green apron monkey

link whoring will continue . . .

Triple bonus points for usage of the word "mollycoddled".

English Mike's Tips for China Safety!

. . .my safety checklist is in my head, and comprises of these things:
1.) Remember open manhole near apartment, hazard when drunk.
2.) Remember drivers in China can't actually drive, take care when under the influence and crossing the street.
3.) Try not to piss off the boss, can be hazardous to your hearing.
The exposed wires, upside down plug sockets, loose plug sockets, faulty fuse board are really a secondary concern, this is China and you get used to those sort of things, and being molly coddled is not really required.

gou rou

Shelley says that The Running Dog is a goodness. And it is.

Lord, if the Chinese didn't put Saddam on a slipper

I had come upon the single fuzzy yellow slipper walking through the supermarket across the street from my apartment in uptown Shanghai. Quickly, I searched through the metal bin of slippers for another shoe to make the one I already had a pair. Finding nothing, I recruited two middle-aged lady store clerks to help me look, but never found a partner for the slipper. On top of that, the store refused to sell me the one shoe that was left, as there was no price tag or any sort of serial number on it. In the end, it seemed, the fuzzy yellow slipper, like the man whose likeness graced its lid, was a despot that did not play by the rules, that could not be bought or bargained for, but had to be stolen.

Posted by otis at 08:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

. . . but she'll never find another sweet man like me

Hunter S. Thompson lived life as though he wanted to leave a great obituary. We'll see if the world was worthy of him.

Tom Wolfe's Rememberence.

The next time I saw Hunter was in June of 1976 at the Aspen Design Conference in Aspen, Colo. By now Hunter had bought a large farm near Aspen where he seemed to raise mainly vicious dogs and deadly weapons, such as the .357 magnum. He publicized them constantly as a warning to those, Hell's Angels presumably, who had been sending him death threats. I invited him to dinner at a swell restaurant in Aspen and a performance at the Big Tent, where the conference was held. My soon-to-be wife, Sheila, and I gave the waitress our dinner orders. Hunter ordered two banana daiquiris and two banana splits. Once he had finished them off, he summoned the waitress, looped his forefinger in the air and said, "Do it again." Without a moment's hesitation he downed his third and fourth banana daiquiris and his third and fourth banana splits, and departed with a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon in his hand.

zap(patriotic) on responsibility

Evolutionary Psychology

The real issue i think is this notion that if there is a biological explanation for behavior, then it removes personal responsibility. I simply disagree with this. I find the whole gay gene thing difficult for this reason, as an argument to leave gays alone or provide for gay rights: if the biological evidence for that is overturned, that it is in fact not a gene, and it is a 'choice' (whatever that means....even it has a biological basis, it was not a choice?) then there is no justification for gay rights? I reject that.

alone but not lonely

I look around me in my life and I see that I am surrounded by people who do not consider themselves social. That is, I am part of a group of loners. It sounds contradictory but it is not. There is no experience more bonding than that of not being able to fit it. Anyone who has enjoyed a Tim Burton movie knows that.

That is probably why on the balance, I enjoyed "The Loner's Manifesto" despite it's numerous tics and annoyances. The author, Anneli Rufus, is part of my little community.

I say on the balance, because this book has several flaws. The most prominent is Rufus's relentless advocacy. Surrounded by anti-social friends I know well that they can be difficult people to care about. Rufus must know this too, and this book could have used a sympathetic chapter on dealing with a loner for the nonloner.

Rufus, though, is singlemindedly focused on raising the esteem and image of the loner. This is a worthy effort, but I'm afraid that this loner feels like the last thing the world wants or needs as another hypersensitive advocacy group. Rufus seems as though she would, as a good portion of the book is spent on getting offended at the use of the word loner as a pejorative or reflexively to describe serial killers (even though many serial killers are actually quite social).

At times, Rufus gives off the impression that she has done a google news search for the word, "loner" and simply quoted every negative connotation she could find.

Society is afraid of loners. Probably for the simple reason that if one is into perverted, shameful and evil things than one is likely to drive away friends. Rufus is out to defend the willful loner someone who just doesn't always like company. But I find myself not blaming society all that much? How are they to tell the difference.

That's why it's important for loners, especially for loners, to have social skills. It takes a lot to turn down a dinner invitation without angering someone. Loners without social skills are almost always a big, helpless pain in the ass for everyone who cares for them.

That's another reason I can't quite buy into Rufus's relentless advocacy. I know I can be a pain, and I know that other loner's can be a pain. I can't quite come to get upset with nonloners for their impatience.

A better book, one that I wish Rufus had written would have tried harder to bridge this gap. It would contain useful advice on getting along society as well as being helpful to understanding the asocial.

beijing subway is safe

no oil cans! no explosions! no skulls! no chemistry sets! oh yeah and no guns.

axis of crap

Quick, think of the worst thing possible.

Is this it?

If not, jesus, why?

"baby got back,"I didn't miss you until you were gone

It may sound like Lao Wei complain a lot about the missing comforts of home. It sounds that way because we do.

But do not mistake that, because I think most of us love it in China. Not only that but absence does work up a fine appreciation for some of the things back in the developed world.

To quote the girl, "I never knew a hamburger could make me happy for an entire night."

What I'm getting at is that I recently took a trip to Beijing. Actually it was more like a four day orgy of food, booze and destruction.

Yeah. These are a few of my favorite things:
thai food
cheap whiskey in about any form desired (except Maker's Mark, damnit!)
absinth
dancing to Anglophone hip hop and electroclash
no bouncy dancefloors
sourdough bread
cheeseburger (not a breakfast sausage patty in a bun)
cheesecake
cheese (noticing a theme?)
a fair attempt at pizza
decent cd shopping (Grandaddy, Sonic Youth and the Rapture)
guiness
qingdao black
dim sum
duck sandwich with big thick french fries cooked properly
good coffee every day
real diner breakfast

Me vs. Mandarin

China and I have a healthy relationship over movies and food. I learn most of my mandarin either buying DVDs or ordering food.

I am, in Mandarin, an enthusiastic blunderer. I like to try it but I generally make a hash of things. On the tones, I am hopeless. I can eventually make myself understood, but it's not pretty.

Last week, we went shopping first for knickknacks, then for DVDs. By way of knickknacks I bought an old poster of Mao with Lin Biao. Of course, for some reason I thought Lin Biao's name was Li Peng. Chinese names largely do this to me. Then again I could not find a Chinese person to correctly name poor old Lin Biao. They could tell me that I paid too much for it. They always do that.

There is no haggling in the DVD store. But some language is required. On this day, I had to figure out whether a group of Chinese, Japanese, French and German movies had English subtitles. This I can do. I asked the sales clerk, "this have not have English subtitles?" four times for four different disks.

Then came another problem: The Graduate. The Girl and I have run through about four different copies of The Graduate with zero of them working. I have no idea why China or our computer hates The Graduate, but it was starting to get frustrating. I had worked through my pile of foreign movies and got to this one. I have no idea how to say, "does this work?"

The clerk looked at The Graduate. "Have English," she said. I tend to bring down the level of Chinese in a room. But she could see I was not happy, even after being reassured that Dustin Hoffman would be speaking English, with subtitles if I so wanted.

I scrunched up my face into an apology for what I was about to do to her language. "This have not have movie?" She giggled, but comprehended and tested the disk out.

"Have."

Suddenly, I remembered that I had left my poster of Mao and Lin on the second floor of the shop. I started to walk upstairs. The clerk, alarmed that she had just spent ten minutes going through this and listening to my crappy Mandarin, said something to me that I didn't understand. It was probably, "don't wander off, retard."

I groped for a way to reassure her. "I don't have Li Peng." Sometimes your brain just doesn't grope hard enough.

She was kind of awed by that statement. She let me go upstairs without fuss. Probably just to find out why I thought I should have Li Peng.

I grabbed my poster. I showed it to everyone, "This, I have Li Peng."

Nobody told me that it wasn't Li Peng. I would have understood that. I had to wait to get home to a history book to find out that my poster was of Lin Biao and that Li Peng was the charming fellow who took over the premiership after Tianamien. You can't expect all of your brain to work all the time.