Senator Maria Cantwell’s office (D-WA) just today responded to an email I sent her office in July about FISA.
The response was on-message, and Cantwell voted against the FISA bill, etc., and no, she’s not up for re-election, so… it’s not as if the timing was questionable. Just… reeeally slow.
Heh, they even apologized for taking so long to respond.
Weird things happened to me in GTAIV last night.
First, the suicidal taxi. I was finishing up a job at Brucies, and for some reason didn’t feel like stealing a car (that road can get sparse sometimes anyway and cops love it too). So, I called Roman for a taxi. I waited and waited, but the blue dot never got to me. I looked at the big map, and saw that the blue dot was at the end of the docks, about a block away. I walked to the end of the dock and saw the taxi waiting for me, parked behind a container next to the warehouse. I got in, and the drive went into his hating-on-me spiel, as the AI tried comically to back out from the spot to get onto the street. Unfortunately, it poorly navigated the end of the dock, at a point where there’s a short car-length waterway between two piers. The taxi backed up, straddling the edge, then when its rear tire caught on the next pier, the taxi tried to pull forward. By that time it was too late, the front tire caught, and the car slowly tilted off the dock. I bailed from the car, but both me and the car ended up in the drink. The driver was still inside, and still whinging at me, until, I presume, he drowned. I got myself back onto land and walked.
At the end of Russian Revolution, where you have to escape past the cops, I managed to basically just steal a cop car, just as a cop was getting out of it. I’m surprised it wasn’t an auto-arrest at that point. I guess I caught the mechanics at a point where my entering the car and his exiting the car didn’t interact. So, weird, but a good weird.
Getting away from the warehouse, the road curves, which makes it really hard to get out of the wanted circle. So, I drove the police car up the side of the grass hill. Well, I didn’t quite make it, and it slid back in such a way that it ended up tightly wedged between a tree and a container or something. So I had to bail (with Jacob in tow through all this of course) and we hopped on a passing bike. (I didn’t even know you could ride a bike with an NPC; it was a crap shoot, but it works. Nice touch, though Jacob got thrown once.)
After dropping off Jacob, I was going to finish up for the night and head home, so I drove the bike back. As I was coming up a hill, a mack truck came out of nowhere and SMACKed directly into me, throwing me literally like 60 feet. I landed on some grass with barely a thread of health left.
Well crap, I don’t want to get back on that bike if I can help it, and I need to grab some food asap. I went up to a passing taxi and jacked it. Taxis are nice and sturdy and fast, so I figured it was the best option. But then I hear gunshots. I’m like, who is shooting? Wtf? And I hear “I teach you to steal my cab” or something like that. I realize that the damn cab driver I just jacked is packing, and shooting at me! I try bail up a side street but he nails me. That’s the first gun-toting cabbie I’ve encountered in the game.
