The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

About once a week, I work out of a cafe rather than at the home office. As you might already know, coffee is a tricky beast that sends you to the bathroom for a couple of reasons. If you’re at the cafe solo, you’re faced with the question “what can I leave at my table to hold it while I’m in the can?”

I could leave a coat or jacket on the chair, but I’m in Florida, where you often don’t have them handy because you don’t need them. That’s when accordion comes in handy: it marks your spot, and accordion thefts, as the joke goes*, are quite rare.

* The joke goes like this: I parked my car in a rough part of town and left my accordion on the back seat. When I got back, my window was smashed in, and I now had two accordions.

Yesterday in Toronto, taxi drivers staged a mass protest against Uber by forming a blockade at Bay and Queen Streets, one of the city’s busiest intersections, located between the old and new city halls, near the large downtown shopping mall, and just north of the financial district.

One protesting cabbie, while talking to reporters, spotted and UberX car and started to pound against the driver-side window and tried to open the driver’s door. The driver of the car attempted to leave the area, but the cabbie would have none of it — he gasped onto the side of the car, and ended up being dragged a short distance. He finally let go, and it appears that no one was hurt in the incident.

You can watch what happened in the video below:

That cabbie probably sees himself as the taxi analogue to the Tiananmen Square Tank Man, but in the publis’s eyes, he’s more like Grampa Simpson:

I’m probably not the first person to make this observation: this may be the first time I’ve seen someone literally dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

Now before you get all self-congratulatory about customers beating the decrepit and corrupt taxi industry, keep in mind that there’s a lot of terrible stuff about Uber as well:

This ad starts off in a Japanese university dorm room with every otaku’s fantasy…

…and that’s when the school administration breaks up their little party:

It turns out that they don’t approve of the young ladies’ beverage choice, Oasis:

The admins find a magazine featuring the Oasis mascot on its cover, a giant rubber duck with a serious dislike for water and dismiss it as a myth…

…and since this is a Japanese ad, things escalate quickly.

Very, very quickly:

Enjoy the video!

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Here in Accordion Bay, it’s what passes for a chilly December morning: 13°C / 55°F. That’s Rhonda the Honda, my trusty 1998 Honda CR-V (which still hasn’t hit the 100,000 mile / 160,000 km mark yet) in the foreground.

Pro wrestling just got more real and more fake at the same time. Watch the video to see what I mean:

Dose has a collection of gift ideas for those friends and family who can’t stop help correcting other people’s terrible grammar. My favorite one is the mug pictured above.

Thanks to Alexandra Samuel for the find!