit network of quasi-sociologists in perpetual motion. We have links to each others' pages on our blog rolls. We read up on each others' tribulations and trials. And when we leave a comment, it's among the most empathetic, because we know what it's like to be toiling on the road with human cargo. It might vary from one metropolis to another, but it's essentially the same. Delivering people from A to B. By way of Z if necessary.

I want to specifically thank and give mad props to the few dedicated cabdrivers of New York City who post entries regularly, especially the ones who make the extra effort of uploading photography they shoot throughout their shifts. Noah Forman, at NYC TAXI PHOTO, refers to them as "SHIFT SHOTS." And so this post is an ode to that style of taxi blogging. My blog, much like theirs, tends to shift, almost capriciously, between stories, pictures, video clips, poetry, and so on. And then there's Gene. This cabbie's fabulous material is split into two blogs. One for tales and one for photos. These can be found at CABS ARE FOR KISSING and PICTURES FROM A TAXI. And there's also the KING OF NEW YORK HACKS, with his unique approach to documenting our beloved city. And I must add the newest addition to our city's taxi blogging community: NYC TAXI BLOG.

Last, but certainly not least, is the one person who was a significant part of my original inspiration for writing down and sharing my taxicab encounters. Her name is Melissa Plaut and her blog, NEW YORK HACK, was transformed into a successful book after being discovered by a publisher. It's called HACK: How I Stopped Worrying About What To Do With My Life And Started Driving A Yellow Cab.

Although there are many more wonderful cabdriving bloggers out there worth checking out (all linked on my blog roll way down below), I must narrow down my favorites to this:
GIL'S PRIZE FOR THE SIX BEST TAXI BLOGS OUTSIDE OF NYC:

#1: DAY CABBIE. She's one of the few female San Francisco hacks and has a truly engaging style of writing.
#2: BOSTON: THE HACK. He's a refugee from the newspaper industry, drives a cab in Beantown, and writes about it with a vengeance.
#3: REAL CAB DRIVER. Stories from the streets of Madison, Wisconsin.
#4: THIS FARE CITY OF PORTLAND. She has a great sense of humor about the job.
#5: CAR 58, WHERE ARE YOU?. Two drivers. One taxi. In the Australian capital.
#6: DUBLIN TAXI. There are more cabs in that town than in NYC. The details are in the pudding.

As you can see, I often start and end my dispatches with a picture taken from the taxi.
Directly above is a view from the inbound upper level of the Queensboro Bridge when traffic entering the city was at a standstill. The picture at the beginning is from the inbound lower level of that same bridge. That wide avenue in the background is probably First. I wish all my fellow taxi bloggers freedom from writers' block, traffic jams, tickets, and sour passengers. Remember, if you drive in NYC, I co author another blog that serves as a more technical, occupational hazards sort of bulletin board. Let me know if you'd like to be added as an author.

FROM THE PERIPHERAL BRAIN

In my three years of taxi driving, I've taken only one somewhat famous individual in my cab. Actor Patrick Carroll was headed home from nightclubbing early one morning, in the months after his film had come out. He was genuinely affable and even offered me a handful of the Edamame snacks he was chewing on. To me he had been just another random street hail and I happened to be the nearest stray yellow bullet the moment he'd flung his hand in the air. However, I had been in a talkatively grandiloquent mood that shift and so I think this made him feel inclined to ask if I recognized who he was. I had no idea, nor had I heard of him, or much about the movie(s) he was in.

I've also taken the endearingly cordial parents of Tim Long, comedy writer and executive producer of The Simpsons, from La Guardia to their hotel in Midtown. They were in from Canada for a few days to see their favorite Broadway shows. I can totally see where his sense of humor comes from.

And I've had the honor of taking Judge Ralph Fine, of Wisconsin's Court of Appeals, to the airport. Jenine was my front seat co pilot that morning and together we embellished him with fresh inspiration not to lose conviction in what little, yet profound impacts each of us can have on humanity.

This morning I witnessed a cop in a three wheeled golf cart pull up alongside a yellow cab and scold the driver through the window, with his self-righteously incriminating finger pointed high in the air. I noticed the taxi had a brake light out and then I immediately noticed that the Interceptor had one of his out too. When the cop took off I pulled up and sure enough that was the hypocritical beef he had with my fellow yellow. You see I don't have a problem with the police unless I see their egos go out of control. Sadly, this is the case most of the time. Another common example is when they ask you a rhetorical question and then demand the answer, knowing one does not exist, and belittling you for not having it. I always see scenarios like this while sitting through traffic lights.

I took an Italian tourist couple to the Metropolitan last week and they asked me if my name (they had been staring at my hack license on the partition) was Italian. I could not believe it. I mean people have always assumed this when they heard my last name [Avineri], but I never expected Italians proper (who live in Italy) to ponder that. It's a Hebrew name and it means "my father is my candle (light)".

There were 4 Floridian women. 3 generations of them. It was 1 family trip to New York that they've dreamed about and promised to do together for so many years. Here they were, finally, on a Manhattan street corner, and oblivious to the fact that trying to catch a cab at 4:30 pm is not a simple task. Like most of my 14,000 colleagues, I was off duty, on First, and bound for Queens. These women looked so disoriented that I did not have the heart to not stop and see if I could fit in one last fare. They only wanted to go a few blocks over to the H&M by Rockefeller, but they had no clue as to how close or far it was. The whole ride I charmed them with my nonchalant, nothing new under the sun brand of New Yorkerness. A dismissing commentary for every little ant hill of activity and traffic quirk around us. The meter read $5.30 and I was told to keep the crisp 20 I was handed and to "tell your parents they did a good job". Speaking of hailing a cab when it's not so easy, here's one blogger's unique account.

RECENT FARES THAT WERE BRIEF BUT LEFT AN IMPRESSION:
1. Captain of a tugboat on the Los Angeles harbor and NYC tourist for the weekend.

2. Man with a twisted leg. He was making deliveries on a nimble scooter last year when a bus door opened right into his path. Now he has to take cabs for the smallest errands. Currently undergoing a string of surgeries.

3. Two Hindi ladies wrapped in saris kept requesting me to slow down more and more until we were literally going 5 mph. In between they'd just go on yapping away aristocratically. Then they requested the A/C, on this 80 degree day in May, from a driver who spent nearly a decade in the sweltering summers of southeastern TX. At the end they tipped 80 cents. And mind you I did everything they told me with politeness and care.

4. One very nice Algerian was aboard the cab for 15 minutes. We spoke about traveling across northern Africa and he said it's totally doable with an American passport, as long as I acquire visas. Problem is I doubt Israel would let me in if I had stamps from those countries. But I would absolutely love to walk the ancient streets of Tunis, Tripoli, and Alexandria.

fughedaboudit!

I am so allergic to television. David Letterman is one of the only people on TV that I can half stand to watch, especially when he has a taxicab related remark. And the other two clips below I shot inside my cab the other night, experimenting with the video feature on my new used digital camera for the first time.

ITINERANT IRREFUTABILITIES

Far away from ever being the victim of an existential crisis. That's you. The dawnielitic beings have arrived in a grease capsule to work on a vegetable farm in Virginia. If you could reclaim the freedom you once knew, you'd be there in a pulse throb. Farming is one of those dharmic human doings worth having your ignorance deplored about. But here you are in the city without a way out, for now. So into the taxicab we go for another hundred mile cacophony of scribbles on the street map of your life.

A pair of 'Ash the Berber' types, but Irish, tip selflessly for a smooth ride from the Bowery to West Fourteenth. A humorous old man travels crosstown to the diagnostic imaging place. One of his jokes: "...a cabdriver speeds up and runs a red light. speeds up again and runs another red. does it a third time. then approaching a green light, he outright sits on the brakes. why'd you stop here of all places? because you never know when there might be another cabdriver running the red light." Don't know about you, but that had me laughing hard. In enters another old man, but in a sharp suit and with no signs of decrepitness, he requests a ride up to Spanish Harlem. As you drop him off in front of the GoSo office, he gets awfully hubristic about his role in reducing recidivism among young men.

A wise young lady who reminds you of Daina Thomas just has to go a few blocks along E 72nd. Says she likes to interview cabbies and asks for your feelings over the credit card machines. She's collecting a rainbow of hackney responses for a letter she'll be writing the mayor. It's a tradition she has kept up ever since Mr. Dinkins himself actually wrote her back in 1990. You get political with your next passenger, a slick Egyptian buck, over the unethical behavior of most governments for the sake of monetary comfort and complacency.

One thing in particular is strongly agreed upon: "rather be homeless on the streets than to know someone died because of me." And the next fare is an Asian-California girl who just spent months touring the country to organize rallies for the Hillary campaign and is a bit bummed about it being over. And then a Jersey couple whose family is visiting from India try real hard to negotiate a flat rate to Niagara Falls and back, which is impossible to do in a dozen hours, and they wouldn't want to embark at 4:30 am anyhow. But there's no getting through to them.

An engineer who just returned from erecting a skyscraper in Dubai catches a ride from the Flower District to his one night crib while boasting the fact that Antarctica is the only place he hasn't been. It could have been a fascinating chat, but instead you drown in his vainglorious hypnotism. You yell something at someone through the window just to break up the stale monotony of his voice. You head back downtown vacant and available until an elder Italian Jew and his alert little granddaughter step in, bound for the salute-to-Israel parade. He tells his tale of driving a retired 1970s NYC Caprice yellow cab through 24,000 miles of Latin America and beyond.

Next in is a modest guy who looks like the helicopter pilot on Airwolf, the 1980s TV series that was among a handful of afternoon anesthetics your mom was clever enough not to let you watch too much of when you'd come home from school. He said he'd look up the resemblance on You Tube. Side note: If a Benz or BMW driver gets angry when you cut him off with your yellow cab, tell them "hey, I've got to earn my swanky beamer too. Ya know?" (ya right).

To get home and hear your sister recalling her great day at the summer internship makes each grueling shift worthwhile. You accidently hooked her up with this spot while being the random yellow cab that stopped when the fashion wizard's business partner hailed his hand up high a few weeks ago. It's going to look so good on her resume.

Synchronicities happen often enough to keep you ceaselessly humble, but only if you're outside the mental bubble enough to intercept them. I leave you with 2 outstanding photographs a Viennese friend took while riding in the cab.