Ghost town

As far as taxis are concerned, San Diego is a ghost town tonight. It's 1:00 a.m. and I've been first in line at a hotel cab stand for an hour and a half. Cabs have been dropping like flies -- giving up and going home. That's one of the perks of driving a taxi; you can come and go as you please, as long as your lease is paid.

I've occupied myself by reading a few doctor blogs, which, for some weird reason, I find engrossing. I guess it's the lingo, and the fact that these people are doing something that has a huge, and almost always positive, impact on people's lives. The blogs are a window onto what are usually interesting lives.

Doc Around the Clock
Blogborygmi
Aggravated DocSurg

Then I read an article on police interrogation tactics at How Stuff Works. Note to self: lawyer up if ever in trouble with the law.

I also perused the BBC and learned N Korea talks close to collapse and Police deaths in Mexico jump 50%. The latter was interesting, considering I live 17 miles from Mexico and spend time there occasionally. I once went through a military checkpoint deep in Baja, manned by 10 machine-gun toting guys in cammo. They looked in my trunk and were curious about my huge, pointed tent stakes. I couldn't really convince them that ordinary tent stakes don't work well in the desert. In the end, they shrugged and motioned, with the machine guns, for me to move along.

The two lead stories at Google News (and I have no clue how stories are ranked) show the 100-year-old struggle between socialists and capitalists, with Bush vows fight as subpoenas authorized and Gore tells Congress of 'crisis'.

I just drove a Navy guy from a bar to a base. He was a nice guy, drunk but coherent. We passed a McDonald's on base and I commented that I've seen one on every military base I've been to. He claimed that "every U.S. military base in the world has a McDonald's." Apparently they have a deal with the military. He also told me that part of the Mickey D's / Navy deal is that if you're dishonorably discharged you can never get a job at McDonald's. Surely that's not an incentive to be a good sailor? Who could possibly care?

He also mentioned he's from the Northeast and this was his first winter in San Diego. It was his first winter without snow. He said it was very strange. The fare was $9 on the meter; he gave me a 20.