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The Battle of Rex and Felina

2011-03-20T17:46:00.003-05:00

We're engaged in a battle of wills with the cats. So far, the cats are winning.

I was just awakened by one of them literally rattling a can for food. He picked up an empty food tin, carried it in his mouth into the bedroom, then plopped it down on the hardwoods closest to my head. When that didn't immediately work, he swatted it to send it rattling anew. That did the trick. I got up and fed them. It was 5:11 a.m.

It's been like this for many months now, though the tin-can caper was a new one (you've watched too many movies, Rex). It's been fascinating to watch as their technique has evolved over time.

The original approach was simply for Rex, known to our friends and often by us simply as The Fat One, to caterwaul as if agonized by hunger until one of us got up. While this did obviously work, it had a high annoyance factor, as evidenced by a lot of thrown pillows, shouted curses and squirts from a water bottle kept by the bed specifically as a deterrent. (Totally ineffective, as it turned out; the cat just learned to stay out of range.)

Sometimes, Rex would mix it up by crinkling a plastic bag where I keep my laundry for delivery. A lot quieter than the whining, but just as annoying; it's got a fingernails-on-chalkboard effect. But it did do the job.

Lately, he's been using Felina, known as The Cute One, to do his dirty work. She'll come in and climb on top of one of us, usually my wife, and begin silently kneading until one of us gives in. (It was a great heartbreak when my wife recognized this kneading for the cynical ploy that it was, and not simple affection.) Rex is still the ringleader, though; you can tell because he's always waiting at the door, like a kid who's just sent his little sister in to poke Dad awake on Christmas morning under the theory that "You're just a baby. There's no way he'll get mad at you."

Why don't we just lock them out of the room? Well, we tried that, of course. But it's a small apartment, and the doors are thin. Rex's voice carries, and besides, they quickly discovered they can rattle the door in its frame, as annoying in its way as the laundry bag.

I even tried buying a battery-powered, time-delayed food dispenser at an absurd price for my wife's birthday. Which, who knows, might even have worked, if I'd been willing to decipher the Chinese instructions and risk poisoning the animals with spoiled food, should the supplied ice packs not do their job.

We asked our veterinarian what we should do. Dr. Maggie, who has long fretted about Rex's little "morbid obesity" problem, suggested tough love. "Just ignore them," she said. Whenever you surrender to their demands, you merely reinforce their negative behavior, blah blah blah.

But my wife and I are not really the tough-love type. In the end, it just seemed easier to let them have their way. And so, in the lightening pre-dawn hour, one of us faithfully gets up and spoons out a can of Mon Petit between the two of them. We put Rex's half in a dish on the floor, and Felina's on top of the fridge, where she has a fighting chance to finish it before Rex can waddle up and steal it.

We know he does this, by the way, because we can hear him denting the metal shell of the toaster oven on his way up there. As I say, Rex is a big cat.

I can imagine some sensitive souls out there thinking we are heartless for letting Rex's eating issues get out of control, but believe me, it's harder to keep an overindulgent cat on a diet than you'd think, at least if you're trying not to starve the blameless cat in the process. Countless visits to the vet, experimenting with wet and dry foods, putting up a fight for days and days before finally succumbing to exhaustion each morning. I'd say it was like being a parent, except our actual parent friends would laugh at us.

OK, so laugh. Get back to me when your babies learn how to rattle a can.

Ho ho ho

2008-12-20T06:08:00.002-06:00

Last night, before going to bed, I enjoyed one of my traditional Christmastime rituals: the watching of "It's a Wonderful Life." Through the beauty of technology, I was able to share the experience with a newbie who had never seen it, who was watching on DVR back in the States, while I cued up my trusty DVD, all the while chatting back and forth via instant message. I even had the cam up and running, although there wasn't much to see besides me speaking along with the lines and eating kettle chips and Haagen-Dazs from the tub.

I have seen the movie more times than any other, by a considerable margin. I know I'm hardly the only person to view this as a classic, and I've probably even waxed nostalgic about it on this blog in years past. (Nothing new under the sun, is there?) Yes, it's an uplifting tale, at least if you can make it to the end. It always meant something special to me, beyond its Christmas connotations, in its emphasis on George Bailey's frustrated desire to "shake off the dust of this crummy old town and see the world." George never does, of course, but I finally am.

But even if my life and George's diverged at some point, happily, I still embrace the film's other, more fundamental message, scribbled in the leaf of Clarence the angel's old copy of Tom Sawyer: "No man is a failure who has FRIENDS." Mindful of this truth, maybe even more so now that I'm so far away from so many of those friends, and apart from my family as well, I undertook a mission I'd always wanted but never managed to pull off before: I wrote Christmas cards. Dozens of them.

Let me just say right now, I apologize for those whose addresses I didn't have, or got wrong, or who just slipped through the cracks. I didn't mean to leave anyone out. I sat under the light of my imported Oregon noble fir, or under the giant pine in Statue Square downtown, and I wrote and wrote. The previous blog post is a copy of the letter I inserted in those cards.

So if you're reading this and you got your card, I'm glad. If you didn't get one, it may yet be coming. But if nothing arrives, just know that I'm writing this for you, too. And I don't want another Christmas to go by without sending out a little cheer and appreciation for those people I care about, and those who care about me.

So raise a glass, deck a hall, do whatever it is you do this time of year, and know you've got a friend in Hong Kong this Christmas.

Better than a card

2008-11-27T23:45:00.001-06:00

Happy holiday greetings from Hong Kong!

I’m sitting in my apartment on Thanksgiving “night,” watching the Macy’s parade live on the Internet, as it’s only a little after 10 a.m. in New York. I had to work at the newspaper tonight — toiling on holidays is sadly a familiar routine for anyone in this biz — but the company was nice enough to bring in a turkey dinner for us all. A nice gesture in these turbulent times.

It was a rocky night, too: big news out of Mumbai, and Bangkok, and as always, Iraq. But it did make me all the more thankful for the things I’ve been given in this life: safe places to grow up and to make my career; the freedom and resources to be comfortable and to pursue my dreams; and most of all, the love of good friends and family, like all of you.

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve talked with some of you, and some others I spoke to most recently under what were not the happiest of circumstances. My mother’s passing was hard on everyone who came to know her, but it was easier knowing that so many people were thinking of Beth, her guys, and me, and sending warmth, support and sympathy our way. I dearly thank everyone for those thoughts and prayers, and though I don’t say it nearly often enough, I am grateful for having all of you in my life.

Hong Kong has already begun getting ready for Christmas, with lights festooning all the high-rises downtown, Christmas muzak pumped into the subways, and trees and baubles decorating many of the shops and offices. And while it’s still getting up into the 70s in the daytime, all the locals are bundling up in their woolen caps and scarves against the “chill” of evenings that just might (but don’t) dip into the 50s. If you go by just the visuals, and ignore that the cabs are all red instead of yellow, it could be Christmas in New York.

I’ve gotten to see a lot of the world in my 20 months in Asia, from Nepal and Thailand, to Cambodia and Taiwan, then Japan and Macau, even England, France and the States. Travel is the thing I love most, and I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to do it. (And yes, I have blown through all my vacation time already, in case you were wondering.) Wherever I’ve been, I’ve been treated with courtesy and kindness, and it’s reassuring to know that despite what you sometimes read in the papers, Americans can find friendly faces around this world.

I hope that all of you are finding friendly faces wherever you are, and that you are able to make the time for the things, and people, that you love most. The holidays are a busy time, and it’s easy to get distracted by things that don’t really matter all that much. But as we gather close to one another — in spirit, if not in space — I hope we can forget the tribulations, and celebrate what does really matter: that there are people out there who care about us, some close at hand, and some far away.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Thoughts on the recent election

2008-11-14T21:33:00.000-06:00

Written in response to an e-mail from my cousin Mindi. (Hi, Mindi!)

The world at large is pretty much ecstatic about Obama's election. To a fairly irrational degree, in fact. This election was watched with unusual interest around the globe, and it seems everybody has a vision of America under Obama as being this whole new animal, a benevolent, peaceful, humble force for goodness and love and equality and fairness. Everybody hated Bush so much, and was so disappointed in America for re-electing him, that Obama's election is being seen as America turning a 180.

Now, it should and will be a change, no doubt about it. But expectations for Obama are so high that he really cannot help but disappoint, especially having been given such a lousy hand. The world knows that he is A) not Bush and B) black, and while these are both remarkable (and positive) qualities, he is not the Messiah, and he will still operate under serious democratic (little d) and financial constraints. He may be the most powerful person in the world, but he is not all-powerful, which is something much of the world (particularly places that are not functioning democracies) fails to appreciate.

I will admit, it is nice not having to make apologies for being an American, now that I'm living overseas. Obama will surely be vastly better than Bush, if only because Bush was so spectacularly, jaw-droppingly bad. Right now it's like everyone wants to give every American they meet a high five.

The night of his election, which was a Wednesday here because of the date line, a bunch of us from the office went to an African bar that was having an Obama victory party (happy hour all night!). Obama T-shirts and chanted Obamas from the stage, dancing, everybody happy. I cannot imagine what bleakness would have descended upon us all had he somehow managed to lose. (The influence of rich bankers and service members aside, expat America is heavily pro-Obama, a reflection of the expat's worldview being a view of, well, the world, and not just whatever suburb or small town he or she grew up in.) I am sure there are McCain supporters out here among us, but they are not quick to identify themselves. It is pretty obvious what the popular sentiment is. In media circles, the tilt is even more pronounced.

I don't want to come off cynically here, because I was deeply proud of America as the results came in, and I was watching the returns and the speeches online just everyone back home. And yeah, I teared up more than once (for McCain and Obama both, actually), because I'm a softie for lofty rhetoric that makes me feel like we're the good guys, the shining city on the hill. I really think we are, actually, which is why Bush's presidency has been so heartbreaking. We went from Le Monde proclaiming "We are all Americans" on Sept. 12, 2001, to The Daily Mirror asking "How can 59,054,087 [Americans] be so DUMB?" on Nov. 4, 2004.

But world opinion is only a small part of it. I recognize that it matters, of course, but if I truly think America is doing the right thing, the rest of the world can piss off. If no one else had been willing to go into Afghanistan, I'd have supported us going alone. It was the right thing to do, and it was our right to do it. (Unlike, say, Iraq.) We have responsibilities that China and Russia and France do not (and cannot) shoulder, and that's fine with me. I like that we elected a black man (or any minority) our highest leader, something you won't see in France in our lifetime. We walked the walk. We lived up to our ideals, and in dramatic fashion. Granted, the country had to be falling to pieces before we did it, but we did it nonetheless.

More important to me is the message we sent to ourselves. Of course, racism is not OVER, by any stretch, but this proves it's a whole lot less of an issue than some people (talking to you, Jesse J.) would have us think. Generations of blacks have been fed a steady diet of hopelessness and victimhood by their supposed leadership, and privately amongst themselves, and this is like a bucket of cold water to the face. Just because the odds are not even-steven, and may never be, does not mean it's impossible to win the game. Most of us, black, white, brown, whatever, WANT things to be fair. The poison of racism is expecting the worst of the other guy. It's an absence of good faith. It's assuming that whatever anybody says, in the end they really just want to fuck you over. And that's what Obama's election was: a triumph of good faith.

So I was proud. I was as skeptical as anyone about Obama's actual credentials, and I thought a lot of the enthusiasm for him was emotional and fuzzy and based on symbolism more than policy positions or qualifications. I still do, and that's one reason I didn't back him in the primaries (I was for Hillary, most of the way). He's clearly a skillful campaigner, a gifted orator, and a temperate and thoughtful mind. That does not mean he can govern, though all of it certainly helps. McCain is an honorable man, and he would have been a marked improvement over the status quo, but when he picked a dangerously underqualified running mate whom he barely knew, he lost the one credential that might have made me actually vote for him: his earned reputation as an independent, wise old man. Trusting that Obama was up to the job in these turbulent times might have been a gamble, but it seemed no more of a gamble than hoping that a 72-year-old man who'd had cancer four times would make it to the finish line without a small-market TV personality taking over as commander-in-chief.

It was clear we needed a change, as Bush and the Republicans had made an unholy mess of the last eight years (indeed, they are fully deserving of the years in the wilderness I suspect are in store for them). And, apart from the thinness of his resume, Obama did not have any obvious strikes against him; he just had barely been to the plate. So, I'll sign up for the symbolism and the soaring speechifying and cheer along with everybody else. I dearly hope that he proves to be a good president and is not drummed out in four years by a depressed economy and a legion of disappointed dreamers; that would be a sad postscript to a truly stirring achievement. But only time will tell.

Baiting Beijing

2008-05-01T11:24:00.002-05:00

I hate to say it, but I'm starting to side with China on this one.

Look, the place has got problems. It's not democratic, it's not free, it's not respectful of human rights, it cozies up to bad countries, it pollutes like a mofo, yes, yes and yes. It is not Eden, but we knew all this before we gave them the damn Olympics, and heckling the torch wherever it goes is just bad taste. I understand that in free countries, protesting is a right, and one that cannot be abridged just to protect a symbol for something that, hullaballoo aside, is just not really that important. But guys, give it up. The Olympics are going to happen, and no amount of petty whining and assaulting girls in wheelchairs (God, what dumbass didn't think how THAT would play in the media?) is going to change that fact, or China. China will do what China wants, what China thinks it has to do, whether we like it or not.

China faces all kinds of challenges that other countries don't have to confront, or confronted a century ago, and in a lot of ways, they're doing a pretty good job. Put 1.2 billion people in the area of the United States, make half of them dirt poor, and see what kinds of sacrifices YOU have to make to keep the lid on. Yes, we can keep the pressure on diplomatically and person-to-person, in any of a thousand ways. But just let them have their moment. Giving them the Games, and then pissing all over it, is only making the Chinese embarrassed and angry. After all, they don't KNOW what we know about their country's deficiencies, because their media don't tell them. All they see is China-bashing, and they are reacting in an entirely predictable and even understandable way.

The Olympics have always been political, I know that, but the IDEA of the Olympics is to set differences aside, just for a few weeks, in celebration of something other than the usual bullshit that divides us. Tibet should have the right to self-determination, Sudan shouldn't be propped up, Taiwan shouldn't live in fear, and ordinary Chinese shouldn't have to go to jail for simply speaking the truth or following their beliefs. But we have about 101 weeks out of every 104 to talk about all that. You've made your point. Now just let it go.

Staging a comeback

2008-03-31T02:39:00.003-05:00

So, I went to go and see Harry Connick Jr. the other night in Hong Kong (I'm back in the States at the moment, but I've been kicking this blog idea around for a while now). I'm a fairly casual fan, I guess you'd say -- I recognize his talents and liked his sound generally but don't own any albums, in part because I always associated him with that sort of lone-crooner-at-a-piano vibe, and I'm not often in the mood for that kind of music. Still, the live music scene in HK is pretty weak, and I got an invitation to go, so I figured, what the hell.

He really surprised me, though. He'd brought a full-on jazz band with him, and he delivered a rollicking, boogie-woogie New Orleans sort of show. Opened with "(We'll Have Big Fun) On the Bayou)" and just went up from there. Anytime you open with Hank, you have my attention.

All the Big Easy standards were included, and a lot of his musicians took a turn in the spotlight, though Harry of course remained the center of attention, no more so than when he absolutely, positively wailed in an extended solo during St. James' Infirmary. His preteen daughters, who were seated across the aisle from my party during much of the show, also got in the act, singing "London Bridge Is Falling Down" in Cantonese to their Hong Kong-born amah. The Chinese up in the cheap seats really roared at that.

Speaking of cheap seats, ours weren't. We had a good view of Harry's hands on the keyboard, at least whenever the usher was not needlessly standing up to let a wayward audience member advance past his velvet rope. I was gratified when, near the end of the show, Harry invited people to leave their assigned seats and join him up front at the stage, a development that brought sheer terror to the ushers' faces as they struggled to decide what to do. One dear companion, Elana, who was responsible for my attendance and did all the legwork, gleefully followed Harry's orders and rushed past the poor usher, who eventually just had to shrug and slink down into his folding chair. Of course, in the end, Harry encored with "It Had to Be You," which may be his signature song but is hardly the most energetic number to finally be imploring the crowd to rush the stage for.

This was basically the first and only time the audience stood, which I understand to be fairly typical of HK. This would have been fine with lone-crooner music, but with Harry and his Big Band it seemed something of a waste. I mean, I did enjoy the show, but between the crowd's demure behavior and the cavernous space of the convention center hall (which Harry joked would be better-suited to motocross), I was reminded of just how much all has to go right to make a concert really perfect and memorable. To make, for example... a Top Ten List of Live Shows, such as I'm about to give you. (No particular order.)

Billy Joel, Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas, December 1999
Basically my only real superstar arena show, but with a guy who really can whip an adoring crowd into blissful harmony. It was right before Christmas so he threw some holiday music into the mix, but he delivered all the favorites that we could hope for, which was reassuring as he was even then vowing to devote himself to classical and leave his beloved pop behind.

Luscious Jackson, La Luna, Portland, Oregon, November 1994
A band that will always be near and dear to my heart, and a demonstration of the truism that chicks who play bass are hot. I succumb to their embrace.

George Clinton and Funkadelic, Granada Theater, Dallas, Texas, May 2006
Serious funk was had, and everything was present to make for a memorable night. Four hours standing on concrete were a small price to pay.

Moody Blues, Rose Garden, Portland, Oregon, May 1996
My buddy Alan's 21st birthday, and a thrown-together adventure where everything somehow managed to turn out just right. And the Moodies were their typical album-perfect selves, like it or not.

Rock Fest, Texas Motor Speedway, Fort Worth, Texas, June 1997
Counting Crows, No Doubt, Third Eye Blind, Paula Cole, Jewel and a bunch of other acts that were huge at the time. No indie cred to speak of, but it did attract 400,000 people, four of whom were me, my stripper friend, her ex-con boyfriend and the stripper setup for me who we all ended up ditching.

Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic, Luckenbach, Texas, July 1999
The last picnic to take place in Luckenbach, and the best time I ever had hoarding beer, dodging horseshoes and befriending Bubbas. Also, "Whiskey River."

Old 97's, Gypsy Ballroom, Dallas, Texas, circa 1999
This was the hardest pick, because I've loved the Old 97's every time and place I've seen them. Could just as easily have been at Trees or the Granada, but Gypsy was first. I think this may have been my first show at Gypsy, too. It was also my first show with a brand-new girlfriend on my arm, which certainly didn't hurt.

Nashville Pussy, Trees, Dallas, Texas, circa 2000
Spandex, leopard print, unprintable lyrics and fire-breathing. So much of the latter that, ever since the Great White disaster, I look back on this event as the night I could have died.

Junior Brown, Continental Club, Austin, Texas, July 2000
Perfect example of the accidental concert. We had meant to go to the Broken Spoke but the winds were whipping like crazy and the rain was pouring sheets so we decided to go to the club across the street from our lodging, the So Close Yet So Far Out Austin Motel. And Junior Brown was playing. Kismet.

Essex Green, The Cavern, Dallas, Texas, May 2006
A band I'd never heard of, at a place I'd never seen a band, with a friend who drives a truck who was just passing through for a night. And I loved them instantly. A good show can do that.

Honorable mentions go out to They Might Be Giants at Gypsy, Smashmouth/Luscious Jackson at Bronco Bowl, Edie Brickell/Paul Simon at Fair Park Music Hall, Huey Lewis/Chicago at Smirnoff Music Centre, Heartless Bastards at Sons of Hermann Hall and the Granada, Willie's picnics in Austin and Fort Worth, Kenny Loggins at the Lane County Fair (my first show, in 1986!), and innumerable acts at Austin City Limits and South by Southwest.

So, any top shows for you folks out there?

And while I'm at it...

2008-03-21T17:05:00.003-05:00

...a few remarks about the OTHER controversy, the one seeking to tar Obama with the crackpottery of his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

I finally got around to watching Obama's speech about race on YouTube, and I thought he struck the right tone. He condemned Wright's remarks, again, and defended his association with the man in a way that I thought rang true. (Getting millions of people to hear him talk about how important his Christian faith is to him is, if I'm to be overly cynical, a clever bonus, but that's beside the point.)

I don't particularly think that he should have felt compelled to go to such great lengths to defuse the situation; it's just not fair to hold a person accountable for every single thing that one of his close friends has ever said, no matter how outrageous. I've got relatives who've said some stuff to make me cringe, too, and I'm not about to disown them. I think we can all relate to that. But he did take the opportunity to say something meaningful, and he did so in an eloquent and constructive manner. Above all he pointed out that both sides of the race divide have concerns and grievances, and even if they're not evenly balanced, there's no point in denying that they exist and that they matter.

And his prescription is right, too. Fix the schools, fix health care, fix the economy, fix the tax structure. That is where we start. The fairer the system is, the more the gaps will narrow on their own. I think there are ways to achieve this without continuing to argue in circles on race. It's not that racism is dead, or that all the barriers to achievement are gone -- we all know that's not the case. It's just that you can only get so far by looking strictly through a racial prism. We all have to make an effort here to see both sides -- but we also all have to make an effort to stop seeing sides at all.

The only thing that bugged me about the speech was his attempt to insinuate that Ferraro was calling his candidacy some form of "affirmative action." Affirmative action, as we all learned in school, is the government telling the people what to do: whom to hire, whom to enroll, whom to do business with. Maybe, if I'm to take the more favorable view, making us behave better and more justly than we would have if left to our own devices. But nobody's "making" anybody vote for Obama. He's the front-runner because America wants him to be. We're there. We're ready.

That's my whole point.

Back from the dead...

2008-03-15T01:26:00.004-05:00

OK, gang, I've done my best so far to keep my mouth shut about the unfolding presidential campaign back home in the States. It's become clear to me over the past couple months that I am somewhat out of step with many of my respected friends and colleagues on the race, and rather than pointlessly try to argue my position against an unassailable tide, I have just remained silent. But I feel compelled to speak now, because of the uproar that has resulted from the comments made by Geraldine Ferraro, the former congresswoman and vice presidential candidate.

What's gotten the media all in a tizzy and forced the Clintonites to boot Ferraro out of their giant tent is the suggestion that Barack Obama would not be in the position he's in now -- that is, front-runner for the president of the United States -- were he not a black man.

Now, step back a minute and think about all that's gone on in this campaign so far. In the early going, every single report on Obama centered on race, and it all boiled down to this question: "Is America ready to elect a black president?" It was taken as an absolute given that being black could only hurt his chances, regardless of his policy positions, campaign skills or fund-raising acumen. In other words, it was perfectly OK to assume that America was racist and that it would be nothing but an uphill slog for Obama to win over the rednecks and neo-Nazis and cro magnon tribalists who would instinctively oppose his candidacy for no other reason than because of the color of his skin.

I have long argued that this does not reflect the reality of 2008 America. The baby boomers who seem congenitally incapable of viewing the world through anything but a 1960s lens naturally assumed that there were Strom Thurmonds lurking around every corner who might have learned to behave in polite company but would revert back to every racist impulse when safely ensconced in the privacy of the voting booth. But a whole generation has come into prime voting age with no memory of the civil rights movement, and that generation, hate to break it to you, has given up the "whatever" attitude and flannel shirts. The members of Generation X (a designation I embrace if only because it so succinctly demonstrates how little the boomers understand us) simply do not carry that same baggage. And the generation that comes behind them, the ones that are contributing so mightily to those throngs at Obama campaign events, is even MORE removed from that era. For all of these "young" people under age 45 -- a defintion that includes fully half of the population -- Selma and Little Rock may as well be Lexington and Concord. Anybody in their 20s and early 30s today cannot remember a time when there WASN'T a black candidate for president.

I've long been of the opinion that, owing to this demographic shift and a variety of other factors, America is not only ready to elect a black president but positively dying to. All we have lacked up to this point is an electable one. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were not electable because they have backed far too many unpopular positions over the years and remained absolutely wedded to some key issues, particularly affirmative action, that simply aren't winners with a majority of voters. (Alan Keyes, the conservatives' black candidate, is even less credible, as he could not even be counted on to win the support of his own race.)

I thought, and still do think, that Colin Powell could have won the presidency in 2000 had he been willing to try. He came to prominence and national leadership through the Army, which meant he did not have to weigh himself down, as so many black candidates have had to do, by kowtowing to kingmakers like Jackson and Sharpton, who insist upon fealty to affirmative action and other "black issues" as a condition of their support. Although he personally benefited from affirmative action, and vocally supported it, Powell never had to pledge his eternal soul to such untenable policy positions as slavery reparations or suffrage for felons. He was widely admired and respected by millions of Americans, black, white and whatever, and had he put his heart into it, he could very well have won the White House. As it was he was easily the most popular member of Bush's Cabinet, and his clout was the primary reason the American public was persuaded to go to war (a source of undying disappointment for me, but that's a whole other matter).

Now, no one would argue that, had he run and won, Powell would have done so solely because of his race. And if I'm to take issue with Ferraro's comments at all, I would have to admit that she went too far to suggest that Obama's other qualifications were irrelevant. But his being black IS relevant, and because, like Powell, he did not come to power by running the traditional kingmaking gantlet, it helps him a great deal more than it hurts. Enough, in fact, to be the reason he is narrowly ahead of Clinton and thus, the front-runner overall.

Consider the math. Obama is winning overwhelmingly with black voters, polling somewhere north of 90 percent in recent primaries. OK, so that's 9 or 10 percent of the population right there. But far more important, there's a massive swath of voters -- young, Gen X, and boomer alike -- who are desperate to prove that they are not racist, that America is not racist, that we are finally past all that. The boomers want to vindicate the crusades of the '60s, and everybody younger just wants the boomers to shut the hell up. The cro magnons who would never vote for a black man, and I'm sure some exist, probably were never going to vote for ANY Democrat.

Yes, yes, there are lots of other issues involved -- health care, the war, terrorism, the economy -- but the differences between Obama and Clinton on most of these issues are slight, and most are far too technical to be recited by any but the most devoted policy wonk. For the vast majority of voters, it really does come down to a handful of gut reactions -- whom do you trust, who has the experience, who makes you feel all goo-goo and ga-ga inside. Obama, the anointed "next Kennedy," has the goo-goo and ga-ga all locked up, and guess what? It's because he's black.

What do you think this code word "hope" really means, for chrissakes? It's not hope for deliverance from NAFTA (which he's not serious about), not hope for universal health care (which his plan does not provide), not hope for an end to terrorism (which being right about Iraq does nothing to bring about). It's about getting past race, and all the polarizing, dated and counterproductive infighting it entails. A vote for Obama is a vote for exorcising demons, burying hatchets, and, to paraphrase a favorite Democratic catchword, Moving On.

Ferraro thinks Obama is lucky because America is captivated by the idea of electing a black president. And whether anyone is willing to admit it or not, she's right.

It says a lot about American society that it can be taken as conventional wisdom, without being questioned, that it will take a miracle confluence of hope and circumstances to elect a black man president, but the mere suggestion that being black might actually be beneficial is the height of apostasy and can get a woman with undeniable liberal cred shunned like a leper. The mere fact that Obama is in this position at all is proof that America has entered a new phase. The Republicans are rooting for Hillary because they believe Obama will be harder to beat. This is racist America?

All the mainstream media outlets routinely report on each candidate's support based on race, gender, income and other factors, which is inherently a racist/sexist/classist enterprise because it implies that (gasp!) people actually make decisions based on these factors that aren't SUPPOSED to matter. I happen to think that Hillary gets a similar bump simply from being a woman, but I don't imagine the same sort of outcry would erupt if some figure in the Obama camp were to suggest as much.

Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats really just want to elect somebody besides a white guy for a change. Why is admitting that such an outrage?

If it's Sunday, it must be... Cambodia

2007-12-08T23:22:00.000-06:00

Greetings, dear readers. Once again I have found myself on a week's vacation in a new country without having finished writing about the last vacation. Well, there may yet be a follow-up entry on Thailand, as I was about 75 percent finished with that entry, but I won't let that stop me updating you on my trip to Cambodia.

I'm sitting in the restaurant of the Hotel Cambodiana, a luxury joint I only booked into because my first choice was unavailable for the whole four days I'll be in Phnom Penh, the capital city. (I'm actually moving to the other place, The Pavilion, after I finish lunch and this entry.) I actually don't like staying in fancy hotels, even disregarding the expense. They have a sterility to them I don't care for, the staff are a little too attentive and friendly, and it's hard to meet other fellow travelers when you're staying in one by yourself. The footloose and fancy-free crowd that likes to take up with strangers for a few hours tend to be in the budget places. Luxury hotels are full of people who don't really want to interact with their destination.

So why do I keep doing it, after making the same mistake in Thailand? Well, mainly, it's just easier. Big fancy places have good web sites and reliable reservation systems so you know what you're getting. The last thing I want to do when I'm flying in late on a Friday evening with a couple bags is go wandering around looking for a room. It's a shame, too, because in a place like Cambodia, I could meet my lodging needs for a pittance if I only were willing to search around on the ground. Oh well.

As I got in late Friday I just went down to the hotel bar -- Qba, get it? -- for a few drinks before going to bed. There was a Tom Jones impersonator, pretty much dead-on, apart from the fact that he was, and I'm just guessing here based on dark coloration and facial features, Sri Lankan. There was also a diva-type girl, singing songs like "Man, I Feel Like a Woman" and "The Wind Beneath My Wings." Things took a surreal turn when she sang "The Ketchup Song." So I'm listening to this Asian woman singing in Cambodian-accented Spanglish about a Mexican guy who loves the first hip-hop song, "Rapper's Delight," but, not knowing English, butchers the words of 1979 urban black America into a phonetic mishmash. Talk about your clash of cultures. I also met a French backpacker named Axel.

Saturday I went out sightseeing. I started out walking down the riverfront, fending off tuk-tuk drivers and looking for a place to buy sunscreen and bug spray, which I'd forgotten to pack. The Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda complex were closed for the traditional three-hour Cambodian siesta -- it's mid-80s here, even in December -- so I wandered around a bit. I went to the National Museum, which is now mostly recovered from the collapse of roofs and invasion of nature that occurred during the forced depopulation of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge.

A little history for you who don't know much about that era. In the late '70s the communist utopians of the Khmer Rouge decided that the pure society was peasant society, so they kicked everyone out of the cities and forced them to work the fields instead. All the intellectuals and academics and professionals and merchants and such were ordered to go out and till and dig and reap the spoils of the earth. Those that objected were killed; those that acquiesced were worked to death and starved. They say 1.7 million people died in this period, a quarter of the country's population. This catastrophe, on a per-capita basis worse than Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Rwanda or Darfur, occurred over a span of just over three years and eight months. It's often referred to as a genocide; but that's not really accurate. It wasn't one people persecuting and slaughtering a minority or rival population, it was Cambodians killing Cambodians on a massive scale, and along the way destroying libraries, historic and cultural treasures, anything that smacked of the high-brow or artistic or bourgeois. It was basically national suicide. It wasn't until the Vietnamese invaded and took over the cities again that the nightmare ended. You know you're a fucked-up country when the communist Vietnamese are the heroes.

Of course, the country still took a long time to bounce back, and it has only been in recent months that the main leaders of the Khmer Rouge have been brought to trial for their rather astonishing misdeeds. The country's been lurching from one caretaker government to another, and even now it is still probably the poorest country in Southeast Asia, apart from the region's totally dysfunctional bastard stepchild, Myanmar. Still, Phnom Penh has a laid-back, tropical vibrancy to it, and it has not yet developed that hurtling-toward-modernity freneticism that rules in places like Bangkok or Shanghai.

Anyway, the National Museum. Not super impressive, really, mainly a lot of sculptures, collected in four galleries with glassless, open windows and a nice breeze blowing through. Attendants will give you flowers, with which you are invited to make a donation to Buddha, who is omnipresent in Cambodian statuary. You could afford to skip it, but I was just killing time until the palace complex opened.

That was still an hour away when I gave in to a tuk-tuk driver and allowed him to drive me to Wat Phnom, a temple on top of the hill that gives Phnom Penh its name. The usual big golden Buddhas inside, no shoes or pictures allowed. A white stupa sits behind the temple, holding the remains of somebody or other, but it was ensconced in bamboo scaffolding for a renovation. My guide pointed out the monkeys swarming around the shady side of the hill, hoping for handouts and, at one memorable moment, demonstrating how we came to have the term "monkey business."

This still only killed a half-hour, including the drive to and from, so I let the driver take me to Tuol Sleng, which I had intended to visit on Sunday instead. This is the Genocide Museum, devoted to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, and occupying the buildings of S-21, the notorious prison/torture house that had been a high school in a previous life. The place is still ringed by razor and barbed wire, and inside it's been left more or less the same as it was when the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh.

The first building of the complex consists of the torture rooms, complete with naked iron bed frames to which the perceived traitors were shackled during "interrogation." Most rooms also have a couple of unexplained but sinister-looking objects, like steel rebar, empty metal cartridge boxes, and farm implements, and you are left to ponder precisely how these items were employed by the sadists of S-21. The results, however, are somewhat less ambiguous; on the wall of each room is a fuzzy photograph of a victim, mutilated and bloodied and very, very dead.

The next section of the campus -- and you can really see how it was a campus, with a grassy courtyard quad and smart, checked tile floors -- consists of several rooms of mug shots. The thousands of people processed and imprisoned and killed at S-21. Men, women, children. All these faces, young, old, scared, weary, resigned. All different, all weirdly the same. In a few pictures, a woman cradling an infant. The "enemies of the revolution."

There are some post-torture pictures, yes, some depictions of those who would not confess, or whose confessions were not sufficient to save them. It's gruesome, even in distorted black and white. But mostly it's faces, faces and more faces.

Perhaps the weirdest display, though, is on the outside of the building, where a big sign depicts a smiling, cheerful face, mouth open and teeth showing in an unmistakable expression of gleeful amusement -- with a big red circle and slash through it. Yes, this is a "no-joking" sign. Apparently there are people who can visit Tuol Sleng and look at the pictures of the dead and laugh, so they have a sign to tell you that this is not acceptable behavior. It's easy to dismiss the inhumanity of the Khmer Rouge as an historical isolate, an aberration of the past. But that sign just goes to show that we're still a deeply fucked-up species.

Then there are the cells. The next building has classrooms all divided up into individual detention rooms, barely big enough to lie down in. The cells are of brick on the ground floor, and wood on the second, and they don't even reach to the ceiling. A healthy person would have little trouble scrambling up and out of most of them, or even kicking down the door, but of course that doesn't do you much good when the whole complex is surrounded by an electrified fence and the threat of torture is audibly, terrifyingly authentic.

But wait, that's not all. In the next building, we have the art. Some tasteful photography and such, as well as rather amateurish paintings -- I'm told they were done by a survivor -- demonstrating how various torture devices, also on display, were used. A big tank with two hand restraints on either side, and ankle restraints at the bottom, where you'd be held face down in the water. A rack with restraints for waterboarding (hear that, Dick Cheney? Khmer Rouge approved!) Out in the courtyard they converted the rope-climb arch, once used for P.E., into a place to hang the noncompliant from the ankles for dunking into pots of foul fertilizer water whenever they had the audacity to pass out from the pain. It goes on and on. There was even a movie showing, but by this point I didn't really have the stomach for it. I left and met my tuk-tuk driver (actually he'd gotten bored waiting and arranged a replacement) for the ride back to the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda.

The Royal Palace was pretty, a collection of yellow buildings, lavishly decorated. Throne room, reception room, even a "gift" building from Napoleon III, who had it built for his empress Eugenie in Egypt and then took it apart and shipped it to Phnom Penh and rebuilt here.

The area was a lot like the corresponding complex in Bangkok, with a lot of the same ornamentation. Thai and Cambodian culture are rather alike, owing to proximity and their tendency to conquer each other from time to time over the last 2,000 years. They were both formerly Hindu, now overwhelmingly Buddhist. They share a similar script, which looks a lot like (and is derived from) Sanskrit. But the Thais never overthrew their monarchy in a brutal revolution, like the Khmers did, so their royal stuff is just a little grander for having not been trashed by fanatics and then refurbished.

Afterwards, I went to the nearby Foreign Correspondents Club for a beer and maybe a bite. I was on the rooftop, where you can see the traffic run up and down the riverside drive, motorcycles and cars and SUVs and pedestrians and motorized bicylces and tuk-tuks, all going at different speeds, swerving easily around each other, nobody ever stopping completely, only slowing down just enough to let everyone go through. There are red lights but they might as well not exist; no one feels obliged to observe them. It's oddly not as chaotic as it sounds; everyone seems to know what they're doing, and no one goes fast enough for anything more than a minor scrape or tumble to result. One suspects that if the traffic increased just another 20 or 30 percent, this easygoing, laissez-faire sort of driving would cease to be practical, and gridlock, recklessness and accidents would ensue. But for now, it's just fun to watch.

Texting from the FCC, I met up with a friend of a colleague in Hong Kong, who proceeded to take me on a righteous bar crawl through the dear colleague's old haunts during his stint here. Only there was no crawling, as he took me on the back of his motorcycle. It's been a long time since I rode bitch, and my tailbone was a little sore from the rear bar of the seat, but we got everywhere we were going safely and smoothly, and I had a grand old glimpse of expat life as it's practiced in sultry Southeast Asia. If Hong Kong is like New York, Phnom Penh is like Austin. Only with dollar beers. I could stand to live here, I really could.

There's some of the retro-ness that I've noticed among other expat groups abroad... the music, when it's Western at all, tends toward the classic rock era, and it's not hard, in the darkened bowels of the Magic Sponge or the Zeppelin Cafe, listening to the Rolling Stones, to imagine what it might have been like here in the era of the Vietnam War. Apart from the Internet cafes, cellphones and a few later-model cars, it could be 1969. There's certainly no McDonald's, no Starbucks, no freeways to spoil the image. Thank God.

After the long night's drunkening, I took an overpriced tuk-tuk back to the hotel, where I proceeded to sleep off all the Singapore-brewed Anchor beer. (That's pronounced An-Chore here, even though there are anchors on the can, to distinguish it from the locally produced Angkor, which is pronounced like encore. Such that when the movie Anchorman came out, everyone called in An-Chore-man.)

The next day I got up and had lunch at the hotel, where I began this entry (I'm at the new place as I write now). I took a tuk-tuk to The Pavilion, which is a 30-room hotel in a former French colonial building, very nice, with a pool out front, where I am currently having mango daiquiris in the shade, a Graham Greene spy novel at my side, and a two-dollar pack of smokes. I was tempted to just lounge around all day yesterday, but I decided to do that today instead. Yesterday after checking in I went to visit something far more inviting than a cool pool on a hot day... the Killing Fields.

About a half-hour from central Phnom Penh by tuk-tuk, the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek are the best-known of many throughout the country, having been the fields where the victims of S-21 were taken after they had surrendered whatever information was required of them. Twenty thousand or so souls were buried there in mass graves, most of them killed with blows to the head or their heads sawed off with the hard, jagged edge of a palm branch -- the Khmer Rouge were stingy with the bullets. One grave was six meters deep and held 460 people. Others were occupied by women (stripped naked, having been raped), or infants (which were held up against a tree, upside down, to receive the fatal blow), or former soldiers judged as traitors (the latter all buried without their heads, which have never been found). It was customary for many victims to dig their own graves, then kneel at the edge before they were clubbed and dropped into the pit. DDT, the banned insecticide and general antiseptic, was poured on in liberal doses to douse the stench, as well as kill through toxicity those who were not finished off by the intended death blow and therefore were buried, technically, alive.

I apologize for being so blunt about all this, but that's exactly how it is presented at Cheoung Ek. It is so monstrously beyond the pale that the overall effect is like a whiff of chloroform. Dizzying, dulling, hard to comprehend. At the end of my tour -- after I was taken through the memorial pagoda filled with thousands of excavated skulls, past the grassy holes that once held bodies, over the worn pathways where the tell-tale white of bone still peeks through the earth RIGHT WHERE YOU WALK -- my guide asked me if I had any questions. I had only one, but I did not ask it: "How in the fuck did this HAPPEN?"

It really is baffling. At least Nazi Germany had some sort of twisted logic to it -- the utmost of evil, to be sure, but at least it was one tribe against another. Primal, animal, not really understandable or rational but at least explained by a cult of personality, a unique historical position and a long foundation of hatred and mistrust. The Khmer Rouge were just fucking nuts. Nobody can even explain how it came to pass; many of the perpretrators ended up just as dead as the victims. Just a mob mentality on a national scale, an epic abdication of basic humanity. It is, in a word, depressing.

I got back in the tuk-tuk and journeyed back to the city, where I met up with my new friends for the beef roast special at the Lazy Gecko. A few more beers, then a reconvening at the Kandal House, then I took my leave to head back to the Pavilion, where, after a few postcards written in a state of progressive inebriation, I gratefully crashed in my air-conditioned room and slept till morning.

Which brings us to today. Actually it's afternoon now, and I'm blogging away via wi-fi in the courtyard by the pool, chatting online and gearing up for more postcards and perhaps a little more Graham Greene (I picked up the used paperback along the backpacker strip near the river). I have no intention of leaving the hotel today, but a swim is highly likely... this is what vacation is all about.

What I'm thankful for

2007-11-22T21:45:00.000-06:00

Happy Thankgiving, grumpy loyal readers!

Yes, I totally choked on the whole pledge, but it wasn't 100% my fault. Also some technical issues. But on this day of generosity and compassion for one's fellow man, I ask that you forgive me. And I, in turn, thank you, my faithful readers. But that's not all.

I'd like to thank a lot of you for things you've given me through the years, things that have given me joy and entertainment and helped to make me the person I am. So if you'll indulge me...

Thank you, Elise McIntosh (nee Jenny Skelton), for Kurt Vonnegut. Thank you, Jeff Marion, for Nirvana, 10,000 Maniacs and a hundred other bands and mix tapes. Thank you, Rien Gahlsdorf, for Lords of Conquest and a thousand other bootleg games. Thank you, Joe Madara, for Axis & Allies.

Thank you, Carl Weinberger, for letters and Douglas Adams. Thank you, Jamie Knodel, for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Thank you, Doris Truong, for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," sushi, chopsticks, and an appreciation for Asian chicks (all coming in quite handy at present). Thank you, Cullen Herendon, for the Old 97's, the Magnetic Fields, and Meredith Miller, and curse you for Tuaca.

Thank you, Gordon Verbiske, for "Friends," and curse you for Marlboro Lights. Thank you, Portia Hall, for being reasonable, and curse you for being right about the war. Thank you, Dan Mains, for joining the Peace Corps (better you than me). Thank you, Pete Campanella, for the Moody Blues and... uh, I forget. (Are those nachos?)

Thank you, Kyle Rogers, for the first flowers we got. Thank you, Donica Croot, for New Orleans. Thank you, Colby Jill Kathleen Barlow, for a lifelong appreciation for... you know. Thank you, Robert Wiard, for making me a leading man. Thank you, Ronald Thorn, for coming to graduation. Thank you, Bill Rossell, for your shoes.

Thank you, Ted Ingram, for steaks. Thank you, Samantha Shaddock, for "Battlestar Galactica." Thank you, Liz Wishaw, for "Weeds," your music collection, Nepal and Belize. Thank you, Andrea Passalacqua, for France, Italy, Chicago, Florida... and for that second chance. Thank you, Alan Berg, for Legos and Playmobil and Famous Bagel.

Thank you, Oregon Ducks, for the Rose Bowl. Thank you, Kim Dykstra, for being first. Thank you, Kaly Soto, for "The X-Files." Thank you, Sean Campanella, for the Essex Green. Thank you, Beth Hardy, for being a good example. Thank you, Allison Stewart, Elizabeth Egeland-Slocum and Laura Riddle, for rooting for me.

Thank you, Deanna Behling, for listening. Thank you, Laura Miller, for coaching. Thank you, Nicole Stockdale, for taking the job. Thank you, Mary Thorn, for cheesecake. Thank you, Clifford Thorn, for "cheesecake." And thank you both for reading, and curse you both for giving me a hopelessly conflicted attitude toward spending.

Thank you, Joyce Lau, for the junk. Thank you, Chris Wienandt, for the job. Thank you, Don Campanella, for Austin. Thank you, Shawna Furr, for being what cool looks like. Thank you, James Gaut, for another box of dogs. Thank you, Jeena, for the Nepalese Mafia. Thank you, Nepalese Mafia, for night swimming. Thank you, Ka Ki Li, for Haruki Murakami. Thank you, Will Pry, for Sebastian, Dick Army, and the vault.

Thank you, Chris Siron, for TiVo. Thank you, Paige Sanders, for being awake. Thank you, Zach Mitchell, for Mia's brisket tacos, and the Heartless Bastards. Thank you, Matt Grg, for Tantra. Thank you, Melissa Sullivan, for proposing. Thank you, James Covey, for the truck. Thank you, Dawn, for poetry.

This is far from an exhaustive list, and rest assured there are many other people I'm thankful for, for many other reasons. But, just so I get this posted while it is still Thanksgiving in some part of the world, I'm going to stop now. Hope you're all stuffed with turkey, and I'll be catching up with you soon!

I am woe

2007-11-10T22:43:00.000-06:00

"Hello David,

Thanks for taking the time to write to Tuaca.

Currently, Tuaca is only distributed in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. While Tuaca is not available in other countries at this time, we are looking into expanding distribution in some markets. Letters like yours will help determine where the brand is expanded. I will be sure to pass a copy of your message along to our brand team and local sales team to let them know of your interest.

Darrell
Tuaca, Liquore Italiano
Please drink Tuaca responsibly."

Still going...

2007-11-10T15:53:00.000-06:00

It's Game Day, people! Wearing your colors?

Well, I'm not, because the Ducks have a bye. But I would be, if it mattered.

Anyway, I'm at the very tail end of a very productive day of shopping for the apartment -- I bought some shelves for my shot glass collection, a toaster, a bath mat, a shower curtain, a dish rack, an alarm clock, a nightstand lamp and some light bulbs, among other things -- and have just spent many hours unpacking and organizing said shot glasses, then books, and then going through about six months' worth of mail. In all I've filled three trash bags with empty envelopes, junk mail and packing paper, and emptied three moving cartons and a shoe box. I even got in some ironing. It was that kind of day.

I've made much point of emphasizing how lazy and procrastinating I am, but there is a flip side. Once in a great while, not nearly as often as is necessary, I get in the right mood and go on a holy tear. Such a day was today. This method served me pretty well in Dallas, where I had a car and knew where to buy anything I wanted without searching too hard, and I didn't have to worry about carrying it all home. But this approach is very un-Hong Kong. The realities of the landscape reward people who are diligent about doing a little bit of work and errands and chores every few days, rather than people like me, who put everything off for a month and then try to catch up in one epic day. I am going to have to learn to adapt, because I now realize I've got three or four debts going to collection agencies and no milk in the fridge.

I can't get no ...

2007-11-09T00:18:00.000-06:00

I had been hoping that when I failed to live up to my 30 Days promise there would be howls of protests, but either you guys have all figured me out and no one's surprised, or no one is reading. Still, I'm back. Call it 28 Days of Dave. Hey, just pretend it's February.

I had a day off yesterday and spent it napping, chatting online and reading Gai-Jin, the third book in James Clavell's Asian saga (the best known of which is the first, Shogun). Although I lack the cultural expertise to confirm that it is an accurate representation of Chinese and Japanese sensibilities during the time period -- spanning 262 years, so far, beginning in 1600 -- it certainly SEEMS educational. I haven't noticed anything obviously anachronistic, anyway. It would make fine reading for high school history classes, were it not more than a little obsessed with sex. (And frankly I think that makes it even better reading for high school history classes, but I doubt many school boards would agree).

A couple of the characters in the book are engaged to fight a duel, with pistols, although the bullets haven't flown yet. (The practice is described as illegal in the book but still practiced.) I got to thinking, that's something I wish we still had around. I mean, if we could have duels, would we still have drive-bys? What about those rap feuds? I bet there'd be less dissing on those albums if you knew the other guy could demand satisfaction. A nice gentlemanly duel would probably keep down the overall body count, too.

Aaron Burr famously shot down Alexander Hamilton, but we haven't seen that kind of action in Washington for way too long. I can tell you politics would be a lot more interesting if Nancy Pelosi could put a bullet in Orrin Hatch for running his mouth. Maybe they'd be a little more civil to each other on the Hill, too. If nothing else, it would make C-SPAN easier to tolerate. Also presidential debates.

Still, as I was pondering this, it occurred to me that I couldn't really recall anyone I wanted to kill. A few people I would have dearly loved to kick the crap out of, yes, but nobody I actually wanted to see dead. (Well, wanted to see dead by own hand. There's lots of people I think the world would be better off without, but I'm not personally volunteering to do the job.)

So I pose a question to you: If duelling were legal, and you were reasonably certain you could beat the other guy to the trigger and emerge unscathed, would you? Anyone really have it coming?

Shameless place-holder post

2007-11-06T13:06:00.000-06:00

I fully recognize that this entry is cheating. I'm just filling a space, because I'm in no mood to post anything more substantial.

I am sending out a mass e-mail of my contact info, as promised. I would like at this time to dearly, sincerely, and profusely ask that all of you who spend any serious time online add me to your IM lists. It's the easiest -- and may I also add the cheapest -- way to keep in touch. If you haven't already been IM'ing, get with the program. I've been doing it since 1996.

Please Mr. Postman

2007-11-05T00:05:00.000-06:00

You remember on those old episodes of M*A*S*H when they'd have mail call and everybody'd come running, excited about what they might be getting? Or maybe back when you were a kid, you had a pen pal or something -- mine was my cousin Carl, who lived all the way on the other side of the state -- so you'd dutifully check the day's envelopes and catalogs for one that was addressed to you and you alone? Why isn't the mail like that anymore?

Thanks to the Internet, and cheap international dialing, we've lost all of what used to be fun about getting the mail, and left in its place all that sucks: bills, advertising circulars, unsolicited junk. My mail now piles up in various locations around my cluttered apartment -- in fact is probably the one single largest ingredient in all that clutter -- and it can be weeks, months, before I bother to go through any of it, so demonstrably not fun it all is. (This habit is particularly unsatisfactory to the good people at Hong Kong Electric, who recently threatened me with a loss of service when my bill went unpaid for... well, let's just say they were generous with the grace period.)

In Dallas I used an electronic bill-paying service that took care of most of my bills automatically, or with only a few clicks required on my part, no great sacrifice of effort for a person who spends no less than eight hours a day in front of an Internet-connected computer terminal. This was the single greatest factor in resurrecting my once-miserable credit rating, as I no longer missed payments out of sheer laziness when I had the money to make them. Of course, now that I have moved to Hong Kong and my U.S.-based bills make a pit stop at Mom's before being forwarded to me here, I've probably shot that credit rating all to hell again. Plus, I've started a whole new track record of missing payments in Hong Kong as well, again, out of sheer laziness. It's a real sickness, it is.

So help me out here. Send me some real, honest to God correspondence. Doesn't have to be a letter, or anything involved. Postcard will do. I've been trying to liven up some of your mailboxes with my own postcards, when they're not getting waylaid by unscrupulous concierges in Third World hotels, so think of it as a little quid pro quo. If you don't know my mailing address, just e-mail me and ask.

I may even send out a mass e-mail with contact info, just to make it a little easier on you all... After all, I'm a deeply lazy man. I know how it is.

Fie upon you, ESPN

2007-11-04T01:05:00.000-05:00

Oregon our alma mater
We will guard thee on and on
Fellows gather round and cheer her
Chant her glory Oregon
Roar the praises of her warriors
Sing the story Oregon
On to victory urge the heroes
of our MIGHTY OREGON!

No. 4 Oregon 35, No. 6 Arizona State 23. Final.

I got up about 6:30 a.m., Hong Kong time, to watch the game using GamePlan International, an ESPN product that lets you view its GamePlan pay-per-view offerings over the Internet. This was the first time I had tried it, in part because I only found out about its existence a few weeks ago, and this was the first week since that an Oregon game was listed as being available through the service (games being carried by Fox Sports or other outlets are, obviously, not shown).

It costs $21.95 per week, or you can buy half- or full-season packages at a slightly discounted price. They show several games at any given time, I think no more than eight, but when I logged in, I was not shown the only game that I gave a rip about. Lots of others -- saw the end of the Texas-Oklahoma State match -- but not the Oregon game. Not having tried the service before, I thought it might be because of some sort of lag, the way games in sports bars often won't switch over until midway through the first quarter because the game occupying that satellite feed had not yet finished. So I sat around a while, waiting, waiting, as the Ducks went up 7-3, 14-3, more. (I could tell from text message updates my sister was sending from Autzen, as well as the usual Yahoo box-score feed.)

I also thought it might be blacked out, as I had paid for the package using a credit card still tied to my mom's address in Eugene. It was not listed as something subject to blackout -- unlike the Oregon State-USC game going on at around the same time, which was -- but it could have been an oversight. Still, I couldn't tell what the problem was, and there were other various glitches that had me suspicious that the whole service was a house of cards. (I also knew that the game was not on ABC in Oregon, which ordinarily means it's not GamePlan eligible, which I know from many frustrating years trying to hunt down Duck games at sports bars in Dallas.)

Finally, midway through the second, I find an 800 number for ESPN.com -- not free when you're calling from overseas -- and, to my surprise, quickly get an answer. I explain my problem, which does not come as much of a surprise to the operator, who admits that the Oregon listing was "a mistake" and there would not be a Duck game available for viewing that day. I complained that the listing was STILL on the Internet, even as the game was well under way, meaning that lots of people wanting to see it might still be ponying up their twenty-two bucks to watch a game that ESPN was now admitting that it couldn't carry (and probably knew it couldn't carry for hours, if not days). I demanded a refund and was assured I would get one in two or three business days. (Funny how it doesn't take two or three business days for them to CHARGE you.)

So I was then left to follow the action using regular box-score updates and Yahoo's GameChannel service, which is as like watching a real game as playing football on the Atari 2600 is like playing the real deal. Despite some harrowing moments late in the fourth, including the unexplained (online) departure of our Heisman candidate-quarterback, the Ducks held on to win. They're now 8-1, and all but assured a No. 3 ranking in the BCS and the polls on account of Boston College's loss to Florida State. Which means, for the next two weeks at least (they have a bye next Saturday), Oregon is going to be part of the national title conversation.

While I am here, in a place that doesn't even regard this game as the real "football." Sigh.

Believe it or not

2007-11-03T02:28:00.000-05:00

Day Two. An Ode to the iPod.

I love my iPod. This hardly makes me unique in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot tell you how good an investment that $400 was. Or more likely $500, when you add in the accessories and earphones and other assorted gadgetry that I've bought for it in the less than a year that I've owned it.

I was a late adopter, as it happens. I did buy one of the first iPods to hit the market, but I bought it as a gift and only enjoyed it briefly before the recipient moved away, taking the lovely little device with her. Still, I knew enough from that experience to realize that I would love to have one of my own, and I dutifully put it on my gift list at Amazon.com for several Christmases and birthdays before finally admitting to myself that it was really too expensive to expect anyone to buy for me. I finally broke down when I saw a colleague's shiny new black video model, and soon I was at BestBuy, making the sort of indulgent purchase that ordinarily causes me to break out into a cold sweat (my thrifty father's genes at work).

I have not, heretofore, been exactly what one would call a "music person." I did not spend all my allowance growing up buying the latest cassettes and CDs, and while I did fall asleep listening to the radio for many years, I never amassed what one would call an impressive music collection. In fact, were it not for the contributions of friends and their mix-tapes, the collection as it stood even as late as the late '90s would have to be fairly described as pathetic. I was, and still am, too cheap to buy albums on speculation, hoping that I will like them based on buzz or cover art or reviews in Entertainment Weekly. (More of Dad.) So my CDs were overwhelmingly Greatest Hits compilations from various bonafide blockbuster bands of yesteryear, and the occasional aged album from a newer artist that had made its way into the Super Saver bin. This, as you know, is no way to build a collection, and it showed. Even now I hesitate to put my CDs on display because they are such a poor reflection of the entirety of my taste.

But along came Napster. And Bearshare. And Limewire. And finally, iTunes. It suddenly became possible for me to collect, free or cheap, all those singles out there from all those thousands of albums I would not otherwise bring myself to buy. Yes, it was illegal, BUT -- and here comes the rationalization that allows me to not give a damn -- I had clearly proven, as my CD tower could attest, that there was simply NO WAY I was going to shell out the money for, say, "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)," ever, and certainly not if I had to buy a whole Rupert Holmes album to get it. Not gonna happen, and didn't. So if anyone thinks I'm cheating the recording industry and the artists out of their rightful profits, it just simply isn't true. If I couldn't get this stuff free or a la carte for 99 cents, I would just live without it. And there have been quite a few instances in which I came to like an artist so much that I actually went to a store and bought the CD, because I realized, hey, I'm digging the Essex Green or the Dixie Chicks or the Dandy Warhols way too much to not throw some money their way.

And finally, in a perfect storm sort of way, in walks the iPod, which allows me to carry around, on my belt anywhere I go, every song I've ever owned (and quite a few that I stole from girlfriends, who, to a woman, all had better collections than I did). When I want a beat to quicken my step, James Brown, De La Soul, Black-Eyed Peas. A taste of my youth? Billy Joel, Genesis, even, yes, Huey Lewis. Missing Texas? Old 97's, Johnny Cash, George Strait. Feeling cheesy? Abba, Bee-Gees, Gordon Lightfoot. Stress-reliever? Guns n' Roses, Nine Inch Nails, White Stripes. Nostalgic? One of those mix-tapes I ripped to MP3s. It's all there, whenever I want -- and wherever there's a stereo and the proper jack, boom! Instant DJ. Or, I can just put it on shuffle and bounce from one memory to the next, rediscover forgotten favorites, or hear something entirely new that I didn't even know I had.

I can't tell you what a comfort this has all been in Hong Kong. I know I would never have made nearly as much use of the iPod in Dallas, where my commute was barely 15 minutes and my car was burglarized far too often to even contemplate carrying the thing around with me. And when I was back in the Pacific Northwest for three weeks last month, I barely even turned it on. But here, I walk everywhere, and I'm by myself more than at any time in my life. The iPod has become integrated into daily routine so thoroughly that leaving the house without it feels as foreign as leaving without my keys or my wallet. And it's a tremendous mood-booster, making even banal errands feel like I'm acting out a scene from a movie.

If I were to lose it tomorrow, God forbid, I'd be out buying a new one the same day. I'm a music person, now.

30 Days of Dave

2007-11-01T23:58:00.001-05:00

OK, loyal readers, I am going to try an experiment here. As you all know I am a total failure at blogging consistently, or at least, at blogging often. Many of you no doubt get frustrated at the lack of updates -- I hear the complaints -- and a few of you have surely stopped coming altogether.

This pains and saddens me. Lo, it is a lonesome existence, blogging into the void. So, for the next month -- that is, for November -- I plan to blog SOMETHING, maybe nothing good, but SOMETHING -- every single day. I'm calling it 30 Days of Dave. And so it begins with this post, thoughtfully delivered on Nov. 2. Because it just wouldn't be me if it weren't a little bit overdue.

The Triumph of the Funky Stars

2007-10-08T18:16:00.000-05:00

Back in the good ol' U.S. of A., sitting at 10th and Burnside in Portland, kitty-corner from Powell's, having a slice of Texas Barnyard Massacre at Rocco's Pizza. I've been in the States for just a little over a week now.

I hadn't really been pining to go home yet -- things were going fine for me in Hong Kong, and it felt like I was just hitting my stride there -- but I do feel glad to be here now. Credit an eventful weekend in Portland for jazzing up what had so far been a fairly sleepy trip.

My hosts, the inestimable Gordon and Portia, took me to a hip new Vietnamese restaurant on my first night in town, and Saturday night they followed up with a fancy meal at the Portland City Grill, a nice spot high up in the Big Pink, as Portlanders refer to their city's most prominent skyscraper. If you haven't seen it, the Portland skyline at night is a beautiful thing. The city is not ginormous in the mold of a New York or Hong Kong, or even a Dallas, but the lights on the bridges crossing the river make for a stunning view from almost any direction.

Of course, they owed me a good time, as they put me to work Saturday afternoon helping them build a new porch with a few other assorted relations and friends. It's a multiweek project, one that won't be finished till long after I'm gone, but I can say I pounded a few nails and painted a few (well, a lot of) beams. It's a shame Habitat for Humanity doesn't operate in Hong Kong; it felt good to get my hands a little dirty with some good old fashioned manual labor.

And yesterday we added good buddy Kyle to the mix for a venture to the Albina Green, a pub featuring a weekly trivia game. As we hoped, the blend of skillz present in our foursome was too much for the competition, and we rolled to victory handily. I embarrassed myself by being able to distinguish the theme songs from Full House and Family Matters, but it was a small price to pay for four lime-green T-shirts labeled "Albina Green Trivia Champ" and $20 in gift certificates I won't personally be able to redeem.

I'm here in the Pearl District, at Rocco's, for my regular pilgrimage to Powell's, which bills itself as the largest independent bookstore in the world (a claim that seems believable given that it occupies an entire city block). I have just finished The Corrections, and I need to pick up some more material for both my remaining time in Oregon and for my eventual return to HK. This is less urgent now that I've found a good used bookstore there, but still, nothing compares to Powell's, and no Portland trip is complete without a visit there.

Anyway, the time's almost up on my meter and I still haven't even gone into the store, so I had better wrap this up and get on it. More on Bangkok to come, hopefully.

Bangkok, Part I

2007-09-06T22:57:00.000-05:00

I got up on Wednesday morning, bleary-eyed and none too happy at the earliness of the hour. I’d only gotten a few hours’ sleep, and I knew it was going to be exhausting traveling to Bangkok, even though it’s only a short distance by air.

I showered, finished packing and went to check out and ask about transportation to the airport. Phuket is a rather large island, and Patong Beach is near the south end, while the airport is in the northeast. I hadn’t seen any metered taxis lurking around during my wanderings, and was not about to take an un-air-conditioned tuk-tuk with a pirate driver all the way there, so my only option was to use the hotel’s car, at the scandalous rate of 800 baht. Yes, welcome to Thailand, where sex is cheaper than a ride to the airport.

An uneventful trip, and soon I’m in the air, and before long I’m landing in Bangkok. (I forgot to mention, on the way from Hong Kong to Phuket the plane was showing Fantastic Four 2: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Good God, that was bad.) I make the mistake of taking an “official” airport cab to my hotel, which charges well above the metered rate (and yes, more than sex). Seems Thailand will do whatever it can to fleece unsuspecting tourists.

My hotel, the Holiday Inn, is a high-end business hotel, with all the usual amenities (except you have to pay for Internet, which is why I didn’t post the bulk of this entry this morning). I get in before noon, so my room’s not ready. I take a glass of white wine in the hotel bar while I wait and plan my first move. Turns out that if I hurry, I can catch the 2:30 feeding and milking at the “snake farm,” a Red Cross institution devoted to research on deadly snakes and the production of antivenin. So once I’ve dropped off my stuff, I’m quickly off in search of it.

Somewhat surprisingly, Bangkok has a nice, modern mass transit system, anchored by both a subway line and an elevated Skytrain. Large parts of the metropolis are not yet served by the three lines, but it’s a good start, and it gets me in the neighborhood of the snake farm. I take a wrong turn leaving the platform and end up covering more ground than need be, in the hot midday sun. Sweat is pouring off me as I wait to cross streets big and small, with painted crosswalks but no signals, and no apparent desire or obligation on the part of drivers and motorbike riders to stop at them. (Is it just me, or shouldn’t a “crosswalk” be a safer place to cross the street than just jaywalking anywhere?)

Still, after a circuitous route, I finally make it there, and the show is already under way. If you’ve been to the bird show at the State Fair or any sort of animal program like that, you know what to expect. Handlers bring out a bunch of different species for the view of an audience in a concrete amphitheater. The dangerous species are kept safely in control, while the harmless ones are brought up to be petted by twentysomething girls on holiday, pretending to be freaked out. Later, they bring out the star -- the deadly king cobra -- which is pathetically cowed by its handler’s hand around that famous splayed neck, and then, for our education and edification, forced to release its venom onto a glass dish. Not a mighty moment for the king, who is then force-fed raw chicken with a stick, because -- and here I think we have proof that snakes do have dignity -- certain species like the cobra will refuse to eat at all in captivity, preferring (one presumes) death over incarceration.

Finally, the show winds up with the photo-friendly python, who is draped over a long succession of tourists’ necks for snapshots, allowing these selfsame twentysomething girls to live out their best Britney Spears fantasies for the boyfriends they’ve all brought along. If you’re going to keep your man from straying in Thailand, you better be prepared to break out the heavy-duty props.

Show over, I start heading toward Lumphini Park, a large expanse that serves as the Central Park for Bangkok, complete with playing fields, jogging trails, fountained ponds and rented paddleboats. People actually do jog here, which is something of a mixed bag, when you factor in the pollution. But before I get there, I spot a shamelessly American chain restaurant, Roadhouse BBQ, and not having eaten all day (I missed the hotel breakfast every single day, turns out), a nice brisket sandwich sounds just about right. Plus, I have some planning to do.

After eating -- giant American portion halfway consumed -- I continue on to the park, which is as described. It’s on my way toward the hotel, sort of. I continue walking in the hotel’s direction, because I need to consult the guidebook I’d left in the room, passing as I go the Arawan Shrine, built to quiet the angry spirits who’d manifested their displeasure by killing several workers in the construction of an adjacent hotel high-rise. The beauty of Buddhism is that the gods are all amenable to bribes; shrine built, the deaths stopped. But their price was a piece of real estate on the corner of one of the city’s busiest intersections.

Finally, I got back to the hotel, and checked what I wanted to find in the guidebook. Mentioned under the heading "Bizarre Bangkok," it was the Lingam Shrine, an attraction not prominently mentioned in many of the tourbooks. It was supposedly not far from the Holiday Inn, so I set out on foot to look for it, hopefully before it got too dark to take pictures.

It was on this little mini-trek that I came to realize just how damn pedestrian-unfriendly this city is, particularly downtown, particularly at rush hour. Armed with directions but not a clear map, I took a street too soon and had to go far out of my way in order to cross a canal, then backtrack. My dogs were barking as the sun went down, and when I finally found the landmark hotel that was to guide me to the shrine, I found myself on the wrong side of the street, waiting for a break in traffic that I thought would never come. After 15 minutes or so I was able to dart across the four lanes, but my directions seemed less than clear on the ground. By the time I finally found the shrine, tucked back behind a hotel near the parking garage and employee smoking area, it was fully dark, except for the lights that illuminated the outdoor shrine's unusual accoutrements.

The Lingam Shrine is a fertility shrine, and it's filled with penises. Large and small, imposing and comical, phalluses of wood, stone and cement. It's said that women hoping to be fruitful pay their respects at the shrine, although it's hard to imagine anything respectable emerging from this foreskin forest. The place was lighted, after a fashion, and I snapped some pictures in spite of the night, feeling like a sausage-party paparazzi and grateful no one was there for me to disturb.

After violating this temple to tumescence, I slowly navigated the streets back to the hotel. I had imagined it would be fun to follow up this experience with a visit to a ladyboy show -- from a celebration of the male member to a festival in honor of its banishment -- but I was exhausted. Before long, though it was barely eight o'clock, I was dozing in my room, not to awaken before the morn.

A Very Thai Holiday

2007-09-06T22:31:00.000-05:00

So, I went down a side street (come on, you knew I would, didn’t you?). And let me tell you, if a Thai hooker asks if you’d like to “connect four,” just say NO.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Last I checked in, I was headed off for dinner on Monday night. I ended up a seafood place close to my hotel, where a female duo was playing such standards as “Must’ve Been Love” by Roxette and “True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper. They asked for requests, but I couldn’t think of anything in this, uh, genre that I wanted to hear. Had the surf and turf with tiger prawns. Not bad…

But I had delayed too long in getting to dinner and by the time I was back out, it was too late for Thai boxing. I might have gone for the ladyboy show, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t feeling up for glam camp. But there were some open seats at the nearest bar in the middle of Soi Tiger, a side street off Bangla Road, and I figured I could use a beer. (The nearby view of a naughty-schoolgirl-theme bar had NOTHING at all to do with it).

I settled in for a while, and, to my surprise, I was not approached at all. There’s apparently some sort of territorial boundary issue going on with the different “bars,” even though they are all under one roof in close proximity, such that girls in one are not allowed to proposition anyone seated at another. My bar, called Jagger and festooned with abundant copies of the Rolling Stones’ tongue logo, did not seem to have any girls working, apart from the bartenders. So I was able to sit and watch the scene go by, and occasionally enjoy a shot whenever some big spender type decided he’d pay a 1000 baht and buy a round for the house (a move always heralded by the ringing of a large bell). There were a lot of Western women there, with their boyfriends and husbands, and as there is no nudity allowed -- at least in this soi -- the whole scene was actually less sleazy in appearance than your average Stateside strip club.

Eventually, though, I did get bored, so I moved further down the side street, to see if things were a little more depraved deeper in. I settled into a new stool, ordered another drink, and before long a girl came up to me and started making small talk. She told me her name, but I couldn’t really understand it what with the pulsing music and her accent, and I’m sure it doesn’t matter anyway. She seemed bored but friendly, and so I agreed when she asked me to buy her a drink (I’m sure she gets a cut of whatever she induces guys like me to buy her). Not having a whole hell of a lot in common to discuss, and with a bit of a language barrier, she eventually brought out the board games, starting with Connect Four, at which she beat me soundly several times. (Connect Four is, after all, just tic-tac-toe on a slightly higher order of magnitude, so if you play it enough -- and I get the impression these girls play a lot -- you can basically guarantee a victory, as long as you go first.) Then on to Shut the Box (also not a euphemism) and finally, Jenga (ditto, although, come to think of it, a lot of these DO sound dirty in a context like this). In this last, I proved a worthy competitor, beating her twice, the second time in a variation whereby the bricks are stacked in a sort of four-pointed X configuration. By this time, though, it was late, so I paid my tab, slipped the girl 200 baht for her time (I am not naïve enough to think that this gaming was anything other than clever foreplay for the shier johns), and headed back down Bangla Road for the safety of the hotel.

It was raining. Actually it had been raining for the last couple hours, which probably gave Soi Tiger a leg up against the other side streets, which are less fully enclosed. It was certainly busy in there, and as the night wore on, it was taken over more and more by farangs like myself, men and women, loosened up by several shots and eager to shake their moneymaker up on stage, just like a professional. The air was at this time much more like Cancun or Bourbon Street, minus (as far as I observed) the flashing. Which I guess makes it more like a bachelorette party on Lower Greenville, come to think of it.

But anyway, as I’m walking down the street in the rain I’m approached by a girl with an umbrella, who is kind enough to share with me. But of course she has business to discuss. “You want me come with you?” As I resist, “Come with you. Only 500 baht.” Still I’m shrugging her off -- as an independent on the street, offering such cut-rate prices (this is about $17 U.S.), she set off alarm bells, although she frankly was prettier than the girl I’d just bested at Jenga. And although by this point it’s clear she speaks reasonable English (and so do I), she reverts to language straight out of “Platoon,” perhaps to appeal to by inner GI. “Sucky, fucky, whatever you want. Only 500 baht.”

I regret to tell the vicarious lechers out there, as well as the bargain hunters, that I resisted the girl’s siren song. (I was not, in fact, even sure that she was a girl, which certainly didn’t hurt in my resolve to be pure.) No, I broke away from her, and hired a tuk-tuk to take me the rest of the way to my hotel out of the rain, a ride all of three minutes long that I was charged an absurd 200 baht for. Or, I guess, two-fifths of the price of “anything you want.”

I slept well that night, so well, in fact, that I missed the free breakfast at the hotel for the second straight morning, but the lazy side of me won out over the miser, and I stayed in my room reading for a while before finally showering and venturing out to the hotel’s beach bar for a lunch of pad thai with prawns and a Singapore Sling. I took my laptop with me and my guidebooks, intending to plan a few outings outside of Patong Beach on this, my last full day in Phuket. But it was raining, so I caught up on some e-mails and IM chatting instead, hoping it would pass.

It didn’t. Eventually I got tired of waiting and decided to stow my gear and go walking again. I had to go and pick up my new shirts from the tailor’s, for one thing, and before long I had been beaten down by a host of other vendors and ended up buying a lot of other stuff I don’t need, including a pair of knock-off Birkenstocks for 400 baht, a Singha beer T-shirt and shot glass to add to the collection, and a variety of other things I won’t go into because some of them are likely to be presents.

My wanderings this day took me off the main beach road and down the long, central artery that forms the backbone of Patong. Slightly less crammed with tourists and touts, but still full of enough massage girls and hotels to remind me this was still not a regular Thai town, the walk was basically a surrender to the weather. I had dearly hoped to get in a parasail ride this day, but the operators weren’t operating, even though the rain was little more than a drizzle. I had broken the cardinal rule of traveling -- if you really want to do something on a trip, do it as soon as you can, the first day, if possible -- and was now paying the price.

Actually, this is not so much the cardinal rule as it is Article A of the real Cardinal Rule, which is “Visit every place as if you will never come back again.” If there’s a sight you want to see, see it. If there’s an activity you want to do, do it. Don’t be cheap, and don’t assume you’ll get another chance someday. Because you’ll never come back from vacation proud of anything you ALMOST did. As I tend never to revisit a venue unless I have no other new options available, this rule is especially important for me. I probably never will come back to Phuket -- certainly not unaccompanied -- so I missed my parasail chance. There will be other beach destinations where I can have a similar experience, but Phuket? At sunset? By myself and moping, hoping to be shaken up by a once-in-a-lifetime thrill? It’s gone. Wasted. All because I was wearing jeans and was afraid my camera might get wet (even though riders seemed to be deposited safely on the beach every time, and I could have changed at my hotel and been back in less than 15 minutes). LAME. Seize the day, my friends. Seize the day.

As night gathered I went looking for a place to eat, and settled on Papaya, a restaurant attached to a large resort. There are lots of restaurants in Patong, but hardly any seemed to be doing any business, so I found myself gutlessly following the herd and picking places based mainly upon whether anyone was already there. This is not any way to go, and I was rewarded for my sin with a mediocre steak.

Afterward I went back down Bangla Road, planning to go see Thai boxing, which is on display at an arena at the end of the street. The boxing matches happen every night here, and are advertised throughout the afternoon by a truck that trundles through the street with a loudspeaker and a clutch of boxers on top, kicking into pads and promising “Real fights! Muay Thai! Tonight! Bangla Stadium! Muay Thai!” on and on on a loop accompanied by jangling clarinet music.

My tailor friend met me as I walked down the street, apparently disappointed to see me still unaccompanied. “No girl?” he said, sympathetically. When I explained I was going to see boxing, he said he knew a friend who could something something -- the mumbling suggested a conspiratorial discount of some kind -- and introduced me to a guy wearing a Rollie Fingers handlebar mustache. The Thai Rollie Fingers led me down the street to the ticket area, where he promptly offered me no discount -- the price was posted clearly for everyone, 1500 baht for VIP and 1300 baht for everybody else -- but nonetheless urged me to buy right now. “That’s too much,” I told him. The stadium was quiet. “Have they started yet?” I asked. Mumbled assurances. Ignoring the Kevin Nealon voice inside me intoning, “But when I am ever going back to Thailand?”, I ponied up the 1500 baht and got a ticket. Then of course I was told they wouldn’t be starting for another 45 minutes. “You go sightsee, come back 45 minutes,” I was told, as if I hadn’t already paced the length of Bangla Road a dozen times already.

I’m sure the only point of Rollie Fingers’ involvement was to ensure that A) he got the credit and kickback for bringing me in, and B) I didn’t change my mind and decide to do something else before the matches started. Well, it worked. So I went back to Soi Tiger nearby and had a Heineken, even though the action had not even begun down the side street, and the school girls at the bar next door were just arriving, one by one and two by two, changing into their little skirts and impractical footwear in a back corner. At least it was still happy hour, so the beer only cost 50 baht.

After my wait I return to the stadium, flash my ducat and go upstairs, where to my surprise a pretty big crowd has already gathered. I am too late for a comfy armchair seat in VIP but can sit just behind it, with an unobstructed view of the ring but a constant stream of other spectators walking past me to the bleachers at the other end of the arena.

Before long, though, the first match is announced, and two thin little boys take to the ring for a lengthy pre-match ritual of stretching and dancing and bowing to the judges. And when I say little boys, I am not critiquing the diminutive Thai physique, I mean two little boys: ages 7 or 8, from the looks of it. The crowd, including a fair number of farang women, lets out an “aw” sound like you might hear if they just announced two baby pandas were going to fight it out.

The kids are fully decked out with the traditional ring headband and silk robes and shorts, boxing gloves and all, and they go through the motions like pros. The announcer speaks mostly in Thai, with a smattering of English, and I assume he’s detailing their ages and weights and hometowns and such. It’s all very cute, the way they’re playing it so straight.

But before long the match has begun, and the boys are kicking and kneeing and swinging at each other with practiced fury, and the farangs quiet down while the Thais in the audience -- they make up the bulk of the bleacher sitters, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t pay 1300 for the privilege -- begin to cheer. The boys are whaling on each other, their managers screaming from the corners, and as the first round ends, the kids are carried over to their corners and their tiny, panting bodies are swiftly massaged with ice by trainers. The farangs are muttering, and I can only guess that some of the more maternal are wondering whether this sport constitutes child abuse.

The match continues, though, and the crowd gets increasingly into it, with partisans of each side -- they’ve placed bets, you see -- shouting a ritual “Oh-ay!” every time they think their man’s (er, boy’s) scored a hit. At first I think this is just spontaneous “Ooh, that’s gotta hurt” sort of cheering, but after a while I come to conclude that it’s actually more of a way to influence the judges, who will decide the match if there isn’t a knockout and must therefore be encouraged to record each successful, or even unsuccessful, blow.

The match goes the whole five rounds and ends in a decision, the kid in the near corner losing. (I can’t honestly say I could have picked a winner myself, as I don’t know how the scoring goes.) Then the next match is up, two boys about 10 or 11, who are more skilled, and as a consequence seem to be afraid to go near each other. The third match is between boys a couple years older, more precise and increasingly brutal to see, and the fourth is between lightweights, one with a mustache, which heralds the beginning of the adult fights for the evening.

Not that the Thais have treated the young fighters as anything less than the real thing. The cheering has been intense, the betting fierce, and you begin to appreciate that the loudspeaker touts weren’t kidding: “Real fights! Muay Thai!” (Muay I gather means “boxing,” but the sound to my ears after so many years in Texas just sounds like, “VERY Thai!”)

It’s in the fifth match that things begin to get really interesting. It’s a girl fight! A tall blonde Norwegian with cornrows and a lot of body ink is matched up against a shorter Thai girl with mismatched uniform. I almost want to put money on the blonde, because she clearly reeks of having “gone native,” of taking this stuff incredibly seriously, while the Thai girl strikes me as somebody they’ve just scared up as an opponent for the crowd-drawing Norwegian (featured prominently in tonight’s all-color handbill advertisement). After all, Thai girls don’t traditionally box.

Turns out, I should have. The Norwegian whupped the crap out of the poor, overmatched Thai, who, even if she had comparable skills, lacked anything close to the Norwegian’s reach. The match went the distance, but only because the blonde began pulling punches. It was clear that they were friends, and a total beatdown would probably deprive the Norwegian of an opportunity to perform in live matches.

The next match was the highlight, though. Another Western fighter, an Australian guy, against a Thai of comparable size. Again, I couldn’t really measure the scoring, but the Australian cut easily, so by the end of the second round he was bleeding profusely from several wounds on his head. Between rounds they would clean him up and apply bandages, and he’d come out angry and swinging, but the Thai knew just where to hit him to reopen the cuts and set the blood flowing again. His dyed blonde hair was fully red by the end of the fourth round, and he looked like a side of beef, but he still seemed to be getting his licks in. It seemed clear that he’d been trained as a regular boxer, as he pounded away at the Thai’s head, using his feet mostly in defense and as an afterthought. There were knockdowns on both sides, but in the end the Thai, who had probably been fighting this way since he was 7 or 8, won, apparently to no one’s surprise.

Somewhere in all this I went to the bathroom. This would not normally be cause for comment, but while I was standing up at the urinal, an attendant came up behind me and put a cold rag across the back of my neck and said something I never expected (or wanted) to hear in a men’s room: “Massage?” Of course I’m in something of a captive position where I’m standing, so I can’t immediately object. Suddenly he’s landing these popping blows between my shoulder blades, and I have to admit, yeah, it feels pretty good. This continues as I make my way to the sink, where another guy reaches up and cricks my neck -- hard -- to one side, then the other. I could hear cracking. Finally, a third guy throws his arms around my chest and hoists me up, popping my back. Damn! I tipped the first guy a 100-baht note, intending for it to be split, but of course he wants me to pay the other two guys, too, and I feel a little cornered, so I oblige. So there went three-fifths of “anything you want.”

Anyway, back to the fights. By now we’re into all-Thai matches, the serious fights at the top of the card, and they just get more and more brutal (though nobody bleeds like the hemophiliac Australian). Takedowns, poundings, grappling that sends both fighters to the canvas. It is mesmerizing, the violence. (By this time I’ve moved into the comfy chairs that were vacated by farangs who got bored before the real action started). But the real show has moved behind me, where the stadium trainer, a woman, has begun stitching up the Australian’s wounds not five feet from where I’m sitting, in full view of everybody. Boys are clustered around, watching the gruesome spectacle, and farangs and Thais alike are taking pictures as the bloodied Aussie winces at the needle. I wish I had asked how many stitches it took. My guess is at least 20.

Finally, after the ninth round, the Thais begin to get up. Seems the rest of the 12-fight card will be kids again, starting with a match of boys about as young as the first two. Having seen this surreal sight already, I join them and make my way for the door.

Soi Tiger is busy again as I pass, so I stop in for a drink at the center bar, then move deeper in, bouncing around for a good view of the scene while trying not to attract too much attention. Inevitably, though, I’m cornered, and out comes the Connect Four, then Jenga. While this had seemed like quite the crazy story to tell the first time it happened (Whores! Playing Jenga!), the second time it happened I became aware that I was spending good money buying overpriced drinks just to play board games with a prostitute. This did not seem like a good investment, so I went back toward the hotel, fending off more invitations from freelancers along the way.

Across the street from the hotel was a place called the Sailor Bar, which I’d visited before and, while it was not entirely hooker-free, the girls in there did not expect for drinks to be bought for them and they didn’t demand that you play Connect Four. The place was proudly “Aussie-owned,” and it seemed like a hangout for full-time expats, rather than tourists. On this evening a middle-aged farang woman was getting her freak on with a Thai around the stripper pole, which seemed like suitable entertainment for a nightcap. Behind the bar were a couple of what I took to be butch lesbians, and I wanted to ask them how it felt to be in a society where the katoeys were embraced while they seemed to be ignored, but this just seemed a little forward, even for Thailand. A fresh-off-the-boat girl -- “One week in Phuket,” she said -- tried to interest me in a little conversation, but her English skills weren’t up to it. “Where were you before?” I asked, using hand signals on the bar to try to indicate, “Here, Phuket, before… ?” but eventually I just gave up, finished my drink and walked across the street to my room.

It was late by this time, but I’d made a promise to someone that I’d do one last thing before leaving town. I stripped down in my room, put on a pair of swim trunks, and ventured through the complex to the beach, where I waded out slowly into the Andaman Sea, which I’m going to say counts as the Indian Ocean for bookkeeping purposes (that’s the Big Three, people!). I didn’t go far, didn’t intend to, having a good buzz by now and there being something of a serious undertow. I got in my night-swimming, though. At least until a security guard saw me and came gesturing wordlessly for the stupid drunk farang to get the hell out of the water. (It seems night-swimming is against the rules, as it is doesn’t look good for dead tourists to be washing up on the beach in the morning.) Oh, well. I did it.

And then it was off to bed, for a few hours sleep at least before I had to get up and finish packing for my early-morning flight to Bangkok. I’ll write more on that leg of the trip soon, but it’s time to start getting ready for another day of sightseeing…

Fuck it, I've gone to Phuket

2007-09-03T06:40:00.000-05:00

I actually did make some progress on the Grand Nepali Adventure post, but I wasn't able to finish before I had to go off on my next grand adventure, this time to the Land of Smiles. Yes, your faithful correspondent has gone off to holiday in Thailand, first stop, the southern resort island of Phuket (which, despite the joke title of this entry, is actually pronounced pook-get).

Some of you newsies will remember the name from coverage of the 2004 tsunami disaster, as Phuket got pretty well clobbered by it. The luxury hotel where I'm sitting right now was among those forced to close and remodel by the damage, sitting as it is immediately on Patong Beach. There is no remaining evidence of the catastrophe here, unless you count the DVDs documenting the destruction that are for sale up and down the main beach road. And, perhaps, in the construction choices evident in the new building (my room, for example, is not carpeted at all but bare concrete, although tastefully decorated besides).

Although the hotel is pretty posh, I suppose, my particular room suffers from being stuck at the back corner and devoid of any -- what's the word for it? -- oh, yeah. Windows. Clear glass along the top of one wall allows in natural light, so it doesn't feel exactly like a cavern, but my visions of voyeuristically checking out the pool or the beach from the privacy of my room have been cruelly dashed.

As I sit writing, the last glimmers of the sunset are visible out over the Andaman Sea, the second straight day that I've been able to enjoy it from the beach. The parasail companies are packing it in for the night, after having taken out a steady stream of daredevils all day long, dangling them 150 feet over the whitecaps from a chute tethered to a speedboat below. I have been trying to work up nerve enough to try it myself -- the charge is only 1000 baht, which works out to about $33 U.S., for a ride that lasts only a couple of no doubt terrifying but electric minutes. I'm pretty sure I would have, if I'd had a companion to witness my bravery, but lacking such except for strangers, I've just been left to stew about it.

That's one thing I've been doing a lot of here: stewing. Coming to a luxury resort dominated by couples when you are single is not, perhaps, the smartest idea I've ever had. But I had anticipated that awkwardness. I am generally comfortable on my own, even with happy pairings all around. What I didn't expect, naively, was all the balding, middle-aged white sexpats, walking around with their Thai rental girlfriends on their arms.

Why should this bother me, you ask? Well, I'm no moralist, by any means, and I certainly don't fault consenting adults for doing what consenting adults have every right to do. But given my present circumstances, my singlehood voluntarily entered into -- as I've done so many times before -- the presence of these Viagra-fueled lotharios has given me an unpleasant picture of a bleak future. The Ghost of Dave Yet to Come, wearing socks with sandals and a sunburn.

Discretion forces me to leave some of the details blank, but suffice it to say, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the choices I've made, and how many chances I've had at happiness, and how many of those chances I walked away from. Now, anyone who's heard me bitch about my love life over the years can tell you some of those chances needed to be left behind, and I would even have to agree. But all of them? Just how many bites at the apple am I going to get? What, dear friends, the fuck am I doing?

Well, at the moment, I'm sipping a bright yellow boat drink at an expensive beachfront bar 12,000 miles from the place I was born, tanned and rested and recently (legitimately) massaged, and this is NOT, strictly speaking, at all a bad thing. We all deserve a little luxury in life, a little alone time, even a little debauch once in a while, but what about the rest of life? When I'm ready to settle down, where will I be? Will I be flipping through a little black book of outdated numbers next to names that have all changed?

But enough of this nonsense. Back to the trip.

There isn't a great deal to see on Phuket, in terms of landmarks, far as I can tell from the guidebooks. A few temples and such, to be sure, but nothing on a can't-be-missed scale. The place is beautiful, sure, but tropical beaches are not, really, all that different from each other when it comes right down to it. One's sands might be a little whiter, one's waters a little bluer, one a little more secluded, one a little more packed with pretty girls. But I guess I've become a little jaded after so many good trips to good locales.

The townscape is not unfamiliar, either. Endless dirty T-shirt shops and knock-off handbags, woodcarved knicknacks and souvenirs. Perhaps what distinguishes Phuket the most -- and here I speak of Patong, admittedly the island's worst in this regard -- is the aggressiveness of the touts. Tailors, over and over and over again -- seriously, I've been approached 50 times already -- holding out a hand, "Friend, where you from?" After which time they engage in chitchat, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, they always have "lots of friends there," but inevitably they want you to step into their shop and look at their fabrics and let them make you a suit or six "for a good price," which is not a good price, or at least, not a better price than off-the-rack stuff you can get back home. You can ignore them and they'll be affronted and curse you as you walk away, you can engage them and smile your way out of it after wasting precious minutes, or you can do as I did this afternoon, and give in. I consented to have four shirts made at a price that is, as I said, not high but no better than off-the-rack prices at home. Probably I could've bargained him down further, but the only reason I was submitting at all was just to be able to say to the other guys, "I just ordered four shirts down the street, so piss off."

The vendors of other stuff are mostly more low-key, except for the massage girls and hookers, of which there are countless numbers. I am pretty sure they are the same people, just advertising something different depending on the time of day. They will smile and wave and cajole, even from across a busy street, and if you dare to venture close enough to be grabbed -- something that cannot always be avoided on these narrow sidewalks -- they will do just that. Unlike the damn tailors, though, at least the few minutes spent talking to them do not seem completely wasted. I really hate the fucking tailors.

And of course, I'm not the only one suffering this harassment. T-shirts for sale along the strip announce, "No, I don't need a fucking tuk-tuk (taxi ride), massage or suit, so leave me the fuck alone." I was tempted to buy one, but adopting such an openly hostile attitude just isn't my style, and besides, maybe I will need a tuk-tuk, and I would hate to be lost on a deserted and dark street wearing one of those.

The nightlife scene on the main strip, Bangla Road, is not quite as decadent as I expected, if only because they close the road to traffic at night and one can safely navigate from the center of the avenue. Down the side streets, though, a different attitude reigns, and as they are all devilishly dead-ended, you cannot escape an aggressive hooker just by continuing purposefully ahead. There's no reason to be going down these alleys but one, the thinking appears to be, so once you've started down one -- particularly as an unaccompanied male -- you're fair game. The girls must be thinking, if I don't pounce, the john may just pick a prettier girl in the next bar. It's competition at its most savage. I stopped going down side streets.

Then there are the ladyboys. Katoeys, as they are called here, the "third sex," under the Thai way of thinking. Transsexuals, rather than mere transvestites, in varying degrees of surgical and hormonal transition. The shocking thing, perhaps, is just how convincing and indeed pretty some of them are. In fact, a lot of them are better-looking than the real girls, because they've spent such fortunes on engineering perfection beyond what the good Lord gave them, and have such impeccable wardrobes and makeup. The bar girls, being mostly farm girls from the poor northern provinces, have not the sophistication (or, in fact, the need) to go to such trouble to look good, so they don't bother.

I did, at the urging of a friend who shall remain nameless even though he has the same name as me, visit a "show," not of ladyboys (although these are reportedly quite the Vegas spectacle) but of women with ... um ... let's say, remarkable anatomical control. The guys from Puppetry of the Penis have nothing on these girls, who have been entertaining the masses (and reportedly breaking glassware) for decades with their unique skills. If you've seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and didn't ask for your money back, this is a show you have to see. Perhaps you'll even be invited on stage, as I was, although if you're ever asked to put a fully inflated balloon between your legs in a Thai go-go bar, you had better not have a heart condition.

All this has happened since I got in yesterday afternoon. I've also had some excellent seafood -- one restaurant lets you pick your fish from a display case, just like lobsters, and I had a delicious white snapper baked in butter and garlic (but not, apparently enough garlic to fully deter the bar girls across the street, who are nothing if not persistent). I am currently enjoying the best margarita I've had in Asia, which tastes, in fact, like a margarita. And I've made quite a dent in "Bangkok Tattoo," a detective thriller I bought at the only used bookstore I've found in Hong Kong, partly in expectation of this trip and the copious amounts of lounge time it would afford.

So here we are. I'm off to go find something to eat, maybe check out some Thai boxing or a ladyboy show. Stay tuned...

A word on not posting

2007-08-21T18:27:00.000-05:00

I know some of you faithful readers had just about given up on me, and for that I apologize. It appears that, now that I've become more settled in, the growing abundance of distractions available to me makes it ever harder to muster up the interest in posting a big entry, or in fact any entry at all. A lot of the newness of Hong Kong has begun to wear off a little, so I am not nearly as struck by odd observations as I was at the beginning -- I seem to have adapted already to the "new normal," establishing well-worn patterns and paths through the city, and while this makes for a comfortable lifestyle for me, it doesn't exactly inspire a lot of the stranger-in-a-strange-land wonderment that animates a blog.

Plus, I'm lazy. There's always that.

I'm still planning to get around to the Grand Nepali Adventure, actually right after I finish this entry, but there's no telling how long or how comprehensive it will be, or how many of the 1,300 or so pictures our party took will make it onto the blog. (As I've complained many times before, it's the pics that really make the task intimidating; I can write all day long.) I'm guessing at this point people would rather see SOMETHING than wait for an epic that may never come. That is, if you haven't already begun to forget about me. *shameless appeal for guest posts of reassurance, sniff, sniff*

But first, a little bit about what I've been up to the last six weeks or so.

I've been working a lot, shifting into a regular position of authority that entails a great deal more stress than I had anticipated, and, for a while there, almost more than I thought I could handle. Gratefully I have gotten past that point, but it only goes to show how difficult change can be when you've become so used to doing things a certain way. And, working for my particular employer, whose idiosycrasies are legion, has been especially challenging, in no small part because I have little power to effect any changes, even ones that are decades overdue. I could go into more detail, but professional discretion advises against it. Suffice it to say, it's a weird place to work.

I am still in the process of outfitting the apartment, which is amazing, when you consider that it's only 550 square feet. But I have been determined not to buy every single piece of furniture from Ikea, which has meant I've had to scour the city for the remaining pieces, limited now by what space I have left and the stylistic decisions already made. I spent many hours in the giant tower of furniture stores at Ap Lei Chau, for example, with nary a purchase, mainly because I don't have nearly enough room for most of what I found there. Among the items still needed are a dining table, a nightstand, a shelf unit for my travel knickknacks and glassware, various lamps and a replacement for the hand-me-down TV stand I was given by a colleague that doesn't really conform to the emerging color scheme and doesn't fit my particular assortment of components. (I have also reached a point in life at which I feel obligated to display good taste, which coupled with my already crippling indecisiveness and insecurity about my sense of style, makes for terribly slow going indeed. I still, for example, don't see why a full-length mirror affixed to a door is gauche, or what was wrong with my old coffee table, but I have to accept that on some things I just don't have a clue.)

I have also been making friends. Among the first was Jeena, the Nepalese bartender at the sports pub that became my first regular hangout in the neighborhood. One of the quickest ways to get plugged into a social network is to get friendly with a bartender, and before long I was introduced to a long list of her Nepalese compatriots, several of whom work across the street at an Argentine steakhouse that has become my favorite restaurant, and where, on my birthday, they made sure to serve me tiramisu with a candle to blow out. Good people, the Nepalese.

Anyway, the advantages of such connections became apparent early on. One night, I was helping keep Jeena company while she waited until 4 a.m. to close the bar on her boss' sadistic insistence that someone might actually want to watch the U.S. vs. Somebody game in the Under-20 World Cup that was scheduled for that ghastly hour. Of course, when that hour came and no customers followed suit, it was announced that the party would reconvene at Deepwater Bay, on the south side of the island. At the urging of Matt, a leader of the gang and a good friend of mine, I was induced to come along -- "Memories, Dave, memories" -- and after a short stop at 7-Eleven for a couple Heinekens, I was splashing around with the party in the black ocean in my underwear, feeling more than a little bit convinced that moving to Hong Kong was indeed a very good choice.

The same weekend I was invited via e-mail by a friend of a friend, a stranger to me, to a gathering of expat journalists at another neighborhood bar, most of them youngish staffers attached to various magazines. I made fast friends with several of them, one of them a longtime resident who knew all the late-night spots, and after a long and ranging conversation in several different venues, we were emerging from a gay bar in Lan Kwai Fong at dawn, the last place we knew of where we could still get served. One person from that outing, Tim, has become a regular character in my circle.

I've become a regular at a watering hole on my street called Barco, where, in a level of service I've come to expect in Hong Kong, they learned my drink in two visits and my name in three. It's a small little lounge of sorts, with an Australian Chinese owner, Alex, who sometimes lets me plug my iPod into the sound system. There's a good mix of local and expat clientele, there's usually a game of backgammon or "lying dice" going on, and I am always made to feel welcome. Now, if only it had a pool table...

Although the nightlife scene has brought me some much-needed companionship, I have also been frequently engaged in more solitary pursuits. I have been reading more than at any period I can remember, and in the last six weeks have finished James Clavell's epic "Tai-Pan," about the founding of this city, picked up in Nepal; "Gweilo," an English writer's memoir of his '50s childhood in Hong Kong; "The Good Earth," Pearl Buck's novel of pre-revolutionary China, lost once in a cab but finished in borrowed form; "Underground," Haruki Murakami's compilation of the accounts of victims of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway; "Norwegian Wood," the same author's acclaimed breakthrough novel, introduced to me by Ka Ki, a fellow lover of books; "Dune," the Frank Herbert sci-fi novel; "The Wilt Alternative," a comic novel from the English satirist Tom Sharpe, obtained along with "Dune" in Paris; and now, thanks to the too-kind insistence of a dear friend who mailed it at exhorbitant expense from the States, the latest Harry Potter. (The English version available here would not have matched my set.)

Of course, making time for all this has to come at the expense of something, and that has been this blog... and, of presumably less consequence to you, dear reader, of television. Yes, the celebrated sluggery of a weekend lost to TiVo is unknown to me now. There's nothing on I want to watch, and the only time the new flatscreen even gets turned on these days is when I want to watch a DVD (bootlegs, or, sometimes, now that I've found a place that does it, rentals). Granted, reading is not any more physically demanding, but at least it's somewhat more intellectually rewarding.

So, I guess that brings us just about up to speed. Hope all of you are well, and that at least some of you are still coming back...

What's going on in Davestan

2007-07-10T23:25:00.000-05:00

Hello, all. A few updates from the House of Dave:

I spent my first Fourth of July abroad last week, here in Hong Kong. It was also the first Fourth of July I spent at work, as I have usually made pains to get the day off for the usual patriotic and pyrotechnic festivities. As there was little of that to be found round these parts, and I had just taken a week's vacation (more on that later), I went ahead and pulled a shift. Me and some of the boys from the office did gather after work for a few drinks, and there was a loud rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner sung in a Lan Kwai Fong bar that scared away several other patrons. But apart from that, it was a pretty muted holiday for me.

Last weekend I went to the movies with a current colleague and former Chicagoan, Jeff, catching "Planet Terror," the zombie half of the Grindhouse double feature that reportedly bombed back in the States. The movie had several gruesome moments to recommend it, and more over-the-top action than you can shake a stick at, but the highlight had to be the fake trailer for "Machete," a sort of mexploitation flick starring Danny Trejo as a day-laborer who goes on a revenge killing spree. Tag line: "They fucked with the wrong Mexican!" Apparently this has struck a chord with the masses, so look for the full-length feature on DVD...

A few things about the Hong Kong moviegoing experience are worth noting, because they are crazy cool. For one thing, when you order tickets online, you can actually see the seats that are still available, and judge whether you would rather go to a less-crowded screening. People really do apparently sit where they're supposed to, as well. You can bring in Starbucks or anything you want, without a fuss. There are ushers with flashlights to guide you if you show up late, and when I spilled my nearly full popcorn all over the aisle, one of them came and asked if I wanted a new one, specified salty or sweet, and went and fetched it for me, for free. Unfortunately I seem to have lost my sunglasses and case from my pocket, and although they made an impressive effort to find them for me, they had simply disappeared.

Speaking of movies, I have been participating in the underground economy of late. I picked up bootlegs of Die Hard 4 and Shrek 3 and Fast Food Nation just last night, from a roving vendor with a dufflebag. These are the quick and dirty bootlegs, the ones made from a handicam snuck into the theater on opening weekend. Sure, there's probably people talking and standing up in front of the camera and all that, but you get that at the real movies, too... and for a lot more than $2 a flick, U.S., which is what I paid.

In other bootleg news, got some knockoff Chuck Taylors at a shop in Sheung Wan the other day, and while they pinch my feet a little and probably won't last the summer, at $10 a pair, you can't beat 'em. Also got some great T-shirts with nonsense English on them, about $5 each. "Let's take a purpose town!" I'll have a little fashion show for you later on, when I get them all back from the laundry.

Laundry, I may have already noted, is exceedingly convenient here. You call them up, give them your address, and they come and pick up what you have, take it back to the shop, launder and dry clean it as requested, fold it, bring it back to you (the same day!) and if you're not around when they return, they just stick a receipt on the bag for you pay them back the next time. All this for about a dollar a pound (dry cleaning somewhat more), which is comparable to what you would pay at a U.S. laundromat to do it yourself. Of course now my lazy side has taken up the extra slack, and I am now too slothful to even gather my clothes into a bag for them and make the call. I'm down to my last few pairs of boxers.

And now, a sneak preview of My Grand Nepali Adventure (I'm taking time to craft it, and delaying a little to give my postcards a chance to arrive first).

THREATENED with loss of facial hair under cover of night!

STRANDED for hours under the scorching midday sun!

TREED by snorting wild rhinos! *

THROWN into a raging river from an elephant's back!**

SEDUCED by a French backpacker!****

DETAINED by the People's Republic of China!*****

CAUGHT smuggling unknown goods through security!******

CHALLENGED to a drinking contest by a Nepali strongman!*******

MENACED by mobs of desperate sherpas!********

EXPOSED to dangerous pathogens!*********

* Slight exaggeration.

** Significant exaggeration.

**** Wild distortion of an entirely platonic encounter, again, altered for dramatic effect.

***** True.

****** Also true, but misleading.

******* Sort of true.

******** Substantially true.

********* True, if you count the water.

Stay tuned...

Playing catch-up

2007-06-23T01:40:00.000-05:00

OK, so it hasn't exactly been the promised "barrage" of posts. I find that as I actually get settled into my apartment and my life here, I have more and more distractions that keep me from adding to the blog. But I've got the day off today and no real plans, so I'll see about catching you up a bit on the Doings of Dave on the Other Side of the World.

First bit of news: Had my first visitor. Liz, passing through for a night and half a day on her way to Tibet (for live updates, check out her blog). I kinda botched the nighttime entertainment, underestimating the time it would take to clear customs and travel up to the Peak, such that we missed out on sushi on SoHo and had to settle for tandoori pizza at Wildfire. But I like to think I made up for it a bit with lunch the next day, dim sum at the Chao Inn in Kowloon, a place I'd been tipped off to (and visited a week before) by co-workers. I joined Liz and her step-gram, Karen, for a stroll along the waterfront before heading off to work.

The Dragon Boat Festival

That was on Saturday-Sunday. On Tuesday, my mentor and fellow slot volunteered to cover my shift at work so that I could go have a genuine cultural experience, watching the dragon boat races at Stanley, on the south side of the island. Dragon boat racing originated with the fishermen, and there's a whole origin story to it. More than a millennium ago, a virtuous man committed suicide in protest of corrupt officials by throwing himself into a river, and the grateful villagers, moved by this gesture, ran down to the banks and made a ruckus and pounded the waves and threw food into the water to keep the fish from eating the martyr's body. Thus was born dragon boating, with its mad but ordered paddling, drum-pounding, cheering and sticky rice (specially prepared and buoyant for water-tossing purposes, although I'm told this part of the tradition rarely happens anymore).
Anyway, this is what the guide books tell you. What they don't tell you is that catching a bus from Central to the Stanley side of the island in the middle of the afternoon on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival (a public holiday in Hong Kong) will take well over an hour, because of traffic. (The subway doesn't run down there, and taxis are stuck using the same choked highways as the buses.) Even once I got off the bus and headed down to the beach, hungry and hot, it took a while to find the actual event.

Perhaps I was expecting a little more pageantry, a little more of a Chinese New Year experience with fireworks and dragon parades and odd tidbits of traditional food and naked kids splashing in the water, but the festival has become a very Westernized, very corporate thing, with logo-emblazoned tents, Heinekens and San Miguels for sale in plastic cups, a P.A. announcer listing off teams of competitors from Credit Suisse and HSBC and Hewlett Packard, and everywhere you look, a bunch of gweilo shoulders pinking in the Hong Kong sun, wherever their skin's not covered by lycra rowing garb. The whole thing had more of the atmosphere of a city softball championship or a 5K run than anything to celebrate a 1,000-years-dead martyr. (One oddball sighting, at left: Women dressed as naughty nurses, handing out free apples on behalf of an insurance company.)

After watching a few of the races, including the men's final, I made my way back up the beach and into Stanley town, where I had an overpriced lunch of fish and chips at a bar called the Beach House, and then into the warrens of the market, where all manner of clothing, trinkets and souvenirs are sold. I scoped out a few items for the apartment, which is still woefully underdecorated, but didn't buy anything. I can't quite decide just how Chinese to go with it. I remember thinking at B&Bs in the Southwest or Florida how tacky it looked for them to be fully decked out with Kokopelli and turquoise, or palm trees and beach scenes, and it occurs to me that having a place in Hong Kong full of paper lanterns and dragon tapestries might be pretty much the same thing. What may be a cool and exotic "theme" in a place like Dallas becomes a sad little cliche in the real environs. Would you fill a Dallas apartment with armadillos, Lone Star flags and oil wells? (Come to think of it, that wouldn't be cool and exotic anywhere.)

Anyway, after I'd had my fill of the festival and Stanley, I hopped back on the bus for the ride back. The buses here are pretty posh, especially the double-deckers, and the sun was setting as I rode. It's gorgeous, the south side, with the sun reflecting off the water and the trees and the sharp hillsides tumbling into the sea (sometimes literally, in the rainy season). In the city, with its skyscrapers and neon and rushing cabs and crowds, you can sort of forget that you're in the tropics, on a latitude even with Hawaii. On the south side, it really comes home.

Thursday, though, was the really great day, one of my best so far in Hong Kong. I started off by meeting co-workers for dim sum at noon, in a hotel near the office. Although a few things can put me off, I find the tapas-like style of dim sum allows me to experiment much more than I ordinarily would, and I have discovered a lot of things I like.

Afterward I had an iced Chillino from the local coffee chain, then wandered around North Point for a little bit, stopping into a DVD store where I bought my first bootleg DVDs: copies of the Indiana Jones and Lord of the Rings trilogies, together for about $25 U.S. Sweet! I started heading back to my neighborhood by subway, and stopped at the H&M and bought a bunch of new clothes for the summer. A lot of linen, light fabrics, that sort of thing. Ordinarily I don't go on such a spree, but the heat's been taking a lot out of me, and it's just not a jeans climate here. I'm sure everything I bought will be active in the rotation for as long as the weather holds.

I returned to the apartment, where I watched the end of the last Sopranos episode -- initially I was as dismayed and bewildered as most people, but it grew on me after time went by -- and about three-fifths of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (I broke down and bought a 32-inch flatscreen TV, but cable here sucks, so DVDs and the Internet are where I'll be getting most of what I watch.) Then I walked down the street and had a steak dinner with baked potato and corn and shiraz at an Argentine restaurant.

Feeling pretty good about my day already, I crossed the street and had a couple cocktails at a sports bar on Staunton Street, where I correctly spelled "Curacao" for a couple of attractive young women experimenting with the color of their champagne. Finally, I realized that it was now late enough to start talking to people in the States, so I wrapped up the evening by drunk dialing (and later, after I walked home, IM'ing) friends back home, hopefully to their amusement.

It's been, all in all, a fun week in the big city by the sea. Stay tuned, as in less than a week I venture to Nepal...

Ladies and gentlemen, we have Internet

2007-06-11T23:20:00.000-05:00

Yes, folks, I'm back in the wired world again, after far too long on the outside looking in. The cable/broadband guy came over the weekend and set me up good, with a fancy wireless connection and a bunch of channels I will no doubt never watch. (I expect to get most of my TV off the Internet, including the last half of the Sopranos' final season. So no spoilers, please! It's downloading now.)

Of course, JUST in time for my return to the Internet, those bastards in the SBC/AT&T/Yahoo Empire turned off my old e-mail account, so if you tried to contact me with it over the last few days, it probably didn't work. I now have a new mail, which is the same before the @ symbol as before (my first initial, last name, and four digits that mean nothing), but after the @ it's gmail.com. I will be sending a mass mailing on my contact info, including my new physical address, in the next few days.

Anyway, it's time to get ready for another day at work. I promise an assault of entries to make up for my time away. Stay tuned...

Let's get physical

2007-06-04T03:01:00.000-05:00

That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.

It is not yet clear which category this city fits into. At this point, it could go either way.

I have already complained about the heat, but I will do so again, because it is still goddamn hot. Every day the forecast calls for scattered thunderstorms and a high of 87 or 88. Every day it is 92 or 93, doesn't rain a drop, and the humidity-adjusted high tops out around 102 or 103. It is not yet WORSE than summer in Dallas, but it is certainly not any better. And I find myself forced to spend a lot more time outside than I typically did in Texas, which tips things toward the worse side.

I am mostly moved into my new apartment. I've got my couch-chaise combo after all, which apparently never went off sale (the sign was merely misplaced). I have discovered that Hong Kong clerks are so eager to be helpful that they will answer yes to any question, whether they understand it or not. "I don't see the discounted price tag on this anymore. That means it's no longer on sale, right?" "Yes." So the trick is always to phrase the question in such a way that the desired answer is yes. "Even though the tag is gone, this is still on sale, right?" "Yes." "And you are going to buy me a diamond tennis bracelet, right?" "Yes." This could work out nicely.

I also now have a fridge and a microwave, so I can actually keep and prepare some food at the house. Sadly the nearest grocery store is a bit of a long walk and a series of escalator rides away, so I can't buy more than I can comfortably carry for a mile or two. I have discovered that what seems a manageable load as you're walking out the door of the store is something else entirely after you've schlepped it around on the subway, up and down stairs and escalators, and through crowds of oblivious tourists and even more oblivious locals, all in sweltering heat that never dips below 85 even in the middle of the night. Yesterday I bought an ironing board in Causeway Bay and eventually had to carry it on my back like a rucksack (the helpful clerk at the Price Rite having tied plastic twine around it in just such a way as to allow this).

I pass several stores, including two groceries, on my commute home. My theory is, if I buy a few things every night, I can stock the place nicely without too much of a burden on any given day. And if it's a little heavy, it'll just count as a weight-training workout without the nuisance or expense of the gym.

As long as I don't have a heart attack or get hit by a speeding taxi on Staunton Street, I can't lose. But those are big ifs.

Just do it

2007-05-30T03:34:00.000-05:00

An open letter to my brethren bloggers:

I know, I know, it was a holiday weekend, and I'm sure there was lots of fun to be had and probably great weather and all the usual beer drinking and hot dog eating and all that sort of crap. But PLEASE, get off your asses -- well, actually, ON your asses -- and write something.

Shawna, Liz, WILL, Brandon, I'm doing my part! Sam is a blogging fool, Autumn's steady as a rock, and Jeff and Jessica at least appear to have emerged from their slumber, but Nicole, I'm losing all faith in you. Portia, I have flat given up.

But I'm asking you all: Don't let me down. I am desperate for amusements that don't involve poorly translated warning signs. That is all.

Little boxes, on the hillside

2007-05-26T14:23:00.000-05:00

Well, gang, today was the big day. Moving Day. I took care of the last remaining tasks necessary before I could relocate to the new pad... namely, waiting around all day for the gas man to come by and fix the water heater (whose pilot light would not ignite) and for the Ikea guys to deliver and assemble my bed. As an extra bonus, the movers also came by to drop off 39 boxes of assorted junk I'd shipped from Dallas.

I could be spending the night there, but I'd paid for one more night at the hovel, and for all its faults, it does still have one advantage over the new digs: the Internet. So I came back here for one more night, to stock up on iTunes material for the immediate future, pack up the suitcases I've been living out of for the past five weeks, and, because I have no self-control, watch the season finale of Heroes that I should've saved for the 'netless days ahead. (I was pleased.)

Sadly, with the exception of a few episodes of Veronica Mars I hadn't downloaded yet, everything else I've been watching has already concluded for the season (or forever), so I guess I'll have to find other ways to occupy myself. I wish I could get all the unpacking out of the way, but right now I have no furniture (besides the bed) to unpack into, so most of that will have to wait until my second Ikea shipment (desk, bookshelf and wardrobe) arrives on Thursday morning.

After five or six trips to the store, which is four subway stops away, I am finally getting sick of Ikea. This being Saturday it was packed, and while Hong Kongers have a tendency to meander even as they walk on the street, the tendency becomes even more pronounced as they ooh and ah over all the home-decorating possibilities presented by Swedish self-assembly furnishings. This is all the more frustrating when coupled with the trademark Ikea layout, which forces you to snake through the whole store every time you go in. Shortcuts, where they exist, are not labeled, so I'm having to learn all the secret passageways like in some bizarre grown-up version of D&D. "I am Flarke, a third-level Shelf Lord! Behold my mighty tape measure!" "You are attacked by two Pax Organizers. Take 400 dollars' damage." "Nooooooo!"

So anyway, even after Thursday's delivery and subsequent unpacking, I still won't have anything in the living room but boxes. I dithered on a couch-and-chaise longue combo that was on sale and now it isn't anymore, so I have lost my front-runner. And I must make time to find a refrigerator too, as the one I thought I'd be buying on the cheap from the office won't fit in the impossibly poor dimensions of my sad little kitchen. (Between the cramped and underequipped cooking area, the lack of bathroom counters and the complete absence of closet space, I believe it would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions to force a woman to live in my apartment. But it works for me.)

One of the nice things about the place, though, is the view. I'm not quite high enough in the building to have an unobstructed sea view, but I can see spots of the harbor between the other high-rises. Way down below you can see the temple, whose roof I could spit on from my bedroom window. And if I'm ever feeling homesick, I can look out and see the McDonald's on Queens Road Central and pretend I'm still in the States. The windows in the bedroom and office are narrow but deep bays that you can step into, surrounding yourself on three sides. I imagine it would be kick-ass for storm-watching, which pains me to think of, because a thunderstorm is passing through the city as I type this from the hovel.

Anyway, I have another busy day ahead of me tomorrow, as I have to haul all my shit from the hovel up to the new place. I'm planning to hire a cab, but even still I expect it to be a hot and miserable job (today's humidity-adjusted high temperature was 104). I will probably have to have a second shower when I'm done before I head off to work.

Oh, and one other thing. I met my nearest neighbor as we were coming up in the elevator. His name is Frances. There was a young girl with him who he called his sister, though there seemed an awful lot of difference in their ages, so I wonder if he just got the wrong word for "daughter." Eh, who knows. But at least I know that if I need to borrow a cup of sugar, Frances is my man.

Ugh

2007-05-25T01:29:00.000-05:00

Up till now, I had more or less assumed that the most oppressive weather feature Hong Kong had in store for me was the rain. Although scattered thunderstorms have been in the forecast for days (and for as far as the eye can see), it hasn't rained at all yet today.

In fact, as I was walking from the subway to the office, I broke a sweat. Come to find out it was 91 degrees out. With 70 percent humidity, folks, that feels like 103.

Oh, lord.

Rub ma belluh

2007-05-24T18:33:00.000-05:00

Holy Buddha's Birthday, Batman! It's Buddha's Birthday!

Well, actually, it isn't, at least not here in China. It was yesterday. But for those of you lagging behind in the Western Hemisphere, you still have time to belly up the bar, have a nondairy smoothie and contemplate Enlightenment. Or your navel. Because to the Big Guy, it's all pretty much the same thing. Or not. My copy of "Buddhism for Dummies" hasn't arrived yet, so I'm still kinda just guessing.

I've included a few pictures from my pre-Paris visit out to the Big Buddha statue on Lantau Island. The monastery out there is pretty well given over to tourists now, ever since they built the modern gondola system that ferries people directly to the hilltop from the nearest metro station. (In the photo, the tanks you see on the lefthand side of the photo belong to the brand new airport complex, built mostly on land reclaimed from the sea... making the Buddha an easy visit for a long layover.)

Don't look down.

Anyway, like so much of Hong Kong that's worth seeing, the Buddha is not old, having been finished my freshman year of college. The monastery's temple may be older, but it's hard to say, because I can't read Chinese.

The temple, and the dragon at left, are authentic. The tea house is not. Apparently the subway company that financed the gondola was not content with the actual tourist attraction they were exploiting, since all the money went to the monks. So they built a little mini complex between the end of the ride and the Buddha, a sort of Disneyfied version of China with many opportunities to buy food, T-shirts, gelato and the like. There is also something called the Buddha Experience, a multimedia show that takes you through the life of the Enlighted One, and a sort of children's playhouse called the Monkey Theater or somesuch. I didn't get to explore these added attractions, although I paid for them, because I came too late in the afternoon. So I wrap this up with the sunset from the gondola ride down:

On to more vital topics, like... TV

2007-05-20T12:09:00.000-05:00

I spent a lot of time on iTunes in France, keeping up with my stories. I don't watch nearly as much TV as I did in the heady days of TiVo, but $1.99 an episode tends to focus one's affections. But at the rate things are being cancelled, I may have nothing to watch come this time next year.

Jericho, Studio 60, Veronica Mars. All officially got the ax in the last week. Jericho of course ended on a cliffhanger, never to be resolved. Studio 60 still has episodes left, though it's always hard to get up the energy to watch something when you know it's a lame duck. Veronica, well, I always knew that it was never going to last. Ratings.

It's always painful to pick up a show from the very beginning, to love it, and to have it fail because the rest of the viewing public just never gets behind it. I don't blame the networks, though, unless they really screw the show over by changing its time slot or putting it on hiatus for no good reason or something like that. I usually have to blame the public for being stupid. For every Firefly, for every Freaks and Geeks, for every Boomtown, there's some absolute brain-dead garbage trash formula junk show that survives for seven, eight seasons. You know, one of those fat-dad-hot-mom sitcoms, yet another spinoff of some already derivative police procedural show, or some godforsaken reality program about the Next Top American Runway Apprentice Survivor on the Road to Weight Loss While Getting an Extreme Bachelor Makeover. I'm not saying all of it is totally unwatchable crap... I honestly haven't seen most of it, on purpose. But something is muscling all the quality off the dial, and it makes me sad.

Home Sweet Hovel

2007-05-20T10:50:00.000-05:00

I'm back in Hong Kong now, still in the tiny room for at least a couple nights while I figure out how to acquire the bare essential furniture and such to allow me to move into the new place. In a perfect world I would have spent all day Sunday doing precisely that, but I didn't sleep on the flight back and so I ended up just crashing all day in the hovel instead. Of course now it's almost midnight here and I'm wide awake, on a mirror image of the normal clock for HK, so I'm going to be digging out of jet lag for the next week. Yay.

I was ready to get out of Paris, though. I'd had enough of that scene. Everything is overpriced, sometimes to the point of obscenity, and I get tired of trying not to be the ugly American all the time. Being unfailingly polite and quiet and undemanding has the unfortunate side effect of making it impossible to get what you want when you want it without getting ripped off. (I tend to have this problem even in America, but in France it is just exponentially worse, because I feel indebted to anyone who will even deign to speak to me in English. At some point I just want to shout, "Yes, I need you to speak in English, which you obviously know how to do, so stop fucking sighing and just do it. I'm a paying customer, you asshole, even if I am just an ugly American.")

Perhaps the rudest people you'll encounter in France are the ones who work in the Bureaux de Tabac. Through some unique deal with the devil, these guys not only have the monopoly on cigarette sales in the Republic, they also are authorized to serve as as a sort of quasi government agent, so when you need something that would ordinarily be sold by the State -- lottery tickets, stamps, a phone card -- and the usual place to buy such things is closed for a holiday or lunch or just because the staff was overtaken by ennui and decided to close early, which, this being France, is all the fucking time -- you have to go to these guys. Unlike waiters, who at least have at least the prospect of being cluelessly overtipped to motivate decent service, the tobacconists have no such reason to be polite, and as such, they aren't.

Speaking of stamps, it costs 83 euro cents (more than a dollar) to mail a postcard to the States, which is the same price as mailing a letter -- and kind of defeats the purpose of using a postcard in the first place. Apart from the pretty picture, anyway.

So I'm glad to be back in Hong Kong. For one thing, the adherence to capitalist principles that applies here is a comfort. I like being able to buy a Snickers at 2 a.m. at a 7-Eleven. As far as I could tell, no convenience stores as such exist in France, where the retail sector is heavily regulated to ensure that corporate chains have no advantage over mom-and-pop shops. This sounds quaint and loveable in a Ben & Jerry's sort of Socialist Utopia way, until you realize you'd like a can of Pepsi or a bag of beef jerky and there's no way to get one until tomorrow morning. For all the whining you hear, France is hardly beset by American chains. McDonald's and Starbucks are the only ones I saw at all, and even they were not even a tenth as omnipresent as they are in a comparable U.S. city. (There are places in Manhattan where there's a Starbucks on three of four corners of the same intersection.)

Hong Kong is expensive, too, in its own way, but at least you know that if you just round another corner or explore another alley, you'll find some obscure vendor with a pipeline to the Mainland who'll think he's ripping ME off by charging me, say, a U.S. dollar for a knock-off piece of Tupperware. Who speaks broken English but is happy to make a sale, any sale. If you get ripped off in Hong Kong it's because you were too lazy to look for a deal. If you get ripped off in Paris, it's probably because it's state policy to rip you off.

Now, all of this having been said, I would still love to live in Paris someday. A lot of the annoyances that I speak of are manageable and navigable once you know your way around, once you've made friends with the corner shop owner or the newsstand guy or the waiter at the local brasserie. And, most of all, once you've really started to speak French. Once you're IN, you're in. It's probably this underlying attitude that bothered me the most while I was there: I always, always felt like a tourist. I could never shake the sense that no one gave a damn about me because they never expected to see me again, because I was just one of the multitudes who file through the City of Light every year. (I in fact suspect that my experience in France would have been radically different if I had been somewhere other than Paris.)

But Hong Kong is home now. And tomorrow, I pick up the keys to the apartment, journey to Ikea to order a bed, and begin the process of truly settling in. Unless I sleep through it.

And now... visual aids!

2007-05-18T12:01:00.000-05:00

Hi, gang. On my last afternoon in Gay Paree, having a Heineken in a bar called Charlie Birdy's, listening to a Cypress Hill live album and updating the ol' bloggerino. I don't have a new entry for you today, at least not yet, but I DO have something else... photos! I've added pictures to three earlier entries of my France visit, "Hooray for la Democracie," "Tying Up Loose Ends" and "What the Hell Else I Found to Do." Please scroll down and enjoy.

(There are also some text additions, in cases when the photographs reminded me of something I neglected to mention. Not a lot of these, but a few.)

Observations

2007-05-15T17:19:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, it's a stereotype, and the French have different expectations than we do, but really, the cafe service does suck. Every time I want to stay awhile, they bring my tab with my first drink. Every time I want to leave, I have to ask for my tab several times. Maybe it's because the tips are already included.

Two Metro trains, stopped beside each other underground. A song being played opposite, on an accordion. "My Way."

It is the rare French person who stinks. But when you're on a crowded subway car, all it takes is one.

French panhandlers are multilingual. You'd think they'd find a better use for such a marketable skill.

In a bar. A radio station devoted to '80s music. "Red Red Wine," "Say You, Say Me," the theme from "Fame."

The French won't hesitate to bum a cigarette on the street, even if they appear capable of buying their own.

A jogger, nearly run down in traffic. Three French youths begin singing the theme from "Rocky."

The French equivalent of the Daily Show features an anchor with a prosthetic helmet of hair. (The show's funny, too.)

Somehow, I always have room for dessert.

In France, Lay's makes a potato chip supposedly flavored like roast chicken.

How can you respect a police car that looks and sounds like that?

MTV still plays videos here.

Not all the Metro trains have fully automatic doors. You have to throw a little lever, or look like a jackass.

One day, after boarding a crowded train, we all hear the intercom telling us (apparently) to get off, and everyone does. Train leaves empty, next one is as full as the one that left, and we're all supposed to crowd onto that one. Fuck that.

Fifteen dollars for a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee. Fuck that, too.

A "Family Guy" pinball machine.

They really do walk around with baguettes. Under their arms, sometimes.

If you saw how many meals come with them, you'd see why we call them French fries.

Wine is usually a better bargain than Coke, ounce per ounce.

Sir Mix-a-Lot speaks for the French brothers, too.

Why is it that whenever I see a fat person on the street, I instinctively suspect that it's an American?

Hooray for la democracie

2007-05-08T16:56:00.000-05:00

Anyway, a follow-up on the rest of my Sunday.

So, I couldn't stand the thought of staying in my hotel room while a major international news event was going down just a few subway stops away. I dragged my aching body out of the room and trudged down to the Metro station outside my hotel. I was at the bottom of the steps when I heard the announcer saying over the PA that some stations were "ferme," or closed, and some of the names I caught were stations in the vicinity of where I was going. I surmised that they were closing down the subway around the Place de la Concorde as a crowd-control measure. Merde.

I climbed back up the stairs and began to walk downtown. I can't really say how far it was, in blocks, as Paris is not laid out on a grid (more like a spiderweb). My hotel is at 225 Raspail, and I walked to where it ends at 0, then had another 200 address numbers on the next street, the Boulevard St.-Germain, before I got to the river and the central plaza. The most efficient route on the subway would have passed nine stops. Suffice it to say it was a goddamn long walk.

About two-thirds of the way there I came upon La Maison de l'Americain Latine, which would ordinarily not have been at all remarkable, except it was where the defeated candidate, Socialist Segolene Royal, had delivered her concession speech about an hour before. I vaguely remembered the place from TV, and when I saw a pack of news motorcycles -- they had chased her down the street with them, taking video from all sides like paparazzi -- I knew this was the place. She was sequestered inside and didn't seem likely to emerge anytime soon, so I walked on.

As I neared the square I started to encounter people walking in my direction, and I started to fear that the party had come to an end already. I mean, just how excited are you going to be about something like this? But I pressed on.

Finally, I came to the National Assembly building (I know I'm switching between English and French at random) and the bridge that crosses to the Place. I could hear music -- somebody singing "Kiss" in the style of Prince -- and saw that there were still many thousands still out on the square. I'll tell you, those Jeunes Republicains were really partying it up, waving flags, drinking Heineken and dancing, with a heavy reliance on feel-good American songs. "Everybody dance now!" Even the exhortations between songs -- delivered by some Caribbean guy who I suppose is something of a star here -- were mostly in English.

I walked around taking pictures and snippets of video with my camera phone, trying not to seem like a perv with too much interest in the dancing girls. Technically my presence might have been at odds with company policy prohibiting attendance at political rallies, but at this point even my colleagues in Paris had no idea what I looked like, so the likelihood of me betraying some pro-Sarkozy bias simply by being there seemed remote, to say the least. I was there purely as a spectator, anyway, and halfway wondered if there would be some sort of violence that I could then breathlessly report to the newsroom like an actual reporter. No such luck. (I later learned that cars were torched and windows broken in several French cities that night, including elsewhere in Paris, but it was nothing like the riots they had last year.)

I hung around for a little while, soaking up the scene, before grabbing a bite to eat. I had probably a third of the worst hot dog I have ever seen -- the guy was heating them up in a wok sort of thing but instead of giving me the fresh, still vaguely pinkish-looking ones in the middle, he served up the nasty, blackened, puckered ones on the edge. I'm telling you, they looked like the pepperoni sticks at a truck stop, these things, and I was grateful to dump it when I finally found a trash can.

I started to walk back, thinking I'd hail a cab once I'd gotten a few blocks from the scene. But as I kept going, the only ones that passed me were occupied, and I couldn't catch a break. At one point, about halfway, when my knees were going and my ankles were groaning, I managed to hail one to the curb, but he confused me with his questions in French (I thought he might be looking for someone who had phoned for a pick-up, and he wouldn't unlock his doors) and he ended up driving off without me. I had to cover the whole distance again, on foot, and while the streets weren't entirely deserted, I knew I couldn't have outrun even the most geriatric of muggers. Fortunately, I didn't have to.

I can't recall ever having been so grateful to get to bed.

What the hell else I found to do

2007-05-07T05:02:00.000-05:00

My legs are still feeling it this morning, but I covered a hell of a lot of ground yesterday. It's amazing how much of Paris you can see on foot if you don't go inside anywhere. I saw most of the major attractions in the course of a long afternoon.

When I first left my hotel shortly before noon I didn't have much of an agenda in mind. I was aware that I sorely needed a haircut, so I started looking around for a salon. They were all closed. Most of them didn't even mention on their signs that they were closed on Sundays, so I get the impression that it's a given... probably something enshrined in French law. Got to protect those hairdressers' weekends from the encroachment of capitalism.

So I began to walk. Down the Boulevard Arago, where the Paris Observatory is located. It's the oldest observatory still in use, I'm told, but it wasn't accepting visitors. As I passed by, I saw down a side street to where a crowd seemed to be gathering, so I changed directions and found myself in another crowded plaza, outside a church (it was, after all, a Sunday morning). Down a narrow lane another open-air market was packed with people, and I briefly considered ordering a whole chicken, but I didn't think eating it Flintstone-style on a curb somewhere would be regarded as very classy.

Quite by accident I discovered the street where Ernest Hemingway had his first apartment in Paris. I took a picture of the plaque. After having toured his home in January in Key West, I now have two former Big Papa residences under my belt. I suppose someday I'll have to make a pilgrimage to Ketchum, Idaho. Anyway, after savoring my connection to greatness, I surveyed my food options nearby and kept walking. This was a little too heavily touristed for my taste, and any tables available were in the too-cool shade.

I finally settled on a place at the corner of Rue Monge and Rue des Ecoles, where I dined on duck (I do love duck), some delicious cheese potatoes and some salad. I find myself really looking forward to finding a place to eat here, in contrast to Hong Kong, where it still seems like a chore, a necessary evil. Perhaps I picked the wrong metropolis to call home.

An English couple sat down near me, and I listened to their conversation, trying to seem as French as possible as I sipped my cafe au lait. This is a fun little pastime, and while I'm sure my high school French isn't fooling any but the most hurried of locals (and probably not even them), I suspect it is plenty to fool a fellow tourist. I view it as a compliment when someone walks up to me and asks me directions in French, which has happened a couple times already (not that I've been able to supply the answer, or even really understand the question).

I took a leisurely time with lunch, and after finally getting my bill and paying, I started walking again. Before long I was at the foot of Notre Dame and headed along the shore of the Ile de la Cite, which sits in the middle of the Seine. I followed it around, looking for unusual things to photograph. I'd done all the classic postcard shots during my last visit, and, taking my inspiration from Don, now I was trying to think more like an artist and less like a tourist. I don't know how successful I was, but I kept trying.

I walked to the courtyard of the Louvre, shooting the pyramid and then progressing down the Jardin des Tuileries, which stretches on to the Place de la Concorde, the heart of Paris. This is the public square where they guillotined royalists during the Revolution, but now it is full of foreigners queing up for pictures in front of the fountains or the giant Egyptian obelisk in the center. Some guy asked me to photograph him and his girlfriend, and I did a crappy job, because he was using a cameraphone and I couldn't see the display in the midday glare. I was glad to finally be asked, though, as I started to wonder if I seemed untrustworthy. When I'm traveling with someone, I get asked all the time.

At this point the Arc de Triomphe was visible at the end of the long Champs Elysees, so I continued in that direction, savoring a three-scoop ice cream cone I'd bought back in the garden and finishing it up on a park bench. After that, I found an electronics superstore, looking for an AC adapter, but couldn't find one suitable for my needs, so I left empty-handed. At the foot of the arch I turned left down the Avenue Kleberg and proceeded to the Embarcadero, the twin buildings that serve as a gateway to the Seine and the Eiffel Tower beyond.

At the Embarcadero, in-line skaters were jumping off ramps and doing slalom courses for tips. I shot a few pictures but didn't feel compelled to donate. A troupe nearby was demonstrating the famed French contribution to the art of break-dancing. I didn't give to them, either.

Passing beneath the tower, I came to the Champs de Mars, the grassy park that connects the tower to the Peace Monument and the Ecole Militaire. I overheard an American tourist remark on the placement of a peace monument in front of a military school, and I wanted to ask whether he thought it reflected a French appreciation for irony or for equivocation, but I held my tongue.

I also forgot to mention that there was a large gathering of Asian brides gathered on the field near the tower. Apparently this is a very popular place for wedding photos, but only if you're Asian. There were well over a different dozen parties there, sort of like a Chinese remake of The Bachelor.

Although all the brides were clad in virginal white, that doesn't mean we lacked for color on this day on the Champs de Mars. No, the color was supplied by a band of hippies having a drum circle.

My dogs were already barking by this time, so I sat on a bench and watched a couple Americans (presumably) tossing a football around on the Champs de Mars. A Frenchman walked up and joined them, his cigarette still burning in one hand as he set down his beer with the other. I assumed he was French because of the cigarette and because he was wearing a sweater with his shirt tail hanging out underneath, but he had a decent spiral, so maybe he was having fun pretending, too.

After a while I got up and started for the Hotel des Invalides, the hospital for war wounded that now mostly houses a couple of museums. It was nearly deserted, already closed. I knew that the French elections that were taking place on Sunday were supposed to have results after 8 o'clock, and I wanted to be around people in case the reaction was dramatic. I didn't know where else to go, so I bought a copy of Le Monde for guidance, sat down at a sidewalk cafe closer to the Ecole Militaire, ordered a coffee and waited.

A pair of tourists on the inside of the cafe tapped on the window as they saw me puzzling through Le Monde's election coverage. (It's not that hard to get the gist, as French politicians say the same sorts of pablum as Americans do, evoking the same sorts of imagery. The conservative, preaching to the young about the sacrifices of war heroes, the liberal, sounding off about diversity and heart and all that. In all, they both hewed very close to the script.) Anyway, the tourists wanted me to hold up the paper to the glass for a photo, and I became aware that they must certainly take me for a local. I basked in the illusion.

Eight o'clock came and went without a word. At about eight-thirty, someone started honking in the street, and I knew the results had probably been announced. Still, no one was chanting names, so I couldn't figure it out. I eventually had to ask my waiter (in French! I was so proud) who won. It was Sarkozy, the conservative. Like a good service-industry member, he evinced no emotion either way.

There were no riots in the streets, so, disappointed, I made my way to the Metro station that took me back to the hotel. I was footsore and tired and hungry and would almost surely have stayed in for the night, except I turned on the TV and found that the party had started in the Place de la Concorde. I personally don't much care who won the election, but I've never been in a national capital when a new chief executive was chosen, so I didn't want to miss the spectacle.

I'll finish this up later; got to get ready for work.

Tying up loose ends

2007-05-06T02:10:00.000-05:00

I had a full day yesterday in Paris, after arriving around 7 in the morning. I was determined not to let jet-lag ruin my trip, so I decided to stay up as long as I could, even though I hadn't slept much on the 12-hour plane ride over.

It was overcast, chilled and windy that morning. My first jaunt out into the neighborhood was quickly aborted so I could return to the room to grab my jacket; I pleased myself for a split-second by shivering to the desk clerk and muttering "Il fait chaud!" as I passed, which made her laugh. I hope this is because she thought I was being cleverly sarcastic ("chaud" meaning "hot") and not because she thought I was an idiot.

So, I start wandering. The neighborhood of my hotel is the Montparnasse, in the south of Paris. I had noted from my guide map that there was a large cemetery nearby, and I had some vague recollection that there might be some famous Americans buried there, so I walked through it and took pictures of the large, above-ground mausoleums. There were some famous personages among the dead, but there were all French (except for Irish writer Samuel Beckett), and the graves are not especially easy to find, so I aborted the mission.

The most famous American laid to rest in a Paris cemetery is Jim Morrison, but he's way the hell out east in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, I discovered later at an Internet cafe, where two euros bought me 15 minutes. Ordinarily 15 minutes would be plenty, but I was using a French keyboard, which positions many of the most-useful keys in unfamiliar places, which makes everything take forever.

There was a large open-air market adjacent to the cemetery that made me wish my room came with a kitchenette. Not just the usual fruits and vegetables, but a full meat and fish market, too, as well as clothing and jewelry and various and sundry other stuff for sale. I was struck by the fact that Paris seemed more like Hong Kong in this respect than either of them seemed like Dallas.

I stopped in at a corner cafe for breakfast, but after sitting down (inside, as it was still too cold to comfortably park in the wind), I discovered to my dismay that there lots of English-speaking people around and even a few signs and menus in English, which are the telltale signs of an inevitably overpriced tourist haven. I spent probably $15 on a basic breakfast of eggs, bread, coffee and OJ.

I am uncomfortable with the tipping situation here. I understand that every place tacks a rather hefty service charge onto the bill, so tipping should not be strictly necessary at all, but my guidebook says the French will usually leave "a few coins" on the table anyway, and I never seem to have anything very small available to give. I think waiters perform some sort of voodoo math with your change that always ensures that you can only tip big or not at all, and rather than come off as a cheap Americain, I end up coming off as a clueless overtipping Americain. (This happens in Hong Kong, too, but not so often, because currency differences ensure I always have lots of small change... and there, the service charge is small, so I feel justified in dropping a buck or two extra.)

I made my way back to the hotel to drop off my heavy laptop bag and headed down to a place I'd missed during my last trip to Paris, the Catacombs. Apparently at some point in the late 1700s they decided that the city's cemeteries were a health risk, so they up and dug everyone up and moved all the remains -- I think I read estimates of as many as six million people, the population of Paris over the course of several centuries -- into quarries south of town, where the Montparnasse neighborhood now sits. The Catacombs, as they later became known, are the home of all these lovely bones, stacked like cordwood 20 meters below the cityscape, often artfully displayed with skulls and femurs making out patterns in the darkened subterranean corridors. It would make for an excellent Halloween venue.

You're told not to take flash photographs down there, as in many of your finer museums and caves, although I suspect it has more to do with not disorienting other tourists than any desire to protect the dead from the deleterious effects of severe lighting. After all, if these dearly departed were going to haunt anyone for disrespect, surely they would have more of a beef with the bastard bureaucrats who had them all disinterred in the first place; and taking their picture is a damn sight less disrespectful than mixing up their bones and rearranging them in the shape of a cross.

But it was the irony of it all that got me. All these poor souls got moved because Paris was afraid they were making people sick -- which was probably true of the freshest ones, but once you're in the ground for a coupla decades, you're not any more toxic than potting soil. They got carted off to the suburbs, used like elbow pasta in some macabre macaroni art under the earth, and when all is said and done, they are now in closer proximity to live, breathing humans (at seven euros a head, mind you!) than they ever were in their original resting places. C'est le mort.

As you emerge from the tunnels, a guard asks people with bags to open them for inspection, so they can check for any morbid souvenirs. I overheard a couple of American tourists behind me joking about the kind of conversation you would have if you, not aware of the inspection to come, were unfortunate enough to be caught red-handed with a bagful of body parts. "Uh, how'd that get in there?" No such thievery was discovered on my watch, sadly, so we're left to speculate.

I made my way after that toward the Seine, walking through the large Jardin du Luxembourg, the grassy expanse extending south from what is now the French Senate building. Two small sub-parks are dedicated to the great explorers, Marco Polo (distinctly not French) and Robert de la Salle (French, but killed on the job, probably in Texas). A boy kicking a ball around with his dad passed it my direction, probably by accident, but I passed it back to him as I walked along.

At the end of the garden, there's a large pool which is used by kids playing with toy sailboats. I was reminded of the similar pool at Victoria Park in Hong Kong, except the Hong Kong version is more for the modern, remote-control variety, not the analog versions prevalent here. I am told that the pool is featured in the widely used language-instruction series "French in Action," which I know I saw, but I can't say I really remember that.

I walked toward the Pantheon, which one would have to conclude was shamelessly copied from the U.S. Capitol, if it hadn't had the exteme bad taste of being finished several years before the Capitol's first stone was laid. I had seen the inside on my previous trip so I kept going, headed toward the river and my second destination, the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. I had also skipped this on my last trip to the city, so I was eager to correct that mistake.

Shakespeare and Company is an English-language book shop, situated just across the river from Notre Dame, and featured in the excellent Richard Linklater sequel Before Sunset. It was a haven for Beat writers, much like City Lights in San Francisco, but unlike the latter, and to my dismay, they don't appear to sell T-shirts. An earlier version of the store, at another location, was a hangout for expat writers between the world wars, and is described in Hemingway's book, A Moveable Feast, which is available for sale at the newer store (est. 1951) for a scandalous 11 euros. I opted instead for a used copy of Hunter S. Thompson's Rum Diary, which describes the lives of vagrant expat journalists in sultry San Juan in the '50s.

It was this book that I was reading as I sipped coffee in a nearby sidewalk cafe (it had warmed up by then), having just dined on mussels and French fries and finished a glass of white wine. There was much ballyhooing a few months back about France banning smoking in such venues, but if that did in fact happen, enforcement is distinctly, and happily, lax.

And so I was able to complete the last of the three things that I was unable to do during my last trip to the City of Light. Now I have two more weeks... what the hell else am I going to do?

Bon voyage a moi

2007-05-04T10:35:00.000-05:00

Firing up the laptop and getting connected to the free Wi-Fi network at the airport took forever, so I've only got a few minutes to dash off a message before I board my flight for Paris.

It seems weird to be back at the airport less than a month after touching down in Hong Kong, but this globetrotting, despite its hassles, is exactly what this whole adventure is all about. I'm still trying to figure out whether I can squeeze in a short trip to London or Amsterdam while I'm in France. Hate to travel halfway around the world without adding any new countries to the list, and I saw most of the highlights of Paris the last time I was here.

Got to go; line's almost gone. See you guys later!

Homeless no more

2007-04-30T23:34:00.000-05:00

Finally signed the papers on my new apartment. It's the one I'd been angling for, up behind the temple, so I'm pleased, though it certainly took a long time to secure. My leasing agents kept giving me the runaround and putting me off. If the deal had fallen through I would certainly have fired them and started using somebody else, but they delivered in the end.

Of course, they didn't actually DO very much. The listing was posted in their window, and I'm the one who said, "I really want to see THIS one." It's possible I would have found it through the complex's own Web site, too. They showed me units in another building that I wasn't really interested in, and they took care of some of the paperwork, but that was about it. And for this contribution, I have to pay them about $700 U.S. (Luckily, this expense should be covered under my moving allowance.)

The place is small, about 550 square feet. There are two very small bedrooms (a queen would probably fill the whole floor), a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom, and a larger living area. There's a bay window in the living room and floor-to-ceiling bay windows in each of the bedrooms, which allows a flow-through breeze if you stand in them with the panes open. I had hoped for a balcony but knew that would be a tall order in that neighborhood, and something that would probably push the place out of my price range.

There are three window-unit air-conditioners, which is how all apartments are here, as far as I can tell. (And which makes some sense when you consider the small area they need to cool.) There is also a dedicated water heater in every unit (also standard), so my neighbors can't cheat me out of hot water if I'm the last to shower. (Although I can easily cheat myself, as the capacity is not very large.) There's a small tub, shorter than your usual Western model, but anything's better than just having a shower stall.

But, the place does lack some amenities considered basic, or at least common, in the States. There's no oven, cooktop, microwave, refrigerator, dishwasher or washer-dryer. Some of these I will supply myself, obviously... there's a surplus fridge and stove at the office that I've been told I can get for a steal, and the expat boards are full of people looking to unload appliances and furniture before they move back wherever they came from. Others, like the washer-dryer, I will try to do without (it being crazy cheap to have your laundry done by a delivery service).

I went by the place yesterday after I signed the papers to take some pictures and some measurements. The pictures didn't work out so well, as there was a shirtless guy doing repair work there and a mess of tools and sawdust everywhere. (It's also very difficult to capture a small space without special lenses.) So you'll have to wait until I actually move in to see what the place is really like.

Move-in won't happen until after I get back from Paris; the apartment managers still had work to do to the place, including new paint and a thorough cleaning. I will have to work quickly to outfit the place with the bare essentials, or at least a bed and a shower curtain, before I can let go of this hole in the wall. I'm eager to get started but a little intimidated at the same time. I haven't decorated an entire place from scratch since the Velasco duplex, and that took many months and never looked much better than passable. I'm older and have more money now; the expectations (at least of myself) are higher.

But, at least there's Ikea. Everyone in Hong Kong loves Ikea -- I have been encouraged to shop there by several people, both local and transplant -- though a lot of people can't seem to pronounce it, and many of them seem unaware that the secret's out. The store's small-space solutions and low prices are very much aligned with Chinese needs, and the style and relative disposability appeals to the expats. I have already been to the nearest store twice, to sort of start gauging my options and figure out what will fit (which isn't a whole lot). One nice thing about a small place: less space to fill.

At the minimum, I'll need a bed, a wardrobe (closets are a rarity here, and I have none), a computer desk and chair, and a couch that can serve as a guest bed in a pinch. Things like a dining set, a coffee table, a nightstand and an entertainment center (if I even decide to get one) can wait.

I still haven't decided whether to even invest in a TV. Because of differing technical standards anything I buy here won't work in the States, and it seems likely that I'll be getting most of my programming over the Internet anyway, so my laptop can probably fill the bill (as it's been doing during my time here in the hovel). Still, as an American, I can hardly figure out how to organize a living room without a TV as the focal point. It just seems so ... wrong.

Anyway, I should probably be getting ready for work. I called the laundry people a while back but they seem to be standing me up. More later, folks...

It still beats the DMV

2007-04-25T09:59:00.000-05:00

Had my first encounter with the Chinese bureaucracy today.

As I understand it, all visitors who plan to stay in Hong Kong longer than 180 days are supposed to apply for an identity card within 30 days of arriving. The nice office liasion lady at work set up an appointment for me this morning at 11, in the big, bland Immigration Building in the Wan Chai neighborhood, five or six stops away on the subway.

I was a little late getting there, having had elevator trouble, and when I arrived I saw people lined up behind a queue sign that read "Internet and phone appointments only." As my appointment had been set up on the Internet, I stood in this line. (A second queue sign read "Walk-in quota," but no one was standing next to that.) I was there for a while, not moving an inch, kinda wondering to myself what was the point of setting up an appointment if you just had to stand in line anyway. I was also wondering why we were gathered in a disorganized blob in the lobby, when there were nylon queue ropes snaking in front of the booths that ordinarily would be used for this purpose.

A couple of people were standing at the front of the line, directing folks, so I left my post and asked them if I was standing in the right place. No, I wasn't. I was supposed to enter the snaking ropes and walk right up to the nearest reception booth. The line that had developed behind the "Internet and phone appointments only" sign apparently was the walk-in contingent. I have to stop taking these English signs so literally.

So I go up to reception, show them my passport, and they give me a form to fill out and a number. I fill out the form and wait for my number to be flashed on a TV monitor on the wall. I'm 357, and they're on 279. Great. Fortunately, I have a book with me.

Eventually they get to me, and I go to the designated booth, where I hand her my passport and my completed form. They scan my thumbprints and take my picture, then send me around the corner, where I am to sit and wait for my number (the same number) to be called again. I finish my book before they get to me the second time.

Finally, No. 357. I walk to the booth, hand her my passport and completed form, and they scan my thumbprints again. They don't ask me any more questions or have me fill out any other forms. In fact, the only thing that seems different about the second booth, other than they don't take my picture, is the scanner pad looks marginally different. I begin to think that this is all just a test of my patience. How badly do I want it?

About two hours and 15 minutes into this process, the immigration lady slides something across the counter at me. Not the identity card, of course. It's a piece of paper with a range of dates on it, showing when I am supposed to come back to pick up the identity card. That's all I get for two hours and fifteen minutes, entailing all of five minutes of actual face time: another appointment.

Some photos and stuff

2007-04-23T11:17:00.000-05:00

I am a few steps closer to getting a permanent place in Hong Kong. This is good, because my temporary place is tiny, only about 270 square feet. A photo of my tiny digs appears at left.

Note the TV, helpfully suspended above the single bed. It also swivels to be viewed from the tiny desk, at left. There is no remote, but that hardly matters, because there is no where to sit that is not within reach of the controls. And besides, only two of the channels are in English, and even then, only part of the time, so there's not a lot of surfing to be done. Last night my choices were The Apprentice vs. Survivor. For the love of God.

A lot of the best American shows are only available on satellite, which I can't get here. I don't know if I can get it in my new place, either, but I didn't move halfway around the world to watch TV.

One of the things I like about the place I'm in now is the balcony. Here's a view. It has a cozy, sort of Alcatrazy feel, don't you think?

Anyway, I have made an offer on the new place. It is still pretty small by U.S. standards but I'd be on the 18th floor, up behind the Man Mo Temple I described an entry or so ago. I went back there, by the way, and took some pictures this time:

If you look closely behind the temple, over the blue "Flats for Lease" sign, you can see the building where I hope to live. It is called Tung Shing Terrace, and it is owned by the nearby hospital, which also maintains the temple. At right is a picture of an altar inside, with the ubiquitous incense.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point that the temple, despite the dark and forbidding interior you see below, is not really all that old.

Neither is the rest of the city, for that matter. Although people have lived or fished around the island for many, many hundreds of years, the permanent settlement began with the British in 1841... only about three months before John Neely Bryan founded Dallas.

So it is modernity that really defines the place. My desired new place is about a seven-minute walk from this emblem of modernity, the Central-to-Mid-Levels Escalator. It stretches about a half a mile from end to end, in several sections, and covers about 450 feet in elevation.

I would probably be using this on my commute home. But not my commute to work, as it would be running in the wrong direction in the afternoon, and there are more direct routes if I'm going to actually walk.

I happened to be standing on a pedestrian overpass over Queen's Road Central one recent evening and looked up to see this very modern sight:

The glowing Phallus to the Heavens you see above is Two International Finance Centre, the tallest building in Hong Kong. Finished just four years ago, it is allegedly 88 stories and 1,362 feet tall -- taller than the Empire State Building, but not the Sears Tower -- but an even bigger building is scheduled to be completed across the harbor in Kowloon by 2010. (I understand from wikipedia that there are actually fewer than 88 stories because the 14th and 24th floors are omitted because those numbers are bad voodoo to the Chinese. I'm also told the top of the IFC is in-swept in an effort to appear "beckoning," but in the daylight I swear it looks like the guard on a barber's electric razor.)

Well, it's getting kinda late and I better be getting to bed. I'll leave you with one last picture, for a restaurant near my little hole in the wall:

Sounds like my kinda noddles.

The lessons of Virginia Tech

2007-04-20T09:23:00.000-05:00

RE: The continuing story out of Blacksurg, Virginia.

I was not at work for the big news (naturally). I had the day off. I didn't even find out about it from a traditional news source, unless you count IMs from dear Jamie traditional. Like most people, I was struck immediately by the sheer number of dead; ordinarily in such massacres the killer doesn't have such discriminating aim, or enough time to be so thorough. I was especially surprised to learn he'd managed it all with two ordinary handguns, and not the arsenal of wicked weaponry that had been the tools of the trade for "Eric and Dylan," the kindred-spirit losers he so idolized.

As the story unfolded, and we heard it might have been an exchange student, I allowed myself to breathe the tiniest sigh of relief, hoping that at least this time it would not be one of "our own." That relief was short-lived, when it became clear that the foreigner had come to us at the tender age of 8. Immigrant though he may have been, he was raised here, in our midst. Our son. Our crazy fucking loner nutjob psychopath son. Lovely.

The story was given prominent play here in all the papers -- first as yet another example of American ultraviolence, then as an exercise in self-flagellation as Asia came to realize this particular Rambo wannabe had once been Korean. There have been copious interviews with relations and teachers on this side of the Pacific, including an uncle who thought it might all have started when he was given the name Seung Hui, a "girl's name." (Call it the Boy Named Sue defense.)

Asian culture being what it is, they do seem to feel responsible for this kid. Shame is visited upon any family whose child strays, especially one who strays this horribly. It doesn't matter that they hadn't so much as seen him since he left 15 years ago as a little boy. The family that might actually be responsible, the one over there in the States, hasn't been able to show its face to comment. I can't say I blame them.

American culture being what IT is, the race is on to assign blame anywhere and everywhere it will stick. First up is the university, which is being second-guessed for everything, from not canceling classes after the first round of shooting, to not kicking the kid out when he first started exhibiting disturbing behavior more than a year ago.

Both of these complaints demonstrate a naive view of what a college campus actually is. Virginia Tech is a campus of 2,600 acres with nearly 30,000 students. Now, if this guy had shot up a hotel room, disappeared for two hours, then gone to an office building a half-mile away and started shooting, no one would fault the office building for failing to close down early. When Tech claims to have had no reason to suspect the dorm shooting would presage a full-fledged massacre, they have a point. Surely there are hundreds, if not thousands, of one- and two-victim shootings that end there, without the killer going on a super-spree. If America closed down every time anybody got shot, we'd never get anything done.

As for the second question, whether the university should have "done something" based on Cho's bizarre behavior in the months before the attacks, well, just what would we have expected them to do? Expel him for being a loser who sent annoying text messages to coeds? Institutionalize him for writing twisted, violent English papers? Half the guys I grew up with were inept with girls and occasionally fascinated with bleak imagery, and none of us were crazy, violent or suicidal. In hindsight, of COURSE this guy looks like a maniac just waiting to crack. But there are lots of people just like him who never go over the edge.

Listen, I'm not saying that things couldn't have been done differently, that there might not have been a better outcome than the one we got. In particular we seem to have seen a breakdown in the gun laws, which are supposed to keep people like this guy from having firearms. You don't have to change the statutes -- this was a guy once legally judged to be a threat to himself. Under the law, even in red-state Virginia, he was ineligible to buy a gun. But he got one anyway, through "legal" channels, because of loopholes that keep vital information from being passed to the people who need it. I'd have a lot more sympathy for the NRA if it spent a few of its millions lobbying for better enforcement of the laws we have, instead of just fighting phantom threats to the Second Amendment, chipping away at every law that gets passed by stripping its funding or undermining its implementation. (Requiring background checks but not allowing the data actually be KEPT anywhere? Come ON.)

But even this is beside the point. Even with vastly stricter laws and enforcement than we have today, the guy might still have got a weapon. Even if you banned every gun, there would still be some out there, and as Tim McVeigh proved, you don't need bullets to kill, anyway. The bottom line is, shit happens. People go crazy. People kill. You can wring your hands and point your fingers and write in your blogs as much as you want, but the world isn't perfect. And sometimes a free society is the least perfect of all.

I'm sorry about what happened at Blacksburg. I hope we can patch the holes in our mental health system and our gun laws and reduce the likelihood of another tragedy like the one perpetrated by Cho Seung Hui. But I expect no cure-all solutions, no magic bullets. As long as there are losers with a screw loose who watch too many movies and bomb with too many girls -- and I don't see any reason to anticipate anything else -- there will be catastrophes like these.

"That's the sound of the men ..."

2007-04-17T22:52:00.000-05:00

Getting ready for another workday in a couple of hours, so I thought I might talk a little bit about the job itself. I hesitate to be fully candid -- who knows who might be reading this, and this is no time to be alienating anybody -- but I'm sure there's still some worthwhile things to discuss.

Adjusting to the editing style of the paper has been tricky. There are a few rules here that take some getting used to. For one, there is a severe aversion to long adjectival compounds -- so you couldn't write U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. You'd have to say Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state. This may not sound like much, but when you string together a list of important people with big titles in a sentence or a photo caption, you end up having to string together a lot of commas, and everything takes a lot of extra words. When you are trying to write something as short as possible, because space is limited, this becomes a serious constraint. I have to unlearn many of the shortcuts that had become automatic for me in Dallas.

They are also strict about bad headline breaks. (For you laymen out there, if you're still reading, that means splitting two words of a single phrase -- say, "doctor's orders" between two lines, so that the first line ends with "doctor's" and the next begins with "orders.") This is a no-no. We used to be strict about this in Dallas, too, but I was one of the people who consistently fought against it, and by the time I left, we had loosened up quite a bit. Enforcing the rule is fine if you can do it, but I always thought it was more important to get more information in the headline. Here, they seem to accept that losing key words in a headline in support of following the rule is just the price you have to pay. This also means a lot of unlearning of old habits for me.

Add to this all the usual quirks of style to memorize, what's hyphenated and what's not, how they spell and capitalize certain things and what not, and it's been a steep learning curve. I'd like to think I'm doing a good job at it, but this is the first time I've had to learn a new style in 10 years. There's also a new (and clunky) editing software to use, with all its shortcut keys, that slows me down. I had become a triage specialist in Dallas, moving copy like crazy in seconds, if need be, and the pace is totally different. My strengths will take weeks to really show; my weaknesses are all on display. It is enough to make even a very confident person a little insecure.

But enough about work.

I had a day off yesterday, and I spent it mostly looking around the neighborhood of my temporary digs, really getting to know the streets and where things are. I thought about venturing further afield, but it looked like it was going to rain at any point, so I didn't want to get too far away. It ended up raining only after 10, when I'd already settled in for the night.

I'm still on nearly a normal person's schedule, awakening at 8 or 9 and going to bed around midnight. This is a combination of lingering jet lag as well as the loud construction site operating across the street from my building. There is a massive pounding at 8 a.m. each day as they drive support columns into the ground with a huge weight. It shakes the floor, and even earplugs can't keep it out. Ordinarily this would really piss me off, but I'm kinda liking being awake during the day. I may try to hang on to this schedule as long as I can. (It also helps facilitate communication with the States.)

My building's fire alarm went off yesterday around 6 o'clock, and I dutifully walked down the stairs to the street. I was the first person out, but eventually about a half-dozen fellow tenants joined me. They went into the lobby and called the landlord to come turn the alarm off, because there wasn't a fire. Apparently this happens a lot; there is a flier in the elevator discussing "improvements" to the fire alarm system. Though I am comfortable here in the short term, I am really looking forward to having a permanent place. Someplace bigger, quieter, where I can decorate and take delivery of my shipped possessions, which are still awaiting direction in some warehouse in Dallas.

Yesterday during my wanderings I did come across something interesting: a film crew. They were setting up a shot in some alley a few blocks from my place, and a bunch of looky-loos like myself were gathered around, watching. I don't think they ever actually shot anything while I was standing there, but I did get shooed at one point to the other side of the street while they fired water into the air, I guess to simulate rain. I wish I knew what they were filming, so I could look for it when it comes out. Who knows, I may become a star of the Hong Kong cinema! "Star" in the sense of "scenery," but still.

I guess I'd better start getting ready for work. Thanks to you all for tuning in.

Mundane in the membrane

2007-04-14T07:57:00.000-05:00

It's been a long week here in the big, big city, but I finally have come to a day off (my first!) and therefore have a little time to update y'all on how things are going.

I've had a frustrating time trying to secure a place to live. The first time I tried to see a place, I rode the subway all the way the hell down to Sheung Wan, the end of the line on Hong Kong Island, in the hopes that I could rouse someone by telephone to meet me and show me the place (I had already communicated by e-mail but hadn't set an appointment). Nope, nobody returned my calls. At least, not until I got fed up and left the neighborhood.

I schlepped all the way BACK on the subway to the North Point/Quarry Bay area, which is where the office is located, to look for another apartment I'd seen online. I DID have an appointment for that place, but when I arrived -- late, because I got bad directions -- the helper lady showing the place had the wrong keys. Left empty-handed again.

I did eventually get to see both places, although the first one ended up not being available -- a point the woman on the phone helpfully did NOT mention before I traveled all the way back there -- and the second one, while available and pretty big by Hong Kong standards, just wasn't what I was looking for. (I wanted a short-term place in a lively neighborhood, and this was a long-term place in a boring one.)

I finally did get a place, though, this afternoon. It's in the area of the unavailable apartment, Sheung Wan, but quite a bit cheaper, so it's kind of a good thing I couldn't take the first one. Of course, it is still teeny-tiny, and it will cost me almost as much as my last Dallas apartment did, but at least all the utilities are covered, it's furnished, and there's free cable and Internet. (One quirk: the toilet sorta shares space with the shower, without an intervening curtain or wall, so one could theoretically take a shower from atop the throne.) I'm planning to stay there a month or two while I look for someplace more permanent, probably with the help of an apartment locator. The permanent place will be more about value and space; this was about being in the heart of things -- both for the fun of it and for the convenience it will offer in the ongoing search.

I apologize, by the way, for going on and on about such mundane topics. I am sure you would all much prefer to hear me talking about crazy China shit. So let's see...

I have eaten Chinese food a couple times now. A co-worker of mine took me to lunch at a Chinese barbecue place where I had some pork and some duck. My companion says he always orders the same thing but never gets charged the same price. Later, I ventured myself to a chain restaurant called Cafe de Coral, where you order Chinese or Western food from a counter (I again had the duck, because, hey, I like duck).

I have also been to McDonald's again a couple times. At one place I'd visited before, the girl remembered me, and when I specified only "no onions" -- onions are hard to scrape off -- she recalled that last time, I had also asked for no pickles. Obviously as a Westerner with an odd order I am more memorable than most customers she must see, but still, I was actually a little touched.

Another note about Mickey D's ... customers don't bus their own tables there. I stand up, and before I can put on my coat, someone has whisked away my tray. And when it's crowded, someone will go through the line and take orders by hand and give you a card to hand the cashier just to speed things up. McDonald's may be an American invention, but the Chinese sure do it better.

Hong Kong is an assault on the senses, particularly the nose. Whether it's roasting meat, the smell of the ocean, urine or B.O., it's always there. There's also a sort of sickly, metal-meets-maple-syrup odor that I've come to assume is the air pollution. It really is bad. The past few days have been can't-see-across-the-harbor days. I find myself actually rooting for the rain, even though I know that when the rainy season starts, it won't stop again for five or six months. So far, it's been overcast nearly every day, but it's not done much more than sprinkle.

As tonight is my last night in the hotel, I had to obtain a cellphone to replace the loaner I was given by the front desk. Bought myself a kickass Nokia number with lots of bells and whistles -- it's a 2005 model, so it was on sale. It's got still and video photography capability, bluetooth, tri-band (so it works in the States as well as the rest of the world) and a bunch of other junk I probably won't ever learn to use before I inevitably lose it.

But there was one thing that it didn't have: a charger. I looked through all the doohickies and discs and manuals and whatnot in the box and couldn't find one anywheres. I looked in the instructions and there wasn't one of those "what you should find in this box" pages, either, so I started thinking maybe cellphones in Hong Kong don't come with chargers automatically (given that the Asian market involves several different wall-plug configurations). I marched back down to the Fortress and asked them about it, trying not to let on that I didn't know whether I'd actually been cheated or not. Fortunately, they didn't try to screw me. They just took down another box and retrieved the charger from that one, presumably screwing the next guy. Sucks to be him.

I have also learned my first Cantonese phrase, mmm goi. It means, depending on the context, "Excuse me," "I'm sorry," or "Thank you," which makes it a very useful phrase indeed. I am sure I have probably mispronounced or misused it a few times already, but it seems like the least I can do for my hosts, who have to put up with my idiot questions and uncomprehending stares. I would like to be able to speak on a basic tourist's level at some point; I don't think there's any hope of having a real conversation with anyone, but I should at least be able to ask for the bathroom or understand what things cost.

The loaner cellphone from the hotel actually had one feature I'm going to miss: when you pressed the numbers, a pleasant woman's voice repeated the numbers back to you in Chinese. It was almost like Sesame Street in my pocket.

At one point I actually knew some other Cantonese words, courtesy of Doris. She always loved to point out when Chinese people in a Western movie shifted between Cantonese and Mandarin for no good reason, not that I could ever hope to tell the difference. Of course now I can't remember anything she taught me.

Hong Kong is a deeply cosmopolitan city. I've already heard French, Italian, Spanish, what I can only assume was Tagalog, and English of all kinds, Australian, English, Indian, American, even Canadian. Just a few minutes ago, an Asian lady in the elevator tried to tell a Chinese guy what floor to press, and he couldn't understand her, so I guess she wasn't speaking Chinese, either. I've probably heard a dozen languages but can only distinguish the European ones.

Most places I go, of course, I'm one of few if not the only Anglo around. But I can tell I'm not the only non-Chinese. I'm not exactly an expert at telling Asian nationalities apart just by facial features and other visual cues, but there are substantial differences in skin tone and bone structure (not to mention clues in the style and quality of dress). And Hong Kong, being a major crossroads of trade and one of the wealthiest cities in Asia, has a lot of immigrants from poorer countries around the region (unlike, say, Japan, which I understand to be almost entirely homogenous). It's comforting to know I'm not the only stranger in this strange land, even if I am the only one with blue eyes.

I spent some more time walking around this afternoon, near the area where I'll be living, and at one point I strayed from the usual tourist zones to a thoroughly Chinese area of town. I was walking past shop after shop filled with strange items for sale, herbs and mushrooms and shark fin and various dried, dead plants and fungus and whatnot. A couple places had lizard on a t-shaped stick, stretched and dried out like some sort of reptilian Jesus-sicle. I wasn't sure if you were supposed to eat it or wave it around to scare off evil spirits.

There were so many of these shops, in fact, that I began to conclude that I must be in the herbal-medicine district. Very little of it looked like regular foodstuffs, something you would use in cooking. No, this was the sort of stuff you boil down in your tea or grind up into your noodles to cure whatever ails ya. I'm not such a Western snob as to think there's no wisdom behind any of these remedies, but with some of them, I'd frankly rather be sick.

Wandering back toward the more-Anglicized part of town, I made my way up Hollywood Road, which is termed "Antiques Street" by the local tourism honchos and is in fact filled with a lot of old-looking curios and furniture. One place sold sculptures carved from "mammoth bone," which I really hope wasn't ivory. The one that caught my eye was about two feet tall, depicting what looked like a bug-eyed samurai battling an even more bug-eyed octopus. Weird.

Further up Hollywood Road -- which gives the Soho district its northern border and its name -- I happened upon the Man Mo Temple, which was open to visitors. The place was choking with incense, filled with ornately carved teakwood and incense burning and gold leaf and oh, yeah, did I mention the incense? You could even buy some there, sort of like the candles you can buy at Catholic cathedrals. One woman had a giant handful, easily fifty sticks, all burning and splayed out like a big porcupine with orange-frosted tips. She appeared to be concentrating on an idol, presumably praying. There were cushions scattered in front of various shrines for kneeling, although no one did so while I was there. Perhaps there were too many tourists around.

Oh, here's a little bit of news for you: at the end of the month, the paper is sending me to Paris for 10 days or so, ostensibly so I can learn a few tricks from the maestros at headquarters. This is fine by me, although I have already been to Paris and I'll be working a lot of the time, so it will not exactly be a free vacation. Still, it's not a bad little perk for my first month on the job.

Well, I guess that's about it for now. I had thought about heading to the new place tonight -- I already have the key -- but it's getting on 10:30 p.m. here, I'm tired, and I've already got the hotel room for one more night, so I think I'll just order some room service while I still can and settle in with the remote. Take care, eveybody...

Wandering, like Caine in Kung Fu

2007-04-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

I spent several hours walking around the city today. I only had the vaguest of agendas, thinking I'd have my camera's memory card converted to a CD so I could start taking pictures again, get myself an Octopus card (used to travel on the subway and buy stuff at convenience stores and fast-food joints) and continue shopping for a permanent new cellphone. Once I'd taken care of those basic tasks I started wandering.

I took the train down to the Central station, situated in the heart of Hong Kong's business district. I knew this was close to the expats' primary stomping grounds, and I surmised it would be easier to find English-speaking clerks and maybe a bookstore with a significant English-language section. I also had learned from an ad on the side of a tram that a new H&M store had opened down there, and I do love me some H&M. Sure enough, the new store was crammed with cheap and fashionable clothes and cheap and fashionable Chinese. (Every H&M I've ever been to has been packed, such that buying a single shirt or pair of socks is unthinkable, owing to the massive lines snaking toward the checkouts, and it was no different here.) Knowing anything I acquired would simply be added to my already bulging luggage, I didn't buy anything.

I made my way up Queen's Road to the Mid-Levels Escalator, which climbs up the hillside in segments from Central to the fashionable Mid-Levels neighborhood, where most of the expats with means live. The adjacent SoHo district is home to scores of trendy ethnic restaurants, Indian and Thai and Continental and Japanese and Italian and even someplace claiming to be Aussie. ("Coffee." "Beer." "No, coff-EE." "Be-Er.") I found myself dearly wishing that I were wealthy enough to live there, just so I wouldn't have to venture far for a familiar food that doesn't come in a sack.

I rode the escalator all the way to the top of the hill, which put me in a spot, because I didn't want to subject my knees to forty flights of stairs back down to Central (the escalator does go downhill, but only in the mornings). So I started a meandering course around and down that I thought would be more forgiving.

I came to the Botanical and Zoological Gardens and took stock of the gibbons and lemurs and flamingos and strangling ficuses and all that. I even caught a glimpse of the jaguar before he slunk back into his private little hovel. I hadn't meant to come here, but it was free and on the way. This is my favorite way to explore.

The level of public investment in infrastructure here is staggering. They've got staircases and catwalks and overpasses and tunnels and switchbacks all for the sake of pedestrians, some suspended fifty, even a hundred feet in the air. The upper reaches of the hillside are obviously occupied primarily by the superrich, but it was strangely gratifying to be able to walk around up there unmolested. America's superrich are usually cloistered behind fences, and in their enclaves there aren't many concessions to regular foot traffic.

After the zoo I kept walking down, passing offices of government and commerce until I was back in Central, near the bottom terminal of the Peak Tram. It was just a few blocks from there that I stumbled upon another unexpected sight: tens of thousands of women. Right there in downtown, packing Chater Garden and the surrounding streets, many of which were closed to accommodate the crowds.

It took a while to figure out what the hell was going on. At first I thought it was merely a big radio promotion, and when I saw that women made up about 95% of the crowd, I guessed that some heartthrob crooner was scheduled to sing there. But as I made my way out of the garden and continued to run into more and more women, I began to conclude that something more substantial was afoot.

There were political banners pledging support for the Gabriela Women's Party, which seemed to be inordinately concerned with the interests of immigrant workers. Not being a student of local politics I didn't know what to make of it, but research later showed that the party isn't even for Hong Kong, it's for the Philippines. Apparently these thousands of women were Filipina migrants -- maids, mostly -- opposed to onerous new taxes being imposed upon their Hong Kong earnings by the Manila government. Suddenly I understood why so few of the women looked, well, Chinese. It was because they weren't.

Anyway, I kept on walking, heading back for the foot of the escalator so I could round up something to eat for dinner. I really planned on being fairly adventurous but the smell of mozzarella lured me to a fancy pizza restaurant instead (they poured my Coke for me from a bottle like it was some fine chardonnay). I swear sooner or later I will eat Chinese, but it seems so inevitable I'm not really in any hurry.

That was enough for one day. I'd been on my feet for about five hours, so I rode the subway back, got some sandwich fixin's from the grocery across the street, and settled back into the room for some Internet and some TV.

Tomorrow, I start the job. I hope I still remember how to do it.

And hello, Hong Kong

2007-04-07T17:19:00.000-05:00

I've been in country for just about 24 hours now. I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out how to get cellphone service here, which involved a lot of tinkering around online as well as a lot of wandering the streets of North Point.

Mobile phones don't appear to operate as they do back in the U.S., where most customers sign up for long-term contracts with some obnoxious "network." Even this took some time to figure out. No, the dominant model here is "pay as you go," so if you want a fancy-ass phone, you're going to pay the market price for it, without fat rebates or kickbacks to soften the blow. So I'm starting to think a basic model will suit my needs after all.

I browsed around some shops, trying to seem like I knew what I'm looking for so the clerk would leave me alone. Dual-band, tri-band, head-band, boy-band, I don't know jack about cellphones, and I don't even know what to ask (not that I could probably understand the reply anyway). So I just stared for a while, read the vague English feature listings, and finally wandered off.

A more aggressive clerk at a shotgun storefront on King's Road spoke a little better English, and I was able to figure out from her that I needed to buy a prepaid SIM card, which, when loaded into a sufficiently sophisticated phone, will endow that phone with a local number and allow calls in and out, at a per-minute rate that varies depending on the type of call being made. The card I got charges a little more than three cents a minute, U.S., both local and to key international destinations. I think.

Of course the ancient phone I brought from the U.S. is NOT sufficiently sophisticated for this, so I will have to buy a new one here (in the meantime I borrowed one from the hotel, so I do have a local number that I should be able to keep indefinitely, although I may have to drop it if I find out there's a cheaper way to do things). In other words, tentative success in my first mission. I have a working cellphone!

This is, of course, key to the primary mission, which is finding a place to live. I get to stay in the hotel for a week, then I can take temporary housing in a furnished apartment for as long as my moving allowance lasts (which isn't going to be long, considering how much I spent on shipping). After that I need to be in a real apartment, and that will require a lot of legwork and exploring. I have a vague sense of what I want, but of course it all has to fit within a budget, so some compromises will no doubt need to be made. I am not really looking forward to this process.

Other notes:

I ate at McDonald's again. Don't hold this against me; I am having enough adventure as it is without adding dysentery to the mix. Anyway, HK McD's don't have the Quarter Pounder, my usual order (I don't know if this is the metric system doing its sinister work or not, but there is no equivalent burger in its place). I have to get the double cheeseburger instead. Requesting no onions and no pickles, as is my preference, sets off a flurry of confusion and helpful service among the staff, who are apparently not accustomed to such things. They want very much to get the order right, and eventually my burger is delivered to my table by the manager, after several miscues and several apologies. I'm starting to think it's better just to get used to pickles and onions. (Other menu curiosities: red bean pies, chicken wings, and corn by the cup.)

Today is Easter Sunday. Although there are plenty of Christians in Hong Kong, the holiday is most readily observed in its highly secularized, highly commercialized form, and all the shopping centers have pastel decorations with eggs and bunnies. Yesterday at the Fortress (an electronics and appliance store) they were promoting cellphones as an egg-worthy Easter present. Another mall let kids pluck prize eggs off a wall with a fishing pole in something called an "Easter Fantasy." I'm not sure Jesus would be amused.

When I first checked into the hotel, there was a party going on across the hall from me. There were red decorations on the door, and the people were loud, really loud, clapping and shouting and laughing and carrying on. If I knew Cantonese I'm sure I could have understood what was being said, and I wish that were the case, as all this was going down before noon on a Saturday morning -- an odd time for a party in a hotel room. Perhaps it was all related to the wedding that was also going on that day. Just another bafflement to add to the list.

I'm not sure what I'm going to accomplish today, if anything. It looks to be another dreary, drizzly day, and as it's a Sunday and a holiday besides (there's some other bloody festival going on this weekend as well), a lot figures to be closed. Perhaps I'll just settle in with room service and bad TV. Or, better yet, good TV via iTunes. Happily I've discovered that I can download video from the U.S., which was supposed to be legally prohibited. (I'm guessing it still would be if I had opened my iTunes account here instead of back home.) Perhaps I won't miss the rest of Lost after all...

So long, States

2007-04-06T02:11:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in San Francisco, preparing to meet my new life abroad.

Am I excited? Apprehensive? Introspective? Yes, yes and yes. I have never done anything like this before, so I don't know how I'm supposed to feel. When you're getting ready for vacation there's an electric sense of immediacy, thinking of all the things that you'll be doing on your trip, all the sights you'll see, all the new experiences you'll cram into a few short days or weeks. It's different when you're getting ready to move somewhere for an extended period, when you know that all that tourist stuff is secondary to the basic business of finding a place to live, going to work, figuring out where to buy toothpaste or a cellphone, talking to bus drivers and store clerks and committing the exchange rate to memory. Nobody jets off to Paris for a long weekend thinking about how the first thing they're going to do when they land is set up a bank account. It's not like you don't still look forward to going, it's just that the fun part still seems far off, remote. Like I still have work to do before I can start enjoying it.

Is this the frame of mind I should be in? Hell, I don't know. But it is.

Anyway, my carry-ons are way overweight and I'm wary of security glitches, so I'm going to make my way to the gate. Thanks, loyal readers, for checking in, and I'm sure I'll be updating you soon. I'll miss you all.

The Long Goodbye

2007-03-22T20:18:00.001-05:00

Many of you may be forgiven for thinking that I would never actually get out of Dallas, but set those doubts aside, as I have finally made it to Eugene. It was a rocky departure, one full of fits and starts, enough to make more than one observer suggest that perhaps I wasn't meant to leave town after all. Be that as it may, I'm gone, and there's only one path to follow now.

Liquidating and moving all my stuff, and myself, has so far proven to be a comedy of errors. The mover came last Monday -- just one guy, packing and hauling stuff off all day -- but that still left a huge amount of junk to be disposed of.

Things got particularly ridiculous last Friday, the day the Salvation Army was supposed to come and claim all the bachelor furniture that was too bulky and too junky to bother shipping to Hong Kong. Dear friend Elizabeth came earlier in the day to get the TV I'd sold her, as well as my beloved TiVo, destined for dear friend Jamie. But the S.A. guys would only give a window of "between 8 and 4" for showing up, and sure enough, they kept me waiting until 2:30... and then left empty-handed, when it was clear they didn't have enough room in the truck for everything I wanted to get rid of. They dispatched an empty truck to come about an hour later, and those guys dutifully carried off the couch, the bed, the coffee table, that desk everyone pretended to want, my ergonomically unsound computer desk, a TV stand, some chairs, a dresser and two nightstands. (They also put a hole in the hallway wall, right next to the one I made the night of my party.)

I then took some of my electronics and other semi-valuables to the pawn shop down the street, hoping to get a few dollars for them. As they were testing out the VCRs, using a TV mounted above the counter, the clerk discovered there was already a tape in one of them. Before I could stop him, he'd pressed play, giving the clientele a free glimpse of an old porn tape that I'd left in the machine God knows when. Niiice. I hope he enjoys the story.

Next it was off to Goodwill, where I dropped off some old clothes, blankets, my ancient Mac and other various and sundry items. On my way there, some guys trimming branches along Abrams managed to drop a large limb right as I was driving by, sending it crashing and scraping from my hood to trunk. What a fitting sendoff for my poor car, another tree falling on it.

After that dropoff, I hit Half-Price Books to sell the last two boxes of VHS tapes and paperbacks that I had not shipped to Hong Kong or managed to persuade friends to take off my hands. Got $20 for the lot.

Despite all this disposal, I still had to spend the bulk of Saturday afternoon carrying boxes of old papers and other junk to the Dumpster at my complex, and loading up my car for the road trip to Oregon that I'd planned to begin the next day. I worked all the way up till midnight, when I made my way up to the Landing for St. Patrick's festivities and a chance to say my last goodbyes to the folks up there. At this point I had already pushed back my departure once, from Thursday, so I endured some expected but deserved ribbing for returning for a new round of farewells.

And then Sunday came, the big day. Dearest Liz and I cleaned up the apartment as well as we could, but I'm sure I left enough behind to lose my deposit. Even still, I only hit the road around 4:30, several hours later than I planned. It felt good to be on the open highway, and I waved goodbye to Dallas as it disappeared in my rear-view mirror for the last time. My iPod played several appropriate tunes, including a track called "Steven's Last Night in Town," about a guy who kept telling friends he was leaving the next day, first to their amusement and then to their annoyance. Little did I know...

I made it just to the other side of Weatherford, about 60 miles out, before my car started making a scraping noise. I pulled right off the highway and eyeballed the car. It seemed OK, although it was riding low in the back, thanks to all the weight I'd put in the trunk and back seat. I took off again, volume off on the radio, listening. Immediately I heard the noise again, especially when I'd hit a bump. It sounded like the tires might be scraping against the wheel well, so I pulled into a Wal-Mart tire center for a quick inspection. They were closing a few minutes, of course, but the guy looked it over for me. He couldn't see any evidence of tire damage, which seemed odd to us both. But the scraping was impossible to ignore, so I jettisoned some weight in the parking lot -- my camping gear (unused in about six years) and some old Playboys I'd kept with the intention of selling of eBay someday. I figured with less weight the problem would at least mitigate somewhat, but when I got out on the road it only seemed to be getting worse. Fearing a blowout if I pushed it, and knowing there were no more big towns between Weatherford and Abilene, I threw in the towel. I pulled into a Conoco station and called AAA for a tow back to Dallas.

As I was waiting I texted several people and made some calls, getting Liz to check on plane tickets as a backup plan in case the problems with the car couldn't be resolved the next day, a Monday. I originally accepted AAA's recommendation of a garage in South Dallas but had second thoughts as I rode back in the tow truck, imagining the peril of waiting for a cab on Jefferson Boulevard after dark with a load of valuable electronics all around me. I switched to a place on Garland Road, where buddy Cullen eventually picked me up. I left the keys in their drop slot and went up to the Landing for a bite to eat and another round of last goodbyes.

The next day I slept in, which proved to be a bad idea, because when I called the garage a little after noon I was told they hadn't noticed the keys and had not even started looking at what might be wrong with the car. By the end of the afternoon they concluded that a plastic mudguard that had bent out of place was likely the source of my scraping noise, but they also thought the brakes needed work and they would need to have a look at the suspension, something that would have to wait till morning. I wouldn't be able to leave until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest, five days after my original target. Sighing, I told them to call me before they did any major work the next day, and I used the bonus time to ship most of my cargo to Oregon and hang out with Liz. Still clinging to the hope of making my road trip, I let the hold on my backup airline ticket expire.

The next morning, I called the garage. Repairs would cost nearly $800, with no absolute guarantee that the scraping problem was solved or that the car wouldn't need some other work down the road. I was ready to surrender. Liz found another airline option that would work for me, using miles, and I told the garage not to fix anything. The car would stay. The road trip dream was over. I left the car in Bill's driveway to sell, declaring, "So long, trusty old piece of shit." We met dear friend Shawna at the Landing for yet another round of final goodbyes, and I got on a plane for Oregon on Wednesday morning.

My disappointment was still eating at me as I landed in Portland. I had wanted the road trip as a bookend to the drive out from Oregon back in 1996 -- one of the great journeys of my life -- and I wanted to give the car to my nephew, who just got his learner's permit. My first car had been a Corolla of similar age, and the symmetry and symbolism were almost irresistable. Now I would have to rent a car for the drive to Eugene, a dreary two-hour stretch of interstate I'd covered a hundred times.

But then it hit me. I had a brand new rental car. I had as much time as I wanted. And I hadn't been to Seattle since the eighth grade. I hit the road out of PDX, headed north on I-5 instead of south. By six-thirty I had stopped at the Mount St. Helens visitor center (no view of the mountain, obscured this day by clouds), eaten a Tillamook cheeseburger at a Northwest-only fast-food chain called Burgerville, and ascended the Space Needle with a crowd of rowdy high-schoolers (at $15 for a ticket, it reigns as the most expensive bathroom stop of my life). Running out of daylight, I turned around and headed back for home. By midnight, 12 hours after touching down, I'd covered 497 miles. It was no epic journey across the West, but under the circumstances... not a bad day's drive.

Pics from my home to be

2007-03-06T21:59:00.000-06:00

Howdy, gang. Just got back from a quick jaunt to Houston, but before I tell y'all about that, it's time for some long-overdue pictures from my week in Hong Kong. Here goes...

To the left is the gleaming K Wah Centre, the shiny modern home of the IHT's Asia offices. We're on the 16th floor, I think.

There's also a lot that's less than modern. Such as this random Buddhist temple at right, nestled in between large commercial buildings in the heart of the Wan Chai district.

I spent a good amount of time just shooting pictures of amusing signs. English is prevalent in much of Hong Kong, although mastery of idiom and spelling is rare, and the warnings often tend toward the blunt side, as below:

Or this:

You have to appreciate a country that is firm in its prohibition of spiting at national monuments. (The building in question is actually the former colonial post office, which now houses an environmental agency.)

Speaking of "green" issues, HK has a mixed record. Large swaths of the territory remain forested, mainly because of unsuitable terrain. Even so, considerable effort is made to incorporate these parklike areas into the city (note above the trees concreted into place to keep them from sliding down the hill during the torrential rains that fall six months of the year).

But air quality is truly horrid. The smog is plainly visible in a photo of the skyline taken from The Peak, which is the highest point on Hong Kong island. (This was a very good day by HK standards. On a bad day, I'm told, you can't see across the harbor.)

The Peak is capitalized for a reason. Although it is naturally high enough to dwarf even the largest of HK's skyscrapers, in true Hong Kong style, they've opted to build a mall on top of it. The viewing platform (left) is on top of that.

But the city is, without a doubt, an amazing piece of work. Consider, for one thing, that all of these enormous buildings -- every last one of them -- was built after World War II. Even low-income housing is likely to be in a twenty- or even forty-story tower, with window unit air conditioning and clothes hanging outside to dry.

When Hong Kong really shines, though, is at night. One of the highlights of my visit was on Friday, when I crossed the harbor on the ferry and saw the city from the Kowloon side. Apparently on weekend nights (or possibly every night, for all I know) they put on a light show involving most of the skyscrapers along the waterfront, replete with green xenon lasers firing out of rooftops and neon flashing in sequence up and down glass facades, all set to music on a platform outside the ferry terminal. It's an awe-inspiring display of civic cooperation hard to conceive of in the States (and hard to do justice with a snapshot camera):
I recommend clicking for a better view.

There was another light display at the terminal when I was there, but I suspect that was connected to the then-upcoming Chinese New Year: This was just one of the things I managed to stumble upon quite by accident, which is a lot of the fun of visiting any foreign city. Check out this menu offering I saw outside a Pizza Hut (and no, I didn't eat there). You may have to click on it to make it out.

Mmm, doesn't that sound good, and oh so authentic? Yankee Doodle-rooni! (By the way, those prices are Hong Kong dollars -- "Hongkies" to the Anglophone locals -- which corresponds to about $10 U.S. for a medium.)

I guess that's about it for my Hong Kong photojournal, at least for now. I'll leave you with three last images that sum it up.

New:
Old:
And "Settle down, Beavis":
Heh, heh.

Yeah, I'm taking it

2007-02-15T22:57:00.000-06:00

I'm moving to Hong Kong!

Despite some initial concern that someone at IHT headquarters had stumbled across this blog and had second thoughts about extending me an offer, I am pleased to announce that they did in fact come through with one, and it was sufficient to get me to say yes. So, at the risk of repeating myself, I'm moving to Hong Kong.

The job is copy editing, again, which is what I know, but the hours are better, and the stories are limited to the serious national/international subjects that I prefer. (Although while I was trying out I did enjoy the experience of editing Day One of the crazy astronaut lady saga, so they're not entirely immune to a little tabloid fun.) I would be in line to take something of a supervisory role in fairly short order, once I get accustomed to the particulars of the job.

All this means that, in the next six weeks, I have to figure out what to do with all my stuff in Dallas (what to sell, what to give away, what to ship home to Oregon, what to ship to Hong Kong, what to store here, and what to pack with me on the plane). Dissolving an entire household is something I've never had to do before, and I'm not really looking forward to it. But it's just one of the evils you have to deal with when you pick and move to the other side of the world.

Of course I'm very gung ho about the whole new adventure, although I'd be lying if I didn't also have some significant apprehensions. This is not a thing to do lightly, and so I find myself alternating between giddy excitement and unalloyed terror. This, as I've been reminded, is also something to be expected. I just have to remember that it's a job, not a tour of duty or a sentence, and I am more than equipped to handle it and whatever social/cultural/personal challenges it throws my way. I'm not signing up to dig sewage canals in Cameroon for a couple of years. I am going to copy edit for a serious American newspaper in a big city that speaks English and is peppered with McDonald's, 7-Eleven, Pizza Hut and shopping malls. This, as they say, is well within my skill set.

I have to find an apartment, which is going to be a major pain the ass, but the paper does offer a fairly generous moving allowance that should permit me to take some temporary housing for a little while as I look for something permanent, and they'll set me up with a locator as well. Rents are sky high in Hong Kong, particularly if you're living in the thick of things, but because of the large income disparities between resident aliens like myself and the local population, such services as housekeeping and laundry are ridiculously cheap or even included, which helps make up for a living space that's maybe a little small or lacks a washer and dryer.

I still have to cope with some culture shock and isolation, I know that, but that, I'll remind my gentle readers, is partially the point. I'm hoping to gain the confidence and experience that allows me to pick up and move more easily, so that I learn to break the bonds of inertia that have kept me in Dallas for so long.

I know some folks get irritated when I act as though Dallas is some sort of black hole, so let me assure you, on the whole, I have loved my life here. I have met some lifelong friends and had some incredible experiences with Dallas as my home base. Some things suck, but that's true anywhere. Despite the jokes, I'm not escaping this place; I'm simply trying something new. If it works out, great -- and there are many things about Hong Kong and the IHT that make this a truly golden opportunity for me -- but even if it doesn't, I'll be a stronger, more fulfilled person for having made the effort.

But don't think I won't miss you all, so very much. (You can probably expect some whiny, weepy posts and e-mails in the months to come.) And to those old and dear friends out in Oregon who are still waiting for me to come home for good, I simply counsel patience. I miss you all, too.

More to come as I get closer to the big day of departure. Wish me luck...

Back in Dallas...

2007-02-11T22:00:00.000-06:00

I'm still recovering from jet lag and the deleterious effects of long-haul air travel on my aching back, but I am in fact back in Big D and busy resuming my career of sitting around and watching TiVo.

More on my Hong Kong sojourn later (if in fact I feel like it, which I may or may not. I'm a mystery that way.) For now I have more pressing business. Like watching TiVo.

In the process of doing this, I happened to not fast-forward past a commercial for Disney's latest direct-to-DVD disgrace, Cinderella III (sometimes I forget and leave the remote on the coffee table, which requires an excessive sitting-up motion to retrieve from my prone position on the couch). Anyway, this commercial included a rather implausible blurb from "critics" who gushed, "As magical as the original!" I did not stop and study the critic's name (see remote comment, pvs) but it was Brian Purdy something-or-other, NBC-TV.

Some time later, when I was forced off the couch to see a man about a horse, I made a detour to the bedroom to check for this review on the Web. Sure enough, the blurb is prominently featured on the C:III promotional site, and I got the guy's real name, Bryan Erdy.

Intrigued by this Mr. Erdy's critique, I went looking for other movies that he might have reviewed. Brother Bear 2: "Even more fun than the original!" Bambi II: "An entertaining family film worthy of the original!" Fox and the Hound 2: "A delightful, heartwarming sequel... worth the wait!"

I should note at this point that for most of his recent career, Bryan Erdy has worked not for NBC-TV the network, but rather for the NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio. (He has an nbc.com e-mail address because until recently, NBC owned and operated this station, although this is apparently no longer the case.) And although wikipedia lists 30 current and 40 former "personalities" associated with this station, Bryan Erdy's name is not among them, so I can assume he is pretty far down the food chain at NBC4 -- clever slogan (neither I nor Dave Barry am making this up) "Working 4 You." Or maybe he ain't working 4 them at all anymore (which is what I suggested in an e-mail I sent to the station's Web site, where a search for Bryan Erdy's name also turns up nada, even though there are bios for a whopping 32 other on-air staffers, including Tom McNutt, "garden expert" since 1989).

Mr. Erdy's name doesn't seem to turn up many hits for any non-Disney, non-sequel, non-straight-to-DVD films (except for one rave about Denzel Washington's recent bomb Deja Vu). So he is A) working for a local TV news broadcast, B) in Columbus (to be fair, the largest market in Ohio), C) only allowed to review really bottom-tier movies for said newscast, and D) not considered one of the station's top 32 most-promotable personalities. And YET, his opinion is of sufficient market-moving might as to be given top billing in a nationwide television ad campaign by none other than The Walt Disney Company, one of the largest media corporations in the world.

So, maybe, if this Hong Kong thing doesn't work out, I should start reviewing movies on You've Reached the House of Dave. If you're out there, Disney Company (and Lord knows you must do some serious searching for positive reviews of your many fine, fine products), just let me know whatever title you're producing next, and I will gladly pronounce it as good as, if not better than, the original. For a small fee, of course. TiVo doesn't pay for itself.

The innocent abroad

2007-02-06T20:49:00.000-06:00

Since I last posted, I have encountered many firsts.

Two days ago, I made my first visit to a Hong Kong supermarket.

Apart from being smaller (naturally) it wasn't all that different from a U.S. supermarket. I bought some sushi (I had to ask for chopsticks in that quirky charades sort of way), some grapes and a quart of orange juice (which is not as easy to acquire as you might think. Most of the convenience stores are stocked with weird pseudo-beverages with names like "Mr. Juicy" and "Pocari Sweat." You have to work for simple, ordinary Tropicana OJ from concentrate.It)

I also visited my first Hong Kong bar. As it is adjacent to my hotel, I expected it to be full of expats and Western travelers, but I was the only non-Asian in the joint. They had karaoke, which seemed kind of an afterthought. Most of the time no one was singing, which was good, because when someone did take the mike it was often painful. The song selection was consistent: Chinese pop ballads. Chinese pop ballads are indistinguishable from Mexican pop ballads, other than being devoid of the word "corazon" every few seconds.

Yesterday I ventured to the Wan Chai neighborhood, which I understand was made famous by "The World of Suzy Wong." It had become a sort of tourist haven, a Beale Street or West End, long removed from its notorious past. I had fish and chips at the Old China Hand, a British bar that had caricatures of famous Brits on its menu, in addition to (inexplicably) such Americans as Marilyn Monroe and Sammy Davis Jr. (I am the Candy Man.) It also featured a sax-blowing Bill Clinton, along with a sumptuous brunette (not in a blue dress, but the implication would be hard to miss.)

I'm due for a shower and an interview with my employer to be. We'll talk later.

Hong Kong Hooey

2007-02-04T09:34:00.000-06:00

Greetings, dear readers, from the other side of the world!

I know, I know, it's been way too long since the last time I posted, but rest assured, it's been a busy time. Well, for a couple weeks it was deliciously unbusy, as I sat around the apartment enjoying my sojourn from the workaday world whilst whiling away the hours in my bathrobe. But the last week's been a whole 'nuther story, as I made last-minute arrangements for a trip to Hong Kong, whence this missive comes.

As some of you know, I am here on a weeklong tryout for the International Herald Tribune, which operates a small office here to produce its Asian edition. I got in last night (around 7 p.m., local time, on Saturday -- which to my Dallas friends corresponds to 5 a.m. Saturday morning... I think). I didn't really get to sleep at all during the 20 hours I spent in transit (16 between LAX and HK), so I was plenty tired -- and seriously sore -- by the time I arrived. The flight was not very full, and many people were able to stretch out over three chairs, but I was too slow to take advantage myself, to my body's unending grief.

This morning I got up fairly early and wandered around the area of my hotel, which is located in a part of the city known as North Point (as in the north point of the island of Hong Kong). If you've ever been in a good-sized American Chinatown, you pretty much know what it's like. Plenty of neon, a little bit of trash, only a handful of chain stores, and a lot of elderly Asian folks milling about. It's dirtier than New York but not as bad as Rome. The newest areas are sterile and modern, almost like Toronto is reputed to be. But North Point is more of a mix of old and new; the IHT's office a few blocks down is in a modern glass skyscraper, but less than a block from my hotel there's a market where you can buy a live chicken. So there you go.

The hotel is not exactly a luxury venue, the room size more European than anything, but the shower works great, and that's about all that really matters. The TV gets channels in both English and Cantonese, but not very many, and certainly there's none of that instant-checkout, Nintendo-and-movies-on-demand stuff. I don't have an iron, but there's a hairdryer.

There's also wireless Internet access, though you have to pay for it in three-hour blocks, all charged at once, for about $6 U.S. For a while there I thought my laptop would be useless, because the special international adapter I was using to recharge the battery kept cutting in and out, but I bought a $5 (Hong Kong, or about 80 cents U.S.) replacement on the street that actually works fine. There are technical reasons for this involving watts and voltages and whatnot, but I won't get into it. Hooray for trial and error.

And I have a view of the water. Luxury yachts and tiny fishing boats cruise by all day. Directly in front is a scenic bus depot, but I'm too high up to hear it.

Haven't really had a chance to sample the local cuisine; I had a hotel breakfast (strictly American) to start with, and, not having a phrasebook or guide to help me order from Chinese-only menus on my dinner break, had to resort to eating at McDonald's. (Yes, I am ashamed. Don't bring it up.) I plan to be more adventurous tomorrow.

I also hope to get around to some sight-seeing, although a quick perusal of the usual tourist resources has me thinking Hong Kong's a little wanting in the bona fide attractions department. This is a city, I think, that requires a bit of a commitment to really appreciate. You can't just swoop in and check off items on a list, like you can with other great cities around the world. But since I'm hoping to get a job here, that's a commitment I am prepared to make.

I guess that's about all there is to report at the moment. I'll try to have another installment for you in the next couple of days...

A1A (Collins Avenue!)

2007-01-06T17:47:00.000-06:00

Greetings from Day 4 of my South Florida vacation. I'm blogging to you tonight from our room at the Lorraine Hotel on A1A in Miami Beach. We spent the earlier part of the day driving over from Cape Coral, our home base. We took the Tamiami Trail, U.S. 41, affectionately known as "Alligator Alley." We stopped in Everglades City for an airboat tour through the mangrove swamp, where we saw a couple of the alley's toothy denizens, as well as a pair of teasing manatee snouts above the ruddy waters, and a variety of pelicans, gulls, ospreys and other wildlife. Our airboat pilot looked like Thomas Hayden Church.

Yesterday was spent doing landscaping work at the vacation house, and later, having drinks at a rooftop bar in Fort Myers and dinner at a bar in Fort Myers Beach. The day before we went deep-sea fishing off of Naples, and our party caught enough red snapper and Spanish mackerel for several meals (in fact, Liz's brother is still enjoying the fruits of that successful outing). And on our first night in the area, we watched the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico at the bridge connecting Sanibel and Captiva islands.

Well, enough time-killing... it's time for mojitos and Cuban food down the strip. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll be back in Dallas next week...

Dave

P.S. Some news on the job front, possible connections for both Hong Kong and Beijing. Stay tuned...

Happy New Year, everybody!

2007-01-01T19:33:00.000-06:00

I'm back in Dallas now, having completed my two-week sojourn in the Beaver State. I had a good time as always, catching up with old friends and family, but it's nice to be back in my own bed, on my own couch, curling up with my own cat and watching my own TiVo. (I got my mom a DVR for Christmas last year but she still watches live TV. Go figure.)

Of course I ought to be doing laundry and various and sundry other chores right now, but I'm feeling worn out and lazy and just want to hibernate. Who knew unemployment could be so exhausting?

Not messing around

2006-12-27T01:15:00.000-06:00

James Brown. Gerald Ford. You think I'm kidding, world? Hire me before I kill again.

P.S. You're next, Fidel.

Merriest of merries to you

2006-12-25T16:27:00.000-06:00

And all that.

Well, it's Christmas, and we're all done opening presents. I'm out at my childhood home, now occupied by my sister's family, and I'm borrowing their computer to post a little yuletide hello to y'all.

Last night I helped my mom wrap gifts while watching, as per my annual tradition, It's a Wonderful Life. I've memorized most of the dialogue but try not to speak it aloud too much, as I'm sure that's pretty annoying, and I recognize that it's a bit of a sacrifice to ask anyone to watch the movie every single year anyway. Few people seem to love it the way I do.

The film always resonates with me, but perhaps more so this year, as I contemplate the next step in my own wonderful life. Like ol' mossback George Bailey, I also long to shake the dust of this crummy old town off my feet and see the world, and for once I'm actually poised to do it. Maybe China, maybe Japan, maybe a European whirlwind tour before I spend a year or two on the job overseas.

Of course, I am not deaf to the film's key message -- that having such adventures is not as important as family and friends. As I am embraced by the life I left behind 10 years ago, it is hard not to consider whether I might be better off just settling down here in Oregon. My couple days in Portland at the start of this visit reminded me just how much I really love that city, and I have more or less resolved to move there as soon as my international sojourn is over. The independent businesses, the functioning mass transit, the bicycling and recycling and hippie/alterna-culture, the bustling downtown with its gorgeous bridges and shimmering riverfront... all the things I want in a city. I used to think that only New York or San Francisco could satisfy my urban fix, but maybe I'm past that now. I still have some adventure in me, don't get me wrong, but I'm starting to suspect that it's a fairly small supply, something I'll exhaust after a year or two in seriously unfamiliar surroundings.

It's just nice to be home, and to know that home is always here... even if I'm not ready for it quite yet.

Wireless and wired on Mexican mocha

2006-12-23T12:28:00.000-06:00

Today's installment comes to you from the 5th Street Beanery, an independent coffeeshop in downtown Eugene with a scenic view of Skinner Butte... or what WOULD be a scenic view of the butte, were it not for the large and imposing county jail blocking the way.

I've spent most of the past couple of days shopping for Christmas, and yesterday I purchased for myself a new laptop. After getting the TK seal of approval, I'm looking forward to breaking the factory seal and playing around with the thing. I guess the borrowed laptop is capable of dial-up after all, but I don't see how. There doesn't seem to be a regular phone jack. Perhaps I need some sort of special phone cord. Must remember to inquire about that.

But I did also buy presents for OTHER people, and I'm proud to report that most of my shopping is now complete, with the exception of my mom, who is notoriously hard to buy for. I'll probably be out on Christmas Eve at this rate.

I am already starting to miss my Dallas friends, even as I run around and catch up with my old and dear buddies around here. Many of us gathered last night to watch the debacle of the Ducks in the Las Vegas Bowl. But we Duck fans are much more at ease with defeat than success, so it's all good. Besides, it's basketball season.

Today is the last day at work for several of my fellow buyout hangers-on, so I send a shout-out to y'all. Be strong... only a few hours yet. Unemployment is glorious!

Daverino, makin' copies...

2006-12-20T22:10:00.000-06:00

Many of you may have been wondering what I did with my first day of freedom from the Morning News, what footloose-and-fancy-free pursuit I would choose to occupy my debut as a new bohemian. The answer, of course, was to go to the office and spend five hours digging through the library and making copies of clips for my portfolio, in the event that I decide to go back into copy editing at some point and need to demonstrate that I did in fact know how to write a headline. I could've done it later, using the public library's resources, but that would have cost me several cents a page, and I felt more than entitled to bilk Uncle Belo for a good hundred bucks in free Xeroxes. Plus, knowing me, I would've let it slide and possibly never gotten around to it at all. One must always account for the procrastination factor when dealing with the House of Dave (as you loyal readers already know).

This task should not have taken five hours. I had already tried once earlier in the week, before work, but had to surrender without so much as a single page, as the decrepit old microfilm machine at the DMN was being balky, refusing to take up the microfilm and and jamming when I tried to print. I told the librarians as I gave up that I would be back later, explaining that the machine was flashing a P2 error, whatever the fuck that means.

So when I came in on Saturday afternoon, I was hopeful they had fixed the machine in the interim and that I might enjoy more smooth sailing. But no sooner had I got in, did I discover my first problem: Nobody was even on duty in the library at all. Fortunately, I had seen where they stashed the key for the microfilm room, so I snatched it from the unlocked drawer and retrieved the first few reels. The machine I had been using before had still not been fixed -- it was still flashing P2 -- so I decided to try my luck with an alternate machine, located in the main library room itself, figuring that the librarians would save the good gear for their own use.

This did appear to be the case. The machine did accept the microfilm on first try, unlike the other one, which required painstaking manual feeding. And it would print without jamming. Excellent. At first I couldn't zoom, but I noticed from the diagram painted on the housing that the zoom required a different lens, one that I had seen on a desk in the microfilm room. I fetched it and figured out how to install it. So far, so good. I was feeling very resourceful at this point, and I began making my first copies.

It was immediately evident that the copy quality was just barely adequate, with long black streaks obscuring or blurring much of the type. These machines don't see much use anymore, as most people find the computerized archives to be more than sufficient for research purposes. It is the rare person who needs to show what the story actually looked like in print, as I did, so repairs are few and far between. But it did work, after a fashion, so I plowed ahead.

But after a while it became clear that the quality was getting worse with each printout, with the streaks widening and darkening to such a degree that it became impossible even to decipher the headlines, let alone the smaller type. As these clips were to be shown to potential employers, this would simply not do. I had no idea how to clean the heads to remove the streaks, even after opening the machine up and very possibly breaking it, so I had to give up. I returned to the microfilm room, with its P2 flash mocking me.

OK, so there's a paper jam. Obviously that can be fixed, right? I plunge into the task, opening up the machine and deciphering the diagram to eventually lower the carriage and find the errant piece of paper, roll it out of place, yank it out, replace the carriage, close the door and start over. Success! The P2 was gone. I scroll to the first page I want copied, and the print quality is dramatically better. So much so that I decide to redo some of the ones I had done before. I rewind the reel and put it back in its box, grab the next and find my next clip, press Print, and wait for it to come out.

Whirr, whirr, whine, groan, P2. Fuck.

I again open her up and pull out the page. This takes about 25 seconds, all told, now that I know what I'm doing. I close her up and press Print again.

Whirr, whirr, whine, groan, P2. Motherfuck.

The machine is loaded with legal size paper, and I figure this might be contributing to the problem. So I pull out the tray and load in regular size, only to find that the plastic guides that can be adjusted for each size have been superglued into place. Perfect. I try it anyway, but it won't work at all.

I saw another tray on a file cabinet, apparently brand new, as it's still wrapped in plastic. Feeling unusually free to screw around with things in my anonymity, I unwrap it and put the guard in place for regular size, load it up with paper and slide it into the machine. Print. Whirr, whirr, whine, groan, P2. Son of a motherfucking bitch.

OK, so it doesn't seem to make much difference which paper I use. I remove the jam, replace the legal-size tray, press Print. Whirr, whirr, whirr, whoosh. Success! It has taken probably 20 minutes to get page No. 2, but it is glory and joy and light. I would dance a jig, but getting on and off my knees to reach the back panel has made a wreck of my joints. I'm content to move on to the next reel, which I feed in (automatic loading has miraculously begun working again! I am a genius!) and scroll through to find the next clip. Size it up and line it up, press Print. Whirr, whirr, whine, groan, P2.

Holy motherfucking son of a cocksucking bitch whore.

At this point I've managed to get my jam-removing routine under 10 seconds, a veritable ballet of precise motion. But as quick as it is, it's still a massive ass pain. And most times when I do it, the machine jams immediately after I close the panel, taking up a new sheet that starts it flashing P1. Fixing this requires pulling out the paper tray and reaching inside to grab the sheet and slowly haul it out. This can only be done while sitting on the floor.

At this rate it will take days to get all my clips done. (It usually takes four or five attempts of each clip to get a clean copy with the proper zoom and lightness without cutting anything off, and we're still jamming more than 75 percent of the time.) I have to find a way to speed this thing up.

I have noticed that the machine doesn't usually jam immediately after I clear the P1 error, so I begin pulling out the paper tray before each printout, aligning the paper stack perfectly by hand and then sliding it back in. Pressing Print on my next few clips goes off without a hitch. Whirr, whirr, whirr, whoosh. I am the master of the Minolta 4400 Microfilm Reader! I have conquered the beast! Granted, going through all these motions still adds two or three minutes to the optimum speed for each clip, but it beats the five to 10 minutes associated with fixing a jam. I might be finished sometime before the new year after all.

I'm cruising along at a handicapped but functioning clip, but as I continue I start to notice that the pages aren't coming out the same way as before. They're getting lighter. Oh, for the love of holy motherfucking sons of cocksucking bitch whores pissing on a rock. Don't tell me I need motherfucking toner.

And so it went. I made an ink-stained wretch of myself trying to find the toner receptacle, refilling it, spilling the bottle more than a little. But no matter what I did, the copies didn't get any darker. I was at the end of my rope. I had already made copies of most, but not all, of my best stuff. I had been left entirely alone and hadn't done any irreparable damage so far, but there was a very real risk an Office Space incident if I continued to use this machine. This would have to do.

So I gathered up my stuff, covered my tracks as best I could, returned to the library and made an ungodly number of photocopies, just to guard against the possibility that I would ever, ever, have to do this shit again. I swear, I hope I live a good and decent and just and enlightened life. Because if I don't, I have already experienced a taste of the circle of hell they've got planned for me.

Fie on you, Wi-Fi

2006-12-20T22:03:00.000-06:00

Faithful legions, I report to you tonight from Taylor's Bar and Grill, a just-off-campus hangout of the University of Oregon that serves as one of the Emerald City's precious few public Wi-Fi hotspots. It's actually not a place I used to go a lot -- I preferred Rennie's Landing down the street -- but it's winter break and it's empty, so it'll do. Plus, they have Dead Guy Ale on tap.

It is my intention, now that I am (for the time being) jobless, to maintain more regular blog entries, but over the next couple weeks this will be problematic, as my borrowed laptop doesn't do dial-up and my mom's place in far west Eugene is quite a ways from the more wired parts of town. I'm actually planning to buy a laptop of my own soon, maybe in the next few days (so I can take advantage of Christmas deals and Oregon's lack of a sales tax). But in any case stay tuned, as I should have a bit to say.

My last day

2006-12-15T22:06:00.000-06:00

And here it is, my last day at the Morning News.

I would like to take this opportunity to tell all my former colleagues how proud and honored I feel to have served with you, particularly on those days when we really showed what a major metro newsroom is capable of. After 10 years, you would think I'd have a pretty solid list of such days under my belt, but as it happens, I missed a lot of the biggest news of the last decade while I was on vacation, enjoying a day off, or attending the occasional convention. A sampling of earth-shattering events that found me watching from the sidelines as an ordinary civilian:

1) The deaths of Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, JFK Jr., Charles Schulz and Bob Hope
2) The Y2K anti-climax
3) The Fort Worth tornadoes
4) The Indian Ocean tsunami
5) Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
6) The bombings in London, Madrid and Bali, as well as of the U.S.S. Cole
7) The release of the Starr Report
8) The Columbia disaster
9) The Stars clinching the Cup and the Longhorns the national title
and, last but not least,
10) 9/11

OK, so I didn't miss everything: I was there for Columbine, the Olympic Park bombing, all the big elections and invasions, Clinton's impeachment and censure, and the passing of the great Don Knotts (who SHOULD have made 1A, dammit). But ya gotta admit, I had a pretty amazing track record... and you have to wonder what dangers the world is in for now that I'm off the job for good. Secretary Chertoff, raise the alert level to Red. Everybody else, raise a glass. I'm outta here.

It's a Very NPR Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T17:27:00.000-06:00

Overheard on the radio coming in to work on Thanksgiving:

The tale of Thanksgiving at a vegan sanctuary, where the centerpiece "turkey dinner" involves a spread of cranberries, pumpkin pie and romaine lettuce... for the turkeys to eat.

And, a historian telling us all about how the real first Thanksgiving had no turkeys, no table, wasn't called thanksgiving, happened in September and involved a bunch of Indians and pilgrims standing around cookfires eating deer and geese off spits, something "more like Woodstock" than today's tradition.

Stay tuned for Christmas, when NPR will tell us that Jesus was really born in the spring, the Star in the East was actually a comet and there is no God. Ho, ho, ho.

Yes, I still plan to go

2006-11-19T15:04:00.000-06:00

A lot of folks keep asking me what I'm going to do when my sentence at the Morning News is up in a few weeks and I find myself genuinely, gainfully unemployed. The short answer is I still don't know -- and it's still OK for me not to know -- but I have some ideas.

Still leading the pack is going abroad to teach, and I would still say Japan is the likeliest destination. What I'm trying to figure out now is whether to get a TEFL certificate -- that's Teaching English as a Foreign Language, one of several bewildering abbreviations in the field -- before I go or to sign up with some company that teaches you their way and puts you to work for them. My sense is that the certificate will give me more options but that it will require me to spend a little money right now and devote several weeks -- four seems to be a common number -- to training, all without a job guaranteed at the end (although one assumes I wouldn't be any worse off for the experience). There are a bewildering number of programs that offer the certificate, many of them in a bewildering array of exotic locales, and there doesn't seem to be a U.S. News & World Report consensus on which are good and which are just out to bilk stupid kids out of their money. The same program will be hailed by one student and assailed by another.

The paralyzing thing about the situation is the abundance of choices, not the lack. I have made it my life's work to avoid making hard choices, often delaying decisions until several options have vanished as a consequence of my inaction, thereby making the selection easier by default. I'll research and consider and weigh and ponder and discuss matters until everyone around me is sick of listening, only reaching a conclusion when the conclusion gets made by outside forces. This is hardly a good way of going about things, I know that, but it's a pattern I find it difficult to snap out of.

Snapping out of patterns is another thing motivating this teaching-English-abroad thing, as far as that goes. It would be infinitely EASIER to go off and get another job copy editing somewhere, and I have had several opportunities present themselves, but I hardly want to risk sliding into the same pattern all over again with nothing different but my area code. I need a shock to the system that opens my eyes and makes subsequent shocks to the system seem less daunting. Hence moving somewhere where I don't know anybody and can't even make friends unless I really work at it. To paraphrase JFK, "We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hahhhd."

And even though moving to Japan is not quite so hahhhd as landing on the moon, I also know I am not Neil Armstrong. So yes, I am afraid of going over there, having a culture-shock homesickness breakdown and having to come home with my tail between my legs. I know it's what I need to do, that I will only regret it if I don't, but still, I have not done anything even remotely this challenging before. I don't ski because people who ski sometimes break bones and I have never broken a bone and therefore don't know how survivable it is. It's conundrums like these that make me such a broken record.

So anyway, I'm still researching and considering and weighing and pondering and discussing. Please feel free to take the needle off when you get tired of the song.

And they even call it "fracking"

2006-11-10T22:55:00.000-06:00

Well, ladies and germs, it's Friday night in the big city, and you all know what that means... Battlestar Galactica! (What, you're not watching? What is wrong with you people?)

I just got done viewing this week's installment. As I was settling in with my remote, I noticed that they were running a "Viewer Discretion Advised" disclaimer. As a grown-up, I receive these warnings with the glee of a lion who chances upon a three-legged gazelle. I figure it means I'm about to get some really good, gripping television, something maybe the kids shouldn't be watching. Although BSG tackles some heavy plotlines -- its very premise is the idea that 12 worlds' worth of humans have just been savagely murdered -- it does not usually carry this disclaimer, so as the episode unfolded, I kept waiting for the supreme moment of extra-bloody viciousness that would make such an admonishment necessary.

For those of you who haven't caught up on your TiVo or for whatever reason have not yet seen the episode in question, spoiler alert! Pick up after this and the next paragraph. Anyway, the cunning self-preservationist and arguable traitor to all humanity Baltar is held captive by the evil Cylons, whom he has betrayed, so they've decided to torture him to see what information he might be withholding. So I'm thinking, this is it! This is the moment when it gets really nasty, and I'm wondering just what sort of future-medieval iron maiden or skin-flayer or whatever they're about to unleash upon his squirmy ass. I'm expecting Abu Ghraib as perpetrated by evil robots. And what do I get? They stick his fingers into two cups like the ones they use to check your pulse at the Albertsons and they turn up a knob. And of course Baltar goes all screamy and we're supposed to get the idea that they've figured out a way to stimulate pain without actually causing any physical harm, which is a pretty good trick and probably gives Dick Cheney a hard-on. But in terms of visual awfulness, it doesn't even rank up there with barking dogs. So WTF? Where is my disclaimer-worthy ultraviolence?

For those of you who don't watch the show, you should know that Baltar has a sort of imaginary friend in his head who happens to look like one of the Cylons, the really fracking-hot blonde incarnation (stay with me, here, sci-fi-phobes, I'm almost to the point). The nature of this strictly mental companion is left unclear by the creators, but she is able to help him through the pain, to let him sort of leave his body behind, by -- gotta love the way they write shows for guys at home on a Friday night -- HAVING SEX WITH HIM. And really good sex, from all appearances.

Come back, spoiler avoiders!

And this is when it hits me. The disclaimer is not for the violence, it's for the sex. A few seconds of tussled blonde with just the slightest hint of -- ahem -- petit mort, with less actual skin than a typical summer day at my apartment complex swimming pool. On a show that routinely has people getting shot, blown up, tortured -- in a memorable moment last season, one guy flipped out and beat a woman's face to an absolute bloody pulp -- and THIS is the sight we're supposed to hide the children from. Jesus H. Christ, this country is nuts.

He slams

2006-10-05T15:18:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. Mail Man,

It is of course well-known that I am a staunch defender of the U.S. Postal Service, a repeater of the "neither sleet, nor snow, nor dead of night" mantra, and an eager arguer that sending a letter from Honolulu to Hartford is quite a bargain even at 37 cents (or is it 39? I never mail anything anymore).

In light of these facts, why do you torment me? Why must you go about your daily rounds in my apartment complex allowing each door to slam shut, rattling the bricks throughout and waking me from my much-needed reverie? Why can you not be bothered to let the door shut slowly, so that I may not be cheated of rest?

I know that I sleep in the daytime, and perhaps you are not aware that your actions disturb me so. Perhaps pulling each door shut would place an undue strain on a routine that already threatens repetitive-stress injury. But dear God, man, every day! I've worn earplugs, but they do nothing to protect me, as it is not the sound but the vibration that wakens me. Up one side and down the other, slam. Pause. Slam. Pause. Slam. It is enough to make one seriously contemplate taking a page from the postman's book and mowing people down with an assault rifle. (I'm talking to you, too, Mr. Pounds on the Ceiling!)

Please modify your behavior before I do something rash. And while you're at it, enough with the coupons.

Sincerely,
House of Dave

Sweating and soaking it out at ACL

2006-09-22T15:31:00.000-05:00

As no doubt many of you are aware, I spent last weekend down at the Austin City Limits music festival, a three-day auditory bacchanalia of shirtless punks, graying boomers and sweaty hippies. My companion and I had a grand old time, and my greatest regret is not making it down there before the fifth incarnation of the event. It's gotten to be a pretty massive affair, which didn't really bother me all that much, but I would've liked to have been there when R.E.M. was headlining and you could still get right up to the stage without being completely obnoxious.

There were a lot of bands down there that I had heard of but never actually heard, so it was an opportunity to get acquainted with some of the new acts that the kids are listening to these days (my dear companion is to be given great credit for steering us in interesting directions, as she is infinitely more knowledgeable about such things than I). Unfortunately there were several occasions when two bands I wanted to see were playing on opposite ends of the endless expanse that is Zilker Park, so sometimes we had to split time between them or just skip one altogether.

We got down to Austin late Friday afternoon, after setting out only an hour late for our destination (pretty good for an Austin trip, which in my experience never get started anywhere near on time). Sadly we were arriving just as the city's notorious rush hour was beginning, so it took quite a bit of time to make our way to our La Quinta on North MOPAC and then on down to the shuttle staging area where people gather to board buses to the festival site. (There is reportedly NO parking at all at the park, although if you could stand forking over $15 to the Baptists, you could use their adjacent lot). Instead we opted for downtown parking, and were the last car to enter the surface lot one block below the staging area, at Republic Square.

It became immediately clear how big the event was, as we found ourselves winding through a long, tedious, switchback line back and forth across the square just to get to where the buses were lined up. In truth it didn't take that long, and we were hardly ever just standing, but when you have to traipse the equivalent of five or six blocks just to get on a shuttle, you begin to appreciate just how many people were coming out. There was one particular guy in line who was older, balding, pale as a ghost and sweating profusely in jeans and a button-down shirt; I didn't give him much chance of surviving the weekend. But most everyone else was prepared, with folding chairs and tank tops, shorts and shades and sandals. It would've been like any other Texas festival if not for the occasional white kid wearing dreads, signaling that we were unmistakably in Austin.

On our first day things went pretty smoothly, although there weren't all that many acts that night that we were all that hyped about seeing. I discovered that evening the importance of timing meals, turning away empty-handed when I found the lines to be impossibly long just after dark (better to sneak out during the headliner or before nightfall). We heard a bit of Van Morrison, the big name that night, catching an unusual rendition of Moondance but, as we overheard, missing a chopped-up version of Brown-Eyed Girl before heading out. We were hoping to catch the Shins at an ACL after-party at Stubb's, so we didn't want to wait for the end of the set, when everyone would be cramming the shuttle lines.

At least that's what we thought. Apparently Van isn't the big draw he might have been, because the shuttle line was already stretched way the hell down Barton Springs as far as Robert E. Lee. I had sorta looked over the map before we left and had a sense that it wouldn't be as long a walk to our car as it would be to wait for the bus, so we decided to make our way out on foot. As we were crossing a bridge over an arm of Town Lake we could hear Van was playing the full-on Brown-Eyed Girl, so we stopped and listened. The moonlit crowd of festivalgoers crossing behind us chimed in on the Sha-la-la-las, in one of those memorable moments that seem to happen so much more often in Austin.

It was a bit of a trek back to the car, but we made it without incident. We didn't know exactly where Stubb's was, and didn't want to just make a guess that would have us walking all over creation for no good reason, so we called Information -- which couldn't help us -- and then the real Information -- the DMN copy desk -- which could (thanks, Elizabeth!). Once we knew where we were going, we struck out, and after another 10 blocks we found ourselves standing in front of Stubb's, being told the show was sold out. Damn. Somebody walking up had extra tickets and just handed them off to some girl, adding to our aggravation, since we would've paid him for them. Frustrated, we trudged off to 6th Street, grabbing beers at the Dirty Dog. (The band playing there was pretty good, actually, a blues-rock trio from Baton Rouge called Atomic Pilot, but as I remarked to Liz, they were just too damn ugly to ever make it.) Afterward we hit a jazz club we remembered from our SXSW sojourn in the spring, and when we were ready to cash in, we paid a bicycle rickshaw to haul us back to our car. Well worth the $16 we paid him ($6 of which was tip).

The next day, Saturday, was hot as shit on the ground, so we often found ourselves making listening decisions based on shade. A funny phenomenon of the festival was the "human shadow," in which people gathered under what few trees there were with blankets and chairs and then slowly moved and replanted themselves through the course of day as the shade moved across the parched grass. Oregon was playing the infamous Oklahoma game that day, and I was wearing my colors, which got me lots of comments (mostly encouragement from Sooner-hating Texas fans) and the occasional score update (although my best lifeline was Sooner booster Bill back in Dallas, watching on his high-def TV and texting me as the game went on).

I didn't make much effort to find a TV, even though I suspected there must be a few scattered around the festival, until the last few minutes of the game, when the updates from Bill started to get crazy. I found one in the AT&T tent, although I could hardly see past the shoulders of the mostly Oklahoma fans crowded around it. When we ended up winning (if you can call it that) I threw up my arms, high-fived a sympathetic neighbor, and got the hell out of there.

We saw a few good bands on Saturday. The Shins, finally (although our view was completely blocked because we had made the mistake of parking behind a traffic lane that just would not be choked off, despite our best efforts). The Raconteurs, and a pretty solid set from the incomparable Willie Nelson (who is never too snobby to play his hits, although, as I remarked to Liz at the time, it helps when you have like 45 of them). We skipped Massive Attack, the other headliner, opting instead for an ACL after-show at Emo's (this time we were smart enough to order tickets ahead of time). We waited for the shuttle, which involved snaking through a line that simply had to be at least 2 miles long. (It took nearly as long to walk that line as it had taken to walk all the way back to our car the night before, though it was marginally a shorter distance.)

The after-party was a bit of a bust; the first band we caught, Nada Surf, was decent, but the second one, Sparklehorse, was just sleepy and sad, and we were hot and tired. (A singer-songwriter playing inside the club, mercifully well air-conditioned, was Rocky Votolato, and he was frankly better than either of bands we had ostensibly come to see.) After a couple of drinks, and a little convo with a fellow ACL'er from Minneapolis, we were ready to call it a night. (I did happily manage a text-message shout-out to the buyout bashers, merrily drunkening it up back in Dallas that night.)

On Day 3, Sunday, it started raining as we drove to the shuttle area, hard. The roads were slicked with oil that had built up over several parched weeks, such that Liz fishtailed madly at the bottom of a hill and several accidents popped up all along our route. We were grateful to have missed the downpour at the park, but it just made the whole day relentlessly humid. We took to tossing ice cubes in our hats just to keep the temperature down.

Sunday was the best day for acts, though, and we strategically positioned ourselves to maximize our listening and minimize our walking. KT Tunstall put on a great set, then we turned around and watched Jack Ingram on a nearby stage. We turned again for Matisyahu, and then once more for Son Volt. Finally we had to actually pick up and move, though, as the New Pornographers were playing at the far end of the park and we did want to see them (and even just a half-set was about as good as anything I heard all weekend). We saw most of Ben Harper before decamping for Tom Petty, which we anticipated would draw the biggest crowd of the festival, as there were no other headliners playing opposite him.

We got ourselves positioned -- taking careful watch of where the traffic lanes were likely to develop -- and finally settled in for the show. People around us urged him to turn it up and complained that it was always like this for the big headliner, too quiet (people never seem to grasp the fact that the dense crowd itself serves as a barrier to sound). We got about six, seven songs in before the lightning that had been gathering behind us started to really flash, and the rain started.

We were prepared for this; we'd brought rain ponchos and packed our various electronic gadgets in plastic baggies. But as it really started to storm and they stopped the show, it seemed almost certain they would have to call it off, lest everyone risk getting struck by lightning in the middle of an empty field. We began to make our way out of the park, where we were again confronted with the massive shuttle line. It was at this moment that I made the weekend's great strategic blunder: I again concluded it would be faster to walk than to wait (I had since discovered a short-cut that would make it at least somewhat less of a hike than the first night). So we started off, hauling our soaked chairs and selves through the night.

We'd made it a substantial distance before the rain stopped, and we could hear the show starting up again. Dammit, if we had only opted for the shuttle line, we would be close by and easily could have returned to catch the rest of the set, and probably with much-improved seating position owing to the departure of much of the crowd. But we were footsore and wet and had already made it a long way, and just couldn't bear the thought of walking all the way back, knowing that we'd still have all that walking to do after the show was finally over. So we trundled off toward downtown, openly wishing for a renewed downpour to punish those hardy souls who stuck it out and now were enjoying a more-intimate show with a smug sense of survival. I wasn't so much disappointed by missing the show as I was at being a pussy, chased away from the night's biggest name by nothing more than some rain and flashing skies.

And so that was ACL. A great weekend, to be sure, even with that resentful final note. I don't know that I'll be in Texas for No. 6, but I hope this wasn't my last one.

Starfucking, as they say

2006-09-22T06:05:00.000-05:00

I'm writing to you all today about the subject of celebrity crushes. I happen to be in the throes of another one, this time to public-radio contributor and author Sarah Vowell, she of the distinctive little girl voice and big nose. I recently got done reading her latest book, Assassination Vacation, which I recommend to anyone with an affection for history and a tolerance for liberal exasperation.

Like all crushes of the celebrity type, I expect this one to be paper-thin but nonetheless somewhat lasting, so long as she doesn't commit some grave sin like one of her predecessors, Janeane Garofalo. Dear Janeane, a fave since The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, lost her coveted place by becoming a shrill political harpy without a sense of humor. I like a woman with opinions but I also like one that can make me laugh, and poor Janeane just doesn't seem to do it anymore.

There have been others, of course. I fell for Sandra Oh long, long before any of you knew her from Grey's Anatomy or even Sideways. I discovered her in the obscure Canadian indie flick Last Night, in which she appears as a woman trying desperately to reconnect with her lover to commit suicide in advance of the imminent-but-never-quite-explained End of the World. Any of you have a membership at Premiere Video, I highly recommend it.

I don't typically fall for the Hollywood starlet of the month, viewing most young actresses as fairly interchangeable and not all that interesting, particularly the pretty blondes. I really dug Renee Zellweger in her Jerry Maguire, Bridget Jones phase, but the way she anorexed it up for Chicago and vamped for all the magazines as a sandwich-challenged supertramp kinda put me off of her. I liked her when she was vulnerable and frumpy and accessible, not when she became a Movie Star. (Although her co-star Catherine Zeta-Jones has never disappointed, even in those obnoxious T-Mobile ads.)

Looking back I always tended to favor the quirky, loveable girls in the movie that the hero doesn't appreciate until the hot chick spurns him. The long-suffering best friend he doesn't recognize as a love interest until the third act, or more likely, the closing credits. You know, like Boof in Teen Wolf, Monique in Better Off Dead, Jordan in Real Genius. (Just to limit my choices to 1985).

You might interpret from this list that I'm a sucker for brunettes, and while I have in fact not seriously dated a blonde since I was 16, I think that's just evidence of mid-'80s casting director bias. The blonde was always the unattainable bitch, the brunette was always the true-blue, real-deal love. I did of course, like most males of my generation, have a tremendous crush on Phoebe Cates, but I came by mine a little differently. I loved her from Gremlins. Thanks to the puritanical editing standards of cable at the time, the classic scene in Fast Times for me made no goddamn sense at all. It wasn't until the late '90s that I realized that the virginal helpmate of Zach Galligan's Billy had actually bared it all in the movie that made her a star. I just thought she looked really cute in a turtleneck sweater.

Of course there have been others. Lucy Liu, circa Charlie's Angels (Barracuda!). Kate Winslet, circa Titanic. Jennifer Grey, circa Dirty Dancing (pre-nose job!) Alyson Hannigan, from Buffy to American Pie (Say my name, bitch!). And Maggie Gyllenhaal, circa Secretary. I don't know if there's a pattern in there. You guys can let me know.

So, in the interest of actually inviting comment, who floats your boat? What celebrities push all your buttons? I'm just curious to see if anyone's reading me anymore, but I'd also like to see the answers.

Put off posting

2006-09-03T15:17:00.000-05:00

As will come to no surprise to many of my loyal readers -- and you really are loyal, if you're still coming back after so many long lapses between posts -- I am a procrastinator. This is a character flaw of the first order, a genuine defining charactertistic dating back to childhood (and first identified by the inimitable Tim Goss, the Birkenstock-wearing, sushi-eating director of my school district's TAG program, who noticed I often would put off making entries in the required TAG journal, even though the journal could be about anything at all and therefore should not have required any more real effort on my part than breathing. Still, I put it off.)

And this trait has haunted me more or less my entire life. I procrastinate about everything. I put off school assignments and household chores. I put off any job requirement without a firm deadline, and I put off taking the ACT so long that I could not apply to college anywhere that insisted upon it (so long, Missouri). I put off my job search 10 years ago so long that, had I not been hired on here, I would've probably had to go home to Oregon and begin my career at the poster child for Gannett neglect.

But this tendency also applies to my personal life. I have put off necessary conversations for far too long (procrastination dovetails nicely with another key trait, conflict avoidance). I have put off going to the gym, quitting bad habits, and finding a new job. I even put off eating, such that it is not uncommon for my stomach growling around 8 or 9 p.m. to remind me to have my first bite of the day (a practice no doubt quite injurious to my health, but more important, to my energy level -- igniting a vicious cycle all the more encouraging of more procrastination).

And so it is today. I am writing this entry as an exercise in procrastination, putting off a vital work task that I even arrived at the office hours early specifically to perform, even though I've already been asked to hurry up with it. It's a sickness, it really is. My house only really gets cleaned when I have some other, more unpleasant task to perform that I want to put off.

One of the main reasons I got into copy editing in the first place was because it gave me a fresh set of deadlines each and every day, no wiggle room, and when the day's work was done it was truly done -- I could safely retreat to my distractions and not worry about anything until it was time to begin again the next day. As miserable as things have gotten around here lately, I honestly wonder what will happen to me when I lose that framework. It is certainly not outside the realm of possibility that I will put off my impending job search so long that I am nearly destitute by the time I find another position, not because I'm an undesirable employee on paper but because I'm so uneager to look for one.

I've been told that it's common practice now for employers to search the Internet for information on potential hires and that the sorts of things said on blogs have been held against people as they've looked for work. If you are such an employer, don't be dismayed by what you read here. I am an exemplary performer under the right circumstances, and even under bad ones, I always do the job and do it well, because my sense of professional pride won't allow me to do it any other way. As for all the other confessions, foul language and snarky opinions posted elsewhere on this blog -- which if I were smart I would probably just take down entirely -- well, as Popeye says, I am what I am (and for me in a nutshell, I direct you here). Please be kind.

Ode to obsolescence

2006-08-29T15:23:00.000-05:00

Let me tell you all a little story. It's a story about a place that used to exist, a long, long 10 years ago. It's the place where I began my career.

When I started as an intern, the newsroom was under construction. When we came to work each day at 3 our keyboards would be covered with a fine layer of dust, and people joked that it was asbestos. I remember the night of the Olympic Park bombing -- one of the few major news events to occur when I was actually on shift -- and everyone stayed late as we tried to piece things together. In those days, we routinely flew lots of pages when big news happened late. There was excitement in the room, because even at 12:30 we knew most of our readers would be getting the news as we last knew it.

Before long we moved into our (not so) permanent digs, along the front wall of the building, now lined with offices. We had windows then! When a storm blew in you could see the lightning, and when it snowed, you could tell from your desk. Some people even were known to pour their cold coffee out the window rather than walk to the break room to dump it (yes, we had a break room).

In those days not everyone had their own desk. Many of the latest hires, myself included, spent a year or two moving around to whatever desk was not occupied on a given day. This was rather inconvenient, I'll admit, but it did give you the opportunity to interact with different people than you otherwise would. Back then there was also such a thing as the Arlington Morning News, a subsidiary publication that we spent many millions of dollars to launch and promote in a war with a rival Star-Telegram product that basically both sides lost. The AMN copy desk worked on our copy desk as well, intinerant editors who never had a permanent seat and hardly ever talked to anyone.

We were still on an archaic editing system called SII in those days, so nobody had the Internet at their desk except Joel (and even he only had AOL, so you needed to be a subscriber to use it). It was dialup, too, so there was no hiding the screech and bong-bong-bong of the connection as you signed on. There was a terminal adjacent to the news desk where you could get online if you needed to research something, but the Internet was not as useful then, and many times it was actually more practical to call the library on the second floor and have them look something up... in books.

SII, the editing system, involved a lot of user-input coding to get the type to take the proper form. If you were writing a headline, you had to specify the typeface, the width, the point size, and whatever degree of squeezing you needed to apply to make it fit. The system allowed you to register 100 "save strings" -- simple two- or three-key combinations that would trigger whatever sequence of keystrokes and commands you wanted, to save you from having to type frequently used sequences fresh every time. Of course, these strings could also be used for less productive purposes, such as sending out a joke message on the computer system as the circumstances warranted. Will, who was but a regular rim editor then, had a save string detailing the symptoms of rubella that he would send off everytime Jay Brakefield unleashed one of his legendary super-sneezes. In many ways, save strings were better than ePop.

There were two full editions, the first of which was known as the 2-star, for ancient reasons I couldn't succeed in explaining now. In the 2-star there was no metro section; the B section (which was then called the A section, only with page numbers beginning wherever the main A section left off) was called Texas & Southwest. Major metro stories would be displayed on the front of the TSW section, along with a bunch of state news from the wire or a network of bureaus. The centerpiece for TSW was notoriously lame, and it was all the more painful an assignment knowing that it was almost never the centerpiece for the next edition, meaning you had to rewrite all your heads on it -- if the story survived at all.

For the next edition, the whole TSW cover was torn up and became the metro section. All the stories would move around and get new spex (which were delivered each night with a jaunty message from the chief or dep after layout gone done writing them). The new spex were quite a labor issue, but back then there were several hours between the editions to get the work done, rather than the 15 or 30 minutes between zones we get now.

And in that gap, we had a lunch break! Forty minutes, starting around 9, in which we all could go stretch our legs, even drive up to Oak Lawn for fast food, Eatzi's, or La Madeleine. If you ended up eating a frozen dinner at your desk, it was entirely by choice. People left the building every night, often in groups. (You could also go to the cafeteria, which was a stripped-down affair compared to the current setup but could nonetheless supply you with a hot dog well into the shift.)

When you got back, there were proofs. The late person in those days had no People or At a Glance duties; they just collected proofs, cut them up, and distributed them around the desk. (Some folks would actually walk around handing off stories to spread out the workload, rather than relying on the "come-and-get-it" style we use by necessity now). Every story in the paper got read after first edition by somebody, top to bottom, and they were all returned to the original editor afterward, with plenty of time to make any fixes, even for little things like missing commas or extra hyphens.

Once the second edition was done, there was another round of proofing, and once again, everything got cut up, distributed, and read, top to bottom. We couldn't fix everything at that point -- we still had something of a limit on fly pages -- but if it was in something special like an obit, even commas and hyphens were fixed, and we made sure everything on the covers was perfect. Depending on the day of the week, we might have suburban copy to work after deadline -- Northeast Tarrant was a notorious headache -- so we rarely got out before 1 a.m. The late person had to stay until 2:30, but it was a bit more rewarding a gig then, because you were expected to update everything that needed updating, and if you did, it actually made it into a lot of papers. You were all alone in the office, except for a lone person in the composing room. Rookies and newbies were not allowed to be the late person, and in fact being authorized to do it was something of a point of prestige.

And yes, there was a composing room then, occupying the space the present UD occupies now. Columns of news came out of large machines and were cut up with Xacto knives and pasted onto each page with wax. If you messed up the coding, things would come out very wrong. If you were making a fix to a paragraph, you could create a new file with just that paragraph on it, then send it to the composing room with instructions printed on top in bold letters, instructing the composers on where the graph was supposed to go, page, story and column. You had to make sure the new graph wasn't longer than the old one, or it wouldn't fit. (I am a little nostalgic for this process, but I'm not a fool. It was extremely inefficient and prone to error, and for all its faults, CCI is much, much better.)

I was allowed to park on the main lot from the first day on the job (or I would have been, had I had a car). I have never parked in the Reunion lot, and only parked in the lot next to WFAA during the summer they were expanding the parking garage. (Original plans reportedly had called for an additional story on the garage, but poor construction scheduling led to overruns, forcing them to scale that back.)

The building now occupied by TXCN was vacant by the time I arrived. It was originally the warehouse for newsprint, from the days when the presses were still in the basement. Although the North Plant had been up and running for a few years, there was still a railroad siding running alongside the warehouse, where the line of cars are parked now. The smoking area was at the end of the dock, where all the garbage bins are kept today.

In 10 years, a lot can change. I've seen a lot of co-workers, and a couple girlfriends, come and go. Up to now, or at least the last round of layoffs, most people left for personal reasons, swapping one newsroom for another just for the sake of family ties, accommodating a spouse or partner, or just moving up in the world. It was still bittersweet to see them go, but it never seemed so much like an escape as it does now. I know the business is different, permanently changed by market forces and technology, and some painful change was inevitable. But I never would have guessed how many people would simply be giving up on the place, on the industry, or wondering how long it will be before they do. It's sad, because none of us went into this for the money. There's better pay in all sorts of fields, but we picked this because we were good at it, and we wanted to do a little good while we earned our paychecks.

You'd think the world would need as many of us as it could get.

Son of a BITCH

2006-08-26T18:31:00.000-05:00

You will not fucking BELIEVE what just happened to me.

So, I load up my car with recycling and I drive down to the closest place I know, Tietze Park, to drop some off. Bottles and cans; they don't take plastic or cardboard. Those were to be later stops.

It's hot as shit and my air-conditioning doesn't work so well in the car since I got it out of the shop, so as I'm getting out, I decide, hell, I'm letting the car run.

So I get out and toss all my bottles and cans into the bins and return to my car, only to discover I've locked myself out with the engine running.

I'm well aware of the deadline pressure here, with the Paul Simon show coming up at 7:30 (it is at this point nearly 6). I don't have my cellphone on me (jackass) because of a project at home, pulling old photos off the old phone.

I start to walk over toward Bill's to see if he's home, but then I realize to myself, even if I can get help, I can't get to my spare keys at home because I don't have spare house keys.

I could call AAA but on a weekend this hot it could take an hour to get a locksmith. Besides, in this heat, having my car running that long with the A/C on is just a recipe for yet another overheat, and the total meltdown of my engine. Assuming of course that no one steals the running car while I'm off finding a phone.

So, in a decision that may have been influenced by a touch of heatstroke, I conclude I really only have one choice. I grab a rock.

I give five or six solid blows to the small triangle window on the driver's side, figuring it's the cheapest to replace and knowing this because I've had it broken by burglars before. But the replacement glass is stronger than regular glass, and it won't give. Scar it up pretty good, but no break.

So I go to the other side of the car and try that one. First blow, nothing. Second blow, bam, goes right through... but I cut my wrist on the glass.

Not really bad, mind you, but enough that I need to get something wrapped around it so I don't drip all over my clothes (my Belikin T-shirt may be a lost cause, though).

I still have to reach into the car and unlock the door, which I manage to do, then the next door, then the driver's door, so I can finally open the trunk to get something to put on my wrist. I stress right now that this was NOT urgent, purely a matter of not making a mess, not life or death.

I grab the garbage bag holding my plastics and wrap that around my whole arm, then drive back to my apartment, fuming. I halfway wonder if my neighbors will think I just participated in a stickup gone wrong or something.

I wash up in the bathroom and put some Neosporin on my wound, which had already started to clot but was reopened by my washing. A single Band-Aid fixed it up.

So, now, just one day after getting my car back from the shop from the last break-in, I now have to have another window replaced... which will have to wait to Monday, most likely.

I fucking hate my car.

(P.S. Do not bother writing me with helpful suggestions as to how I could have handled things differently. I have already come up with several of my own, and if I hear any more, I think I may just have to kill someone.)

Yeah, I'm taking it

2006-08-23T09:07:00.000-05:00

This e-mail shall serve as notice that I intend to accept the terms of the buyout offer as given. I retain the right to rescind this acceptance within the timeframe given by the company.

This acknowledges the receipt of your e-mail to <mailto:voluntaryoffer@dallasnews.com> voluntaryoffer@dallasnews.com.

Good night, John Boy

2006-08-20T02:35:00.000-05:00

I've been living amongst the swinging singles of the Verandahs (extra h optional) for a few months now, and I must admit the social scene has been gratifying. One of the reasons I signed up to live in one of the Power Properties was the opportunity to meet a new circle. And I have.

I don't know any names, of course, but I think I have a handle on things. There's Forever Shirtless Guy, mainly in the afternoons. There's Coffee Girl, in the early mornings. Hot Blonde Neighbor has a name but I've already forgotten it; same with Never Home Guy across the hall. There's Pounds on the Ceiling downstairs, but I haven't heard much from him since I got the new TV bench from Ikea. There's Dog Walking Guy and Dos Equis Guy (is that how you spell Dos Equis?), Jogging Girl and Really Shouldn't Be Jogging in Public Girl. I've really started to feel at home here. I don't know what they call me -- Weird Hours Guy, perhaps -- but it's just like a family. Maybe someday I'll even use the pool.

Completing the Maple Circuit

2006-08-12T19:08:00.000-05:00

I'm going to begin putting the experience of my recent Quebec/New England odyssey on the blog, before it starts to fade from memory. I have unfortunately something of an obsessive streak about completeness, such that I don't like to do something if I can't do it right, and thoroughly. This trait collides with my equally pervasive habit of putting things off, such that for want of doing something properly, I end up doing nothing at all.

SO, in recognition of these facts, I'm going to do this blog entry a little differently. I'm going to post each section as I finish it, rather than waiting until the whole damn thing is done. There is a high probability that I will return to some sections for revisions as I remember new things or just to add jokes, such that I will advise my gentle readers to return often and consider rereading the whole thing when it's over. That may be asking a lot, but when you consider how rarely I ever post anything on here at all, you'll recognize this is not much of a time commitment.

A companion blog from my traveling companion is available here. I have not read it yet, for fear of tainting my own recollection, so forgive me if some information is repeated. As she is a foodie, I will leave most of the gustatory discussion to her, although let it be said we ate a hell of a lot of good meals.

So, without any further ado, here is the Great Maple Circuit Caper, a story in 17 parts.

Montreal, Quebec

We got off the plane in Canada in the early evening and were confronted with a minor crisis early on. As soon as we cleared customs, we went to an ATM to withdraw some Canuck bucks so we could catch a cab into the Old Quarter of the city, where we were staying. For whatever reason, the machine -- the only one in the terminal -- could not communicate with the bank we both use. After some hemming and hawing and trying to figure out whether les cabbies Quebecois take Visa, to no avail, we exchange what little U.S. currency we were carrying for Canadian. It's enough to get us there, but not by much. We don't admit it at this time, but I suspect both of us were quietly fretting about what we'd do if no Canadian ATMs would take our cards -- a distinct possibility given that we use an obscure credit union whose debit cards have been known to be rejected even at American outlets.

Our cabbie is, to our surprise, not the usual gregarious African or South Asian immigrant one usually finds in big cities, but rather an actual gruff Quebecker. Our attempt to convey our hotel name in French is met with puzzlement before he asks us to speak in English, which he understands perfectly well. (In fact the language issue did not present any problems on the entire trip, as we were mainly in touristed areas where everybody is bilingual. We gamely approached everyone en francais, sometimes successfully enough to even receive a French reply, although our lack of comprehension was usually so evident on our faces that most people just transitioned straight into English.)

A forty-dollar cab ride later, we settle into our hotel, and venture out into the city. We had seen crowds gathering in a big plaza on our drive in, so we backtrack there to find the Place de Jacques Cartier, which our guidebook tells us is the liveliest spot in the Old City. Street traffic is blocked off, and the place is lined with sidewalk restaurants, entertainers, caricaturists and the like (think Jackson Square in New Orleans). We walk around checking menus -- most places have a host greeting potential diners with a friendly but bored "bonsoir" -- and venture onto one of the main adjacaent streets, Rue St-Paul, in search of a place reportedly the oldest inn in North America. We don't find the one we were looking for, although there are others staking the same claim. We end up having mussels, fries and Molson's on the Jacques Cartier.

The next morning we get up early for the free continental breakfast (waffle maker!), but we fall asleep again as soon as we return to the room. Starting off some hours later, we hit a tourist info center off Jacques Cartier to buy a pass to the various attractions in town. We have to make a side trip for cash (other ATMs do come through for us, thankfully) because they won't take plastic for the pass, but soon enough we are properly equipped, and on our way via subway to our first attractions, surrounding Montreal's Olympic Park. The area is full of athletes attending the first-ever OutGames (some sort of pissing match in the gay sporting community led to a schism from the Gay Games, which were awarded to Chicago). If your gaydar isn't up to snuff, you could always look for the lanyards. See which country they're from, too.

Olympic Stadium is famous as a colossal taxpayer boondoggle that ended up costing more than a billion dollars, all to build a stadium with a retractable roof that ultimately never worked right and had to be replaced with a fixed one. The tower that lifted the roof -- when the roof still worked, that is -- was not even finished until 11 years after the '76 Olympics were over. It's reportedly the tallest inclined tower in the world, and it does give a nice view of the city, as well as the Biodome next door, which from above looks pretty much like a giant space tick. The Biodome is an indoor zoo and aquarium, since Montreal in the winter is not very conducive to many of your more interesting species. Being in a jungle setting but seeing a roof arching over the tree canopy is cool but also a little unsettling, in a Truman Show sort of way.

The area is also home to a massive Botanical Garden, also one of the world's largest, which we had to see in something of a hurry as the day had gotten away from us. It has both a Chinese Garden and a Japanese Garden, although after only a couple of weeks I can hardly distinguish one from the other in my memory, which would probably make Doris sad. They were both very pretty, though, I promise.

The next morning we didn't even bother trying to make it to breakfast and slept in again. This was the day we were supposed to stay fairly close in, visiting the riverfront and the two islands -- one natural, one manmade -- that served as the grounds for the '67 World's Fair. By the time we started walking around, though, it had already gotten to be ridiculously hot outside, with 70 percent humidity that made it, if not technically on a par with Dallas, certainly just as bad when you consider we had no car and little shade. We retreated back to the hotel for lighter clothes, and Liz bought some ostensibly more walkable shoes, which of course ended up being a blistery disaster as the day wore on. (I made a similar mistake in Europe, so I could sympathize, not that it helped.)

We took a ferry over to the islands, which was a pleasant if not entirely convenient little ride. (You can take the subway if you want, but the thought of being in the un-air-conditioned tunnels that afternoon did not appeal to us in the slightest.) Once over there, we walked to a historical museum housed in a former fort that we unquestionably appreciated more for the AC than for the exhibits. They did have a cool little flag-lowering ceremony involving a regiment of kilt-wearing Scottish re-enactors that gave me the opportunity to gobble up all the space on my camera's memory card.

After that, we hobbled across the island to the Biosphere (not to be confused with the Biodome, although no doubt it often is), which was the home of the American exposition at the World's Fair. The giant geodesic sphere was designed by Buckminster Fuller and once was covered in some space-age polymer, but at some point the covering caught fire and it was never replaced, leaving the naked sphere looking like some sort of playground structure on steroids. (Montreal itself has a long history of burning down, as the fort museum explained to us shortly before.) There's a museum inside now dedicated to nature, the Circle of Life, sustainability, and all that crap. Apparently the sewage generated by the building is filtered through the reedy marshes at its base, as something of a demonstration of how we can keep from destroying the planet through natural means. You get the feeling that not only did these guys see An Inconvenient Truth, they scoffed at it as too little, too late. But they do have some fun little water exhibits to play with, if you're so inclined.

At this point Liz is barely ambulatory, her feet are so bad. There's a shuttle that carries people around the island, and we took it next to the casino (which we picked over the beach mainly because it was the first bus that showed up). It's a pretty massive, multistory affair, and as casinos go I'm sure it's lovely, although it suffers from that classic (and entirely deliberate) casino flaw of being utterly unnavigable. We each lost $20 on the slots -- Liz had been up for a while, but I lost early and with typical gusto -- and got the hell out of there, this time taking the subway back.

This was also the day that we were planning to visit the Basilica of Notre Dame for a light show they were having that night. We had some time before the show, and were soaked though from walking around in the humidity, so we hit up the hotel to shower and clean up (and for Liz to change shoes). Of course, this ended up being entirely pointless, as when we got there for the show, early as advised, we ended up sitting in the un-air-conditioned sanctuary with scores of other tourists, sweltering away. The show was more of a multimedia presentation on hanging screens than Pink-Floyd-at-the-Planetarium, amateurly acted, not entirely historically correct, and presenting a conspicuously uncritical view of the church, such that I found myself scoffing and laughing along with the lesbian OutGamers seated on the pew next to us. The best part was the onset of thunder-of-God sound effects near the end, which ended up being actual thunder, as a roaring storm had rolled in during the show. (The church itself is not especially historic, even by American standards, its sanctuary finished only in 1830 and its signature Gothic towers later than that. It is not even technically a cathedral, inasmuch as it is not the seat of a diocese. But it is quite beautiful inside, even if not on quite the level of the major cathedrals in Europe. Once you've been to St. Peter's, it's hard to be truly impressed by a church.)

We waited for the storm to pass, first in the church and then outside under the overhang, before venturing back to the Rue St-Paul for dinner. Our first choice didn't appeal so much when we saw the menu, so when the rain kicked up again, we sheltered in that restaurant's doorway, where eventually several other people joined us. At one point an Asian guy with a backpack approached and asked us if we knew where the hostel was; we gave him some bad advice, and he trudged off in the rain in the wrong direction (the hostel, we would later discover, was only about 20 yards away, across the street). We finally ended up at a restaurant suggested by the guidebook, which proved to be quite good.

On our last full day in Montreal, we decided to walk downtown. Our route took us through the heat of the city's Chinatown, a small district full of eateries, importers and bargain shoppers, as in pretty much every Chinatown you've ever seen. We had some bubble tea, some weird candy with a name like "dragon's beard," and stepped into a subterranean shop to buy discount souvenirs, as well as some socks for still-suffering Liz. When we emerged, it was raining, but the clever entrepreneur running the place had already moved his rack of umbrellas outside. We bought one and continued downtown.

We visited the city's Museum of Contemporary Art, which was featuring an exhibit by Northwest artist Brian Jungen, best known for ripping apart countless Air Jordans and stitching them back together to form masks like those seen on totem poles, as well as constructing giant whale skeletons with nothing but the interlocking pieces of hundreds of plastic deck chairs. God, I love modern art. (Though I hope Canadian taxpayers were footing the bill, and not us.)

It was still raining off and on afterward, so we made off for the Underground, which is a network of tunnels linked together to create an enormous shopping mall. It is to the Dallas Underground what a pea is to a basketball, the place is so big. (And full of people.) The entrances are all over downtown, although we actually got in via an escalator below the city's main Episcopal Church, which consented to having a mall built in its basement in exchange for the developer throwing in some meeting rooms the parish could use. Practical folk, the Episcopalians.

But even a giant mall is, in the end, just a mall, and we were using it mainly as a sheltered path toward our next destination, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. (We were determined to get our money's worth out of that pass.) They turned out to be having an exhibit on 20th-century Italian design -- chairs, dinnerware, typewriters, cars, whatever -- that I'm sure Cullen would have enjoyed. We even had espressos in the cafe.

This was our last chance to experience Montreal's night life, so after dinner -- we had pizza and wine out a boutique chain called Pizzadelic -- we ventured out to a bar on Montreal's main drag, the Rue St-Laurent, called the GoGo Lounge: '60s mod decor, '80s music, 20-something clientele. Gimmicky, but lively. I also dug the Taco Bull Tex-Mex restaurant across the street, though we didn't eat there. We probably would have ventured to more places, but the rain was incessant, so we just got our buzz on and cabbed it back to hotel for a good night's sleep.

We were getting close to the road-trip portion of the journey, but we were lacking the key ingredient: a car. While Liz did laundry at the hotel, I took a rather inefficient subway trip to pick up a rental from Hertz (getting shamed in the process by the token-taker who correctly noted my three-day subway pass had expired). Rather than strike out immediately, we took the opportunity to hit up a few Montreal attractions with the added "convenience" of a vehicle.

I use the scare quotes there because driving in Montreal is something of a clusterfuck. LOTS of one-way streets, construction, bizarre intersections, and selfish drivers. At one point I realized that I would need other motorists' cooperation to get to an opposite street that was not quite aligned with the one I was on, such that I would need to drive a short way in the wrong direction on a one-way street. The street I was crossing was in gridlock, so I figured it was impossible and resigned myself to turning right, but as no one was moving anyway, I just sat there hoping for an opening (and in fact a couple more aggressive drivers completed the exact maneuver I was contemplating by passing me on the left). While this was happening, another driver gestured in exasperation at me for my failure to use my turn signal. (I eventually did have to turn right.)

Anyway, we drove up onto Mont Royal, the oversized hill from which, it is speculated, the city got its name. It's a big park with the two main municipal cemeteries (one Catholic and one for everybody else, never the twain shall meet) and a few overlooks. But the main attaction is St. Joseph's Oratory. Over the course of the 20th century, a rather obsessed little priest known as Brother Andre turned his small chapel into a massive basilica on the hill, the largest church in Canada with the second-largest dome "of its kind" in the world, behind St. Peter's. Brother Andre was credited with a bunch of miracles, mostly healings, and he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. His heart -- the actual mummified organ -- is kept in the church's reliquary.

We had lunch in the vicinity of the Rue St-Laurent at an oddball hippie sandwich shop -- I had something involving strawberries, peanut butter and cream cheese -- and shopped along the street for a bit before finally heading out of town. Darkness was falling by the time we got to the border.

Plattsburgh, N.Y.

This was not exactly anyplace we had intended to go, let alone spend the night. But Lake Champlain, which runs for much of the length of the New York-Vermont border, is a big mother. If you're only casually glacing at the map you'll see several crossings, but a few of them are ferries. The exit we took, after missing the bridge that is the primary means of passage, had us winding through the darkness on a narrow road past campsites and budget motels. I started to doubt whether the ferry would still be running at that hour, so I had Liz call to check, and sure enough, it wasn't (and crossings took an hour, besides). We doubled back and returned to Plattsburgh, which is as lovely as it sounds, and booked into a motel. As we explained the situation to the clerk, he informed us that there is a second ferry that runs 24/7, but by that time we were too tired to mess with it. Our best dining option by then was Wendy's.

In the morning, on our way back to the hourlong ferry, we stopped by something called Ausable Chasm, which sounds very dramatic and awesome. It may actually be dramatic and awesome, too, but at $17 a head for the right to hike a couple miles along a river, we took a pass. You can get a hint of the scenery from the bridge near the expansive gift shop, though, and it does appear to be a nice collection of waterfalls and rapids cutting through a granite gorge. Whether it's worth what its private operators charge for it, we'll leave for other intrepid explorers to discover.

Burlington, Vt.

We viewed the ferry as something of a pleasure cruise across idyllic Lake Champlain. We bought souvenirs and muffins from the gift shop onshore, and Liz fiddled with her computer while I walked around the boat.

It was pretty hot when we got into Burlington, parked, and began to explore the town on foot. We found a brewpub (Vermont's oldest, it claimed) and had some decent pub grub and beer, then continued walking around the pedestrian-friendly downtown. We stepped into a hippie-dippy shop selling T-shirts with slogans like Bush Is a War Criminal and leftist, pacifist propaganda that reminded me of home. So much so that when we stopped at a shoe store shortly thereafter, I bought my first pair of Birkenstocks. Liz, who had still not found a suitable solution to her footwear woes, opted for Crocs.

Waterbury, Vt.

This town is remarkable mainly for its chief export: ice cream. Yes, Waterbury is the home of Ben & Jerry's, and we took the factory tour. It's a nice little operation, but it's starting to show corporate roots now that the company has been gobbled up by massive Euro-conglomerate Unilever. They still give profits to charity and name flavors after favored lefty causes and celebs, but there's just a little too much polish, and the titular founders have mainly excused themselves from the business (although we were told they do still attend store openings from time to time). But the ice cream is still delish, and we got to sample the debuting flavor American Pie at the end of the tour. Perhaps the most interesting part is the Flavor Graveyard up on the hill, which tells of the dearly departed varieties that didn't quite make the grade with the public. (An exception is the White Russian, which for a time made B&J the world's largest consumer of Kahlua, but eventually became too expensive to continue.)

Montpelier, Vt.

Montpelier is a lovely little town situated in the Green Mountains, and the smallest state capital in America. The Capitol grounds are like any small-town square, site of picnics, frisbee-catching dogs and kids on skateboards, with a forested mountainside right behind it. The building that houses the state's Department of Human Resources across the street wouldn't be big enough to house the foreign-language department at my university. We were only passing through this evening, taking a few pictures along the way, but we liked it so much we ended up staying a night there later in the trip.

Littleton, N.H.

We drove to this little hamlet in northwestern New Hampshire and checked into a room at what purports to be the oldest motel in New England, opened in 1948. It's a quaint little family operation, a U of rooms encircling a house that serves as the office, with parking in between. (In other words, a motel.) The walls are all wood-paneled, and the shower has a hopelessly inadequate curtain that doesn't begin to keep the water from covering the tile floor. Still, they've got Wi-Fi, and it's still old and independent, so if you're ever up that way, I'd still recommend it.

On recommendation of AAA and the seconding of a woman loitering in the lobby area of the house, we get some Italian down the street. The restaurant is adjacent to what is probably the only bar in town, which is boisterous with small-town drunks. Ordinarily a scene I'd want to take in, but we're exhausted (again) and just crash back at the room.

Franconia Notch State Park, N.H.

Franconia Notch is, as the name suggests, a notch. Which is to say, a gap in the White Mountains that could be used as what we in the West would call a "pass." (The White Mountains of New Hampshire are, in the summer, just as green as the adjacent Green Mountains of Vermont, which in turn are, no doubt, just as white as the White Mountains in the winter. That they should have different names at all suggests something of a colonial marketing gimmick.)

Anyway, Franconia Notch was also home to the famed "Old Man of the Mountain," a colossal granite profile on a mountain face that has served as the state symbol for more than a century, and in fact is immortalized on the back of the New Hampshire quarter. Where it is not immortalized, however, is the mountain, having surrendered to the forces of erosion and collapsed with one assumes must have been quite a mighty thud in 2003. You can still hike up a little trail and see where it used to be, and quite a few people still do, although reportedly tourism in the area has taken a hit since the Old Man's demise.

The area is still a lively skiing outpost, however, and in the summer people can still take a ride to the top of a mountain in an enclosed gondola, which we did, at Cannon Mountain. It was a bracing 58 degrees at the 6,000-foot elevation, with 15 mph winds, and Liz was grateful to have purchased a sweatshirt at the gift shop below (although we were nonetheless pleased to finally experience something less than room temperature or hotter, given that the whole reason for choosing Canada and New England as a vacation destination was to escape the North Texas heat). We walked a trail around the summit, putting up with a family full of obnoxious kids who kept a pace annoyingly similar to our own. There is a large wooden lookout at the top, from which one can reportedly see three states and a province on a clear day, and it was in fact a remarkably clear day, so we did.

The park is also home to the Flume, which is a river cutting through the notch, quite a bit like Ausable Chasm, although, being run by the state, not quite so expensive to visit. As you hike up along the banks, it gets increasingly narrow, until there are no banks at all and you must follow a series of wooden catwalks and stairs bracketed into the granite walls of the gorge. We were walking behind a large crowd of people, including a group of Asian-American college kids on holiday from Harvard who kept blocking traffic by taking an utterly excessive number of pictures of each other, posing in front of waterfalls and the like. Given that they were all using digital cameras and no doubt all had access to e-mail, it was a mystery to me why each shot had to be retaken with each individual camera. Harvard kids may not be as smart as their reputation.

Crawford Notch State Park, N.H.

Crawford Notch has many of the same sorts of attractions as Franconia -- gondolas, chasms, mountainsides that don't have any faces on them -- but we were getting tired of hiking around at this point, so we only stopped once at a waterfall to take a picture. We were on a mission now to make it to Maine before the good restaurants started to close.

Portland, Maine

As we were making our way into the Portland vicinity, Liz began to call hotels from the AAA guidebook so we would know where we were laying our heads that night. We had intended to get a room somewhere along the southern Maine coast, but as she started calling around, it became clear that we would have to modify our plans. It was Friday night in the summer, and apparently the entire Eastern Seaboard had decided it was time to spend a weekend at the beach. Every room between Portland and the Boston suburbs was booked.

Using the guidebook, we worked our way down the coast via cellphone and finally got a place, freeing us to pursue the next part of our mission: dinner. Although there were undoubtedly better bargains to be had at some of the eateries we passed in Portland's bustling harbor area, we settled on well-reviewed seafood house and had ourselves a righteous meal of clam chowder and lobster. When in Maine...

Methuen, Mass.

Salem, Mass.

Boston, Mass.

Providence, R.I.

Hartford, Conn.

Lebanon, N.H.

Montpelier, Vt.

Quebec City, Quebec

More Davisms

2006-06-29T23:57:00.000-05:00

To a colleague who had edited a story on it:

"What does Waxahachie need a Farmers Market for? If you live down there you could just go to the farm."

From the viewpoints wire: "I do not think it is a smart strategy for the president to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government. Nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain."

"That supremely schizophrenic position comes courtesy of the junior senator from New York, who somehow is regarded as the (wo)man to beat in 2008."

In response to a story on Rob Scheider collapsing on a movie set:

"It probably really is heat exhaustion. I don't think Rob Schneider is cool enough to do drugs."

From a brief: ADMINISTRATIVE PROFESSIONALS MEETING: The Las Colinas Chapter of the International Association of Administrative Professionals will meet at 5:30 p.m. July 10 at a new location, the Dallas Marriott Las Colinas, 223 W. Las Colinas Blvd. Vickie Osborn will present "How to Jazz Up Your Career."

"You could start by not being an administrative professional."

In response to overhearing a colleague talking about someone being in his kitchen:

"Cliff Clavin once tried to win Final Jeopardy! by answering 'Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?' It didn't work, although it was (presumably) true."

A colleague had asked why the The New York Times' story about searching financial records for terrorists was so shocking as to merit the House's condemnation, to which I replied:

"The House seems unusually determined to throw petty little tantrums for the cameras these days. Nothing was revealed that I wouldn't have already assumed was going on, and I would think the terrorists would be just as insightful as me."

From a U.N. story:

"There's something very wrong when Algeria is a member of the U.N. human rights council and we aren't. Also on the council: Such beacons of light and justice as China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba."

In response to the Supreme Court's striking down Bush's special military tribunals for al-Qaeda suspects:

"So, President Blank Check finally gets put in his place, eh? ... It has always been a curious feature of our government that the authority of the Supreme Court is entirely dependent on the executive and legislative branches basically just going along with whatever it says. ... The Roberts court may not come down on my side of every issue, but the one thing it can still be counted on to do is defend its own authority. Bush has basically argued all along that he can do whatever he wants because we're at war. Where to draw the line is a matter on which reasonable people may disagree, but asserting that there is no line at all is just arrogant beyond belief."

An exchange with a colleague on the times, which are a changin':

Dave: Oregon's ban on self-serve gas is basically a state employment program. Thousands of utterly unskilled people earning minimum wage doing a job people in 49 other states do for themselves.
Rebecca: new jersey has the same ban. It's one of the few good things about new jersey.
Dave: Oh, 48 then. The principal argument they actually use is that there are semi-rural areas with little gas service where the elderly and disabled could not reliably get their gas pumped if it were not legally required. Now that it is widely known that prolonged exposure to gas fumes is cancer-causing, I fully expect the attendants to eventually bankrupt the state with a class-action suit someday.
Rebecca: I guy I used to work with was from New Jersey. When his mom came to visit him in Pa., she'd stop at the gas pump in her cadillac and continuously honk her horn, and was outraged when no one showed up to pump her gas. She had no idea that new jersey was unique, and had no idea how to work the pump. She ended up bribing other customers to fill her tank.
Dave: I'm not sure, but I think I may not have pumped my own gas until I moved to Texas. Truth is it actually is kinda nice not having to do it yourself, especially in bad weather (which is not all that uncommon in Oregon). Good attendants will usually squeegee your windows for you, too. It can take a lot longer sometimes, though.
Rebecca: I would love to have full service available. I remember the good ol' days in pennsylvania, when the privately-owned stations were still full service. Someday, I'm sure I'll fondly look back on the days when supermarkets had actual checkout clerks, too.
Dave: And the bank and the post office.
Rebecca: honestly, I'm happier with the automated post office.
Dave: OK, maybe that does represent a certain amount of progress. The worst technological development of the past 10 years by far is fucking Ticketbastard.
Rebecca: Don't get me started on that. That "Best available" crap that always gives you the seats that are way off to the side, and the $10 service fee, on top of the shipping fee and the handling fee, and you can't figure out why your $20 "best available" seat to Les Mis is in the last row of the upper tier, and actually costs $65.
Dave: Or why they charge you MORE to e-mail tickets that you print out yourself, with your own paper and ink, than for tickets you pick up at will call, with an actual clerk, printing and materials costs.
Rebecca: They won't let me choose aisle seats, so I have to keep putting seats on 10-minute hold until it gives me two that are on the aisle. Last time, I had to do this 14 times before I finally tricked it into selling me seats on the aisle.
Dave: EVIL.

Passing time with wikipedia:

"Owing to the alignment of its streets on a strict grid and the grid's angle to the compass, twice a year the sunset is visible in Manhattan on the horizon at street level. Same happens with the sunrise on two other dates of the year. This phenomenon is known as Manhattanhenge."

Ted's reply:

"In 3,000 years, when the ice melts and the ancient metropolis of Manhattan is rediscovered, scientists will declare the citizens to have been pagan sunworshippers."

Davisms

2006-06-25T20:32:00.000-05:00

Today, because I'm aware that I am becoming painfully bad at posting regular updates, I begin a new feature on the House of Dave. I am periodically going to include a dose of comments I made to co-workers regarding news that crossed my desk during the day. So, without any further ado, Sunday's Davisms:

In support of putting a story about Warren Buffett giving his fortune to charity on 1A:

"I DO think Buffett is worthy, though. The second-richest man is giving his money to the richest man to spend on behalf of the lowliest, worthiest causes. Not flashy stuff but tuberculosis, malaria, Third World HIV. Solid, Midwestern values applied in service of mankind. If it doesn't make 1A, what act of charity does? ... This is almost the sort of thing we ought to make news even if no one cares. It's just the right thing to do."

In response to a colleague who found today's letters tame, I did discover this fabulously stupid remark: I believe that the government should censor the press, as we did in World War II.

"And you thought there was nothing to piss me off."

An observation:

"Story on the wire says Make-A-Wish gets so many donations they've had to expand recipients beyond the terminally ill. OR, you could give the money to Bill and Melinda Gates and grant the wish of some African kid not to, you know, die."

Taunting our lead obit preparer about the possibility of a famous person kicking the bucket that night:

"Lady Bird is mentioned in the lead editorial. This is just the sort of inconvenient thing that can kill a person."

My satirical rewrite of a graphic on a story I didn't like:

"The opening of Smith & Jones Addiction Consultants’ video game addiction clinic in Amsterdam has highlighted the danger of putting made-up shit on 1A."

I really didn't like that story:

"There is no hint of skepticism in GAMERS at all. We are utterly demeaning everyone who's ever had a real addiction with this completely made-up bullshit."

In response to a translation supplied in a foreign story, "Tu Rock Es Votar," or "Your Passion Is to Vote":

"I should say I find it highly, deeply, transcendently unlikely that the Spanish word for passion is 'rock.' "

OK, I really, really didn't like that story:

"I am REALLY uncomfortable with running GAMERS as is. We should have talked to an 'expert' who doesn't have a financial interest in propagating this nonsense. Listen, if I decide to shut out all my friends and family and sit in my house and read comic books all day, that's definitely dysfunctional behavior, but I'm not addicted to fucking comic books. I'm just dysfunctional. And I don't think we can slap a fix on it and call it good. I think the intern that wrote it would be better served by us holding the story, telling her how to repair it, getting her to make the right phone calls -- the American Psychiatric Association, for a start -- and whipping the mother into real shape. Right now we've got unbalanced junk science, and I don't want us printing it. No matter how desperate we are."

A story out of Washington: Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said he would write Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging that the nation’s chief law enforcer "begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times - the reporters, the editors and the publisher." "We’re at war, and for The Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous," Mr. King said.

"Um, fuck you?"

Another Washington story: "This is the place to stop it," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who believes it would harmfully limit the right to free speech. "This will be one of the most important votes we cast in this session."

"He's talking about opposing a constitutional ban on flag-burning. And if this really is among the most important votes this session, I want Congress' paychecks back."

The Census Bureau counted about 9.6 million Latinos, a little less than 5 percent of the population. The bureau acknowledged that the figure was inflated in the Midwest and South because some people who checked the box saying they were "Central or South American" thought that designation meant they were from the central or southern United States.

"This doesn't reflect well on the people of the central and southern United States."

Out of Baton Rouge: "Every time you turn on the news, some kid is getting abducted and raped and murdered," said Sen. Nick Gautreaux, D-Meaux.

"That senator is so made up."

An exchange with a colleague:

Ted: Without looking it up, please give me the name of the U.S. Interior Secretary.
Dave: Elaine Chao.
Ted: That's Labor.
Dave: Fuck. I don't know.
Ted: Dirk Kempthorne.
Dave: Yeah, I definitely didn't know that.
Ted: I had no idea we had a Cabinet secretary named "Dirk."

Fun with "addiction":

"Please replace the GAMING OVERLOAD headline on the GAMER graphic with 'GAME OVERLOAD.' For the fun of it."

Me trying to rally support for a headline about an unorthodox pop-rock version of a Shakespeare classic:

"Who here thinks the Midsummer Night's Dream skybox should be headlined 'What the Puck?' "

In response to a brief in which Iran threatens the West:

"If the country’s interests are attacked, we will use oil as a weapon," state television quoted Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh as saying. "And if it gets in your eyes, man, that shit stings."

Of meals and wheels

2006-05-27T19:37:00.000-05:00

As I obliquely mentioned in my last post, I recently played host to an out-of-town guest, an old friend of mine who was my roommate for my senior year of college. Gordon, like my latest roommate James, was tidier than me by nature and tended to keep the place up, in exchange for me stocking the house with ramen, beer and other essentials of college life. So it was with great pleasure that I was able to invite him into James' and my place during my last week of tenancy there. It was the first time Gordon had been to Texas.

He arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, and we jumped right into the fundamentals. We drove down to the West End and walked to Dealey Plaza, where he stood for a photo on the grassy knoll, acceded to the huckster selling conspiracy newspapers and risked death by standing on the X in the street. We toured the Sixth Floor, then went a short walk around downtown, to the Big Red Courthouse and the JFK Memorial, the latter of which left him about as unimpressed as most people. We returned to the car, drove to the office and walked over to Reunion Tower, where we had Texas Ice Teas and took panoramic shots of the city.

Despite the short distance, we drove over to Pioneer Plaza to walk amongst the steer, then walked over to City Hall, where we met with our coyly unidentified third party, who joined us for dinner at Sushi Yama, off Forest Hill near the Texas Instruments campus. It was dollar sushi night, and we had our fill, after a long wait for a table but before an interminable wait for a check. Finally free, our third party took leave of us, and Gordon and I made our way to the Landing, where we would stay until just shy of last call.

We slept in the next morning, hitting the Angry Dog for lunch before making it to the Nasher Sculpture Center in advance of its closing at 5 (highlights are the famed Walking to the Sky sculpture and a temporary exhibit of architectural models). I'd heard that Chase Tower, the "keyhole building," had an observation deck, so we made our way over there afterward, signing in and riding up to the 40th-floor sky lobby for free. It's a unique view of the city, from the bottom of the keyhole, and I highly recommend it.

We'd parked under the Trammel Crow building, and after a brief detour in which Gordon got trapped in an express elevator to the upper floors, we found our way back downstairs to the garage, where we were dismayed to learn our two and a half hours of prime downtown parking would cost $14. Yikes. Next time, go for the street.

Gordon had another mission for his visit, culled from a book called 1,000 Places to See Before You Die: The Mansion on Turtle Creek. We weren't about to eat there -- we were in shorts and sandals and besides, the bill would kill us mere mortals -- but we thought it might be worth checking out. Besides, we were thirsty, and we figured at least we could snag a drink at the bar. So we headed out into the Bermuda Triangle that is Uptown, knowing only vaguely where the Mansion actually is.

We drove from one end of Turtle Creek to the other, without spotting any sign for the Mansion. We doubled back, zeroing in on a likely candidate that turned out to the Mayfair on Turtle Creek. Frustrated, I finally called information on my cellphone and got the exact address. Armed with that info, we finally got to our destination and parked in its circular drive, out of the way.

Of course, this would not do with the valet, who greeted us as we walked toward the door and asked where we were headed. I confessed that we were just tourists hoping to look around and maybe have a drink at the bar -- by this time we were pretty parched -- and he said OK, but nonetheless insisted on taking my keys. (He subsequently reparked my car about 200 feet farther from the door.)

We walked inside the lobby and were underwhelmed by the ambience -- so much so that after looking around a bit more, we returned to the front desk to confirm with the clerk that this was, in fact, the main lobby. No ostentatious crystal chandeliers or gorgeous sculpted fountains. Just a fairly nondescript hotel, less fancy than many others I've seen. We decided it must be the restaurant that has such opulent surroundings as to merit being Dallas' only entry in the 1,000 Places guide, so we walked across the courtyard and entered it, this time explaining our mission to the maitre d', who directed us to the bar area.

Finally, a little dark-wood grandeur, a little high-class decor. We two sidle up to the bar to whet our whistles, where we are promptly but politely told we could not be served because we were wearing shorts after 5 o'clock. Sigh. We turn around deflated and dehydrated, and I resolve to Gordon that I shall redeem this defeat by taking him somewhere I knew we would be served: The Elbow Room. I tipped the valet five bucks, no doubt to his shock.

A few minutes later, we parked on Gaston, and I was halfway across the street before I noticed Gordon wasn't with me. I turned and saw him feeding the meter. Yikes, I'd nearly forgotten about that. He hustles along to join me, and before long, we're finally quaffing that delicious nectar of the gods, beer. Well, Ziegenbock. But any port in a storm. Gordon beats me in shuffleboard, two games to three. Upon our exit, we discover that the meter had not been sufficiently fed, and now I owe the city another $20. Goddamn it.

No visit to Dallas is complete without a stop at the Baylor bronze hand exhibit, which we did next. Particularly noteworthy are the congenital deformities and the massive meat club that was the hand of Andre the Giant. We snap a picture next to my hand for comparison.

By this time we've worked up a giant appetite, so I take Gordon to Mia's Tex-Mex for some margaritas and brisket tacos. We're supposed to meet up with James to watch the Mavs game after, so we drive home and pick him up before heading back to the Landing, which is packed. The only space to stand is in the pool room, so Gordon and I play a long stretch of games, first against each other, then against a jovial restaurateur and his ex-wife, who he boasts once played (and was immediately beaten by) Minnesota Fats. We manage to pick up two wins against superior talent, before returning to the bar once the game is over and the crowd dissapates. Once we've had our fill, we head back home, where we while away the rest of the night plinking beer cans with James' pellet rifle. Now, THAT's Texas.

The next day we're supposed to go to Austin. Gordon is eager to see the bats under the Congress Avenue bridge, and I'm about out of Dallas sights to show him, anyway. So we get out on the road, a little later than I had hoped, but we only had to make Austin by sundown, so who cares? But a couple of unseasonably moderate days have given way to ninety-plus heat, and it's too much for my Corolla. We get just south of Waxahachie -- 37 miles -- before it overheats and we have to pull into a rest area and call AAA. Our tow back isn't as fun as the one with O.C., because our driver sounds like Boomhauer and we can't understand most of what he says. Once the car's at the shop, we return to the casa and pass time watching Lost before we decide to catch a cab into town to try and salvage our night. We manage to secure through someone's kind offer access to a vehicle, which we have to gas up because it's running on fumes. Afraid of running out of fuel on Central, we finally get to a Shell where -- of course -- the first pump is broken. And then it won't take my card, so I have to go inside. But we get it done. And now for dinner.

We are looking for barbecue, but it's getting late and our best options seem to close right before we get there. We end up settling for Margarita Ranch, at Mockingbird Station, which does the job but isn't what we were after. We have a couple drinks with friends at the Monkey Bar, but after a couple late nights, we weren't into anything heavy, so we soon take our leave. At this point we're pretty worn out and disgusted with our luck, so we get to thinking about how much fun target practice was the night before, so we resolve to go get some more ammo at the only place I can think of that might sell it this late: Wal-Mart. I remark to Gordon on the way that I hope there isn't some jackass Texas law that prohibits such sales at this hour, but when we arrive at the ammo case, we are told that is precisely the case. No live ammo after 10. "Not even BBs?" "Not even BBs." We found a way to drown our sorrows, but the day was miles from its intended plan, and we retired unsatisfied.

I had one morning to get Gordon his last request before he was to fly out: barbecue. After hitting up Wal-Mart for another cache of pellets, we head out to the Baby Back Shak, which delivers on a delicious order of ribs that sustains us through the rest of the day. It's now hot as hell, so we tour Fair Park without stopping the car or rolling the windows down. Yeah, yeah, art deco, whatever. We want to shoot something. So we stop back at the house and try our luck in the daylight. Somehow we were better in the dark, after several beers. Or at least we seemed to be. Go figure.

Finally, it's time to drive Gordon to the airport. He assures me he's had a great time, even with the Austin fiasco, and I assure him I loved hosting him. He had resolved to come cheer me up after he read a particularly bleak entry on this blog, and so I hope when he reads this massive missive, he realizes one thing: mission accomplished.

The Tao of Urban Relocating

2006-05-27T18:34:00.000-05:00

I'm actually a ways behind in postings, which is only going to get worse since I don't have Internet at home at the moment. But before everyone completely gives up on Dave the blogger, I thought I'd give you a little something.

I moved this week. Roommate James is selling the house, so I had to get into a new place. I splurged on an apartment in a fancy-pants Power Properties complex down by the spillway, at the south end of White Rock Lake. Granite countertops, hardwood floors, jungle-like pool areas with cabanas, waterfalls and free cable. I haven't done the apartment thing since '97, preferring not to have to deal with too many neighbors too close at hand. But I didn't want to commit to a long lease, and I thought it might be nice to have a little social opportunity around the house, for once.

Moving, as we all know, is a gigantic pain in the ass. I spent several days packing in advance for the movers, who came on Friday morning at 10. They had barely gotten started at the house before my DirecTV installer calls and says he's ready to get started on my installation, even though it's not supposed to happen until from 1 to 5. OK, I say, I'll just skip the shower and go right over, since I don't know when the DSL guy is coming and I don't want to miss him.

Anyway, I arrive and have to negotiate with the DirecTV guy over where to install the cable. He needs permission from the management to install a dish, even though there are already dishes all over the damn place. So I trudge around to the front office and pick up a copy of my lease and ask about putting up a dish. A guy will come around to show him into the attic, the apartment manager says. The installer grumbles when I return that he knows how to get in, he needs the permission. Already sweaty and testy, I snap back: If I didn't have permission, why would they tell you how to get in the attic? He accepts this logic and gets to work.

Meanwhile, I get a call from James. Apparently the movers misunderstood instructions and have failed to pack up a few pieces of furniture, and now the truck is full. They'll have to make two trips, I'm told. Well, hell, so much for getting off cheap. I signal OK, and before long they're in my new complex, unloading. Most of the boxes they dump right in the living room. I'm dismayed to see a box clearly marked "Glass Fragile" at the bottom of a giant stack. Obviously I'm not dealing with the most carefullest of movers. (I've discovered nothing broken so far, however).

Soon we have to run back for another load. The movers tell me they have another appointment at 3, so we'll have to make it quick. We load up whatever's too big for my car and then return to the apartment. By 2:25 or so, they're done, and I briefly panic when I can't remember where my checks are to pay them, but I quickly recall and send them on their way.

The DSL guy still hasn't been by, far as I can tell (they don't give you a window to go by). So I call the new AT&T, and they tell me they don't see why I should need to be around at all, they should be able to do it all remotely. "Even DSL?" says I. "Even DSL," says they. So I take them at their word, running out to pick up a shower liner, some Windex, my dry-cleaning and some Taco Bell, the last of which I scarf down at James' before loading up the rest of my stuff, Beverly Hillbillies-style, into my surprisingly high-capacity Corolla.

When I get back to the apartment around 5:45, there's a note on my door. "Sorry I missed you!" reads the message from the stealthy DSL man, who apparently had been waiting from a safe distance until the minute I left the apartment before coming up to find the door locked. It's marked 2:45.

So I call up AT&T and bitch them out and get them to waive my installation fee, but they can't reschedule me till fracking Wednesday. So now I am CUT OFF, at precisely the time I need Internet the most. I've got a range of office paperwork to do that now I will actually have to do AT the office, which means it will take longer and be less pleasant. Not to mention all the backlogged blogging I need to do (I haven't forgotten about your visit, Gordon!) Son of a bitch.

Anyway, after I get done ranting at the AT&T lady, I unload the car in 15 to 20 trips up and down the stairs on a 92-degree day with no shade. Rivulets of sweat are carving clear pathways through my two-days-without-a-shower funk. My hair is soaked on the sides and now in a super-pompadour thanks to constant run-throughs by my greasy fingers. A nagging cough is aggravated by my out-of-shapeness, the summer smog, and constant dust from furniture and other objects that have lain undisturbed for the last two years. All I want is a shower.

So I hang up the dollar-store liner on left-over shower rings from my Velasco duplex, turn on the water and hop in to discover... I do not have a dedicated water heater. The temperature fluctuates between warm and chilling, presumably with the flushing and dish-washing and spin-cycling of my neighbors. Under my nearly heatstroked circumstances this is not such an unpleasant experience, but I shudder to think what it will be like on a January morning. I better never run out of hot.

I spend the remainder of the day hauling boxes from one room to another, cutting unmarked ones open to discern their contents, and setting up my entertainment center and bed so I can begin actually living in my new space. Pizza and salad, mercifully delivered by a patient partner in crime, sustain me until bedtime, when I exhaustedly crawl into a much-harder-than-I'd-noticed-before bed.

So that's the state of things. Once my Internet is back up I'm going to go on an eBay bender to unload some of this extraneous stuff, to get closer to a Zen, nonmaterial existence. Lately I've been thinking about Eastern philosophy, and I think I've finally deduced why the Buddha is always smiling. It's because the Buddha never had to change apartments in Texas in the summer.