cajolable.com

turns out that the host that I use for this blog, hostmonster, is blocked by the Great Firewall of China. So, I wont’ be posting anything until we get to Laos in a few days. Stephanie and I are in Lijiang, China, having a great time.

Many thanks to Will Grover for helping me beat the system just to get this post up. You rock, Will!

For some reason, once I start traveling, I start waking up with the sun. It’s an entirely crap superpower if you’ve gone to bed at 2am, but one that can make for some really cool sunrises. I’m staying in Stephanie’s old room at her parents’ place and this is the view that she got when she was growing up. I’m jealous.

Just before sunrise over Macau

Sunrise over Macau

First, let me start off with two little rants: I think Macau is a better spelling of the city/state’s name than “Macao”, so that’s what I use. It’s the Portugese spelling, but this part of the rant is somewhat superfluous, because in Cantonese—the native tongue around here—it’s called “aw muhn”, something entirely different. Second, and I could go on for days about this one, I really wish there was more competition in US airlines. I had the misfortune of flying US Air from Philly to SF a few days back, and wow have things gotten bad for them. I’m flying Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, and it’s about a zillion times better. US Air charges for water now. Did you know that? $2 for water. Weak.

Rant over, I’ve made it after a 14 hour flight that I think took me up north through the arctic and then down over parts of China. I landed in Hong Kong, which is now part of China but like Macau (a former Portugese territory), has remained largely independent from the Middle Kingdom. Hong Kong and Macau are on opposite sides of the Pearl River Delta on the southern edge of China, separated by about 60 km, which you can easily cross one one of the hour-long hydrofoil rides.

Lunch on my Cathay flight - proscuitto and melon, yeah!

Fists of Fury - one of the 100 movies I could watch. Wah!

So, I arrived, transited onto one of the Jetfoil ferries, and did baggage claim and customs an hour later when I got into Macau. Pretty cool, and I think it ran me $18 or something like that.

So, now I’m here in Macau. Stephanie met me at the ferry terminal and we hopped a cab back towards her parents’ place with a pit stop at a little restaurant for some BBQ pork (char sui) and duck over rice. The place is strangely familiar, mostly because I was here for a week in 2005, but still.

Ducks beware, I will eat you

Entrance to Stephanie's apartment building

View of Macau from the 9th floor

A little about Macau from Wikipedia

Macau was both the first and the last European colony in China. Portuguese traders first settled in Macau in the 16th century and subsequently administered the region until the handover on December 20, 1999. The Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration and the Basic Law of Macau stipulate that Macau operates with a high degree of autonomy until at least 2049, fifty years after the transfer. Under the policy of “one country, two systems“, the Central People’s Government is responsible for the territory’s defense and foreign affairs, while Macau maintains its own legal system, police force, monetary system, customs policy, immigration policy, and delegates to international organisations and events.

Macau in the circle

Lil' Wayne's new mixtape - American Dream

After the blockbuster success of my favorite rapper, Lil’ Wayne (yeah, I’m 13 years old, so what), I had this awful feeling that steady stream of mixtapes he put out would stop. Woulda been a huge shame, because most of Weezy’s best stuff comes out on mixtapes, and not on his few albums. The guy’s crazy prolific, too, putting out 100 tracks per year, easy.

So, now I see on emusic.com that he’s got a new mixtape up. I’m on my way out the door, so I buy it (wierd ’cause I’ve never paid for one before). It rocks.

He’s got Kanye, Jay-Z, TI, Nas, Luda, The Game, and a surprisingly good Busta Rhymes. The title track has him rapping over one of Mike Tyson’s crazier tirades—you know, the one where he says “I’ll eat your children, praise be to Allah!”. Oh, Mike Tyson. You’re batty.

Take a listen.

[working on posting the song]

It’s been a few months years since I’ve put down everything and gone for a good travel. Fortunately for me, I’ve finally gotten to a point in my life where I can make it happen, and this time I’ve recruited my girlfriend, Stephanie to make the journey with me. Or, maybe she was the one that recruited me to travel, but the net result is that I’m out of the house and out of the country as of December 29.

The plan, such as it is is to start in Berkeley, fly to Macau to meet up with Stephanie, and then somehow make our way to the remote-ish southwestern Chinese province, Yunnan, and then skip down into Laos. If we’re lucky, we’ll have time to make it to northern Vietnam, stop by Hanoi, and slurp down some pho before having to head back to the US.

I know it’s campy and clichéd, but here’s the song that’s going through my head as I get ready…

the Smart Youtube plugin made it super easy to add this video.

Today I got to save a life. Sort of.

For the past few weeks I’ve been volunteering at the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, taking computers destined for a scrap heap, separating the metaphorical wheat from the chaff and reassembling the  parts into working computers.

You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things that people donate. There are some really high-end computers that come through there. SGI clusters, servers, Cisco fiber switches, and power macs galore. Then again, there’s the fair share of really old computers to get put out to pasture, too, but they are what makes it so much fun for me. Taking apart the old computers is like a walk down the road of computer history. All the weirdest almost-made-it kinds of ideas and components come through the ACCRC, and most get tossed in the recycling bin.

The better computers, and the ones we can build out of salvaged parts, later get Ubuntu linux installed on them and are then donated to charities, schools, or people not able to afford their own computer.

So, today as I’m installing Ubuntu on a resurrected Pentium 3, James, the guy who runs the place (and who begrudgingly landed at the top of CNN’s Heroes list two weeks back), comes in to the room where I was working saying that he needed to get an Apple Lisa working so it could be sold at a charity auction.

A little Lisa History
The Lisa was the brainchild of Steve Jobs and was the first computer to come with a graphical user interface and, more importantly, the first to come with a mouse. They retailed for ten large and truly set the course for what we know today as a modern computer. Before this day, I’d never seen a Lisa, only heard the name whispered like a story about magic or a first love.

James dragged one down from the attic of the ACCRC warehouse, and after finding out that neither it nor any of the 5 others he got down actually worked. We started tearing them apart, and after 2 hours and a whole lot of circuit board swaps later, we had one that booted. 5 MB hard drive and all (yeah, 5 megabytes). Hey, for 1982, 5 MB was pretty cutting edge.

I had fun playing the role of both computer archaeologist and doctor. Even though Lisa is 25 years old, I feel like reaching inside her was reaching into the past, touching the naïve, beautiful dreams of her creators.

As an aside, the Altair—that other computer with the first GUI— can siooma, as Steve Jobs would say.

Every now and again, my girlfriend reconnects with her Cantonese roots by buying a bunch of magazines from Hong Kong. Last May, she picked up this little gem, Go Shopping!, which is jam packed with stuff to buy. Mainly for women. Lotsa clothes, cosmetics, weight-loss snake oil, and a few things about food.

It’s not a real magazine, more like a paper version of those Service Merchandise smorgasbords that used to follow each round of Wheel of Fortune. Or maybe Price is Right makes a better metaphor, but you get the picture.

Picking through it, I found some gift ideas like this personal sauna suit. Why didn’t anyone think of that sooner? Probably be a hit at Gitmo.

But the best part is the 4-page spread on the invasion of Hong Kong by upscale burger chains.

Everything but the names of the burgers is in Chinese, but the names are all you need.

First up is Frying Nemo, the fish burger. Looks pretty good. Kinda McFishwish-y, but nice and crispy.

Next is the veggie burger, or as it’s so delicately named: The Sissy Boy. Maybe it’s a statement about vegetarians. I dunno.

Oh, and what goes better together than hamburgers and Mexican food? Well, if you’re a normal human, everything. If you’re a Hong Kong restaurateur, nothing. That logic brings us the South of the Border which is laid on a bed of salsa-like stuff and topped with some avacado and a dallop of sour cream. Yum.

Not.

But look again at the left hand page of the article and there’s that big ass burger that the model is gripping. Two thick patties, lettuce, cheese… It’s huge! Almost the size of her head.

But what’s it called. The fat burger? The heart clogger? What kind of mildly amusing or culturally offensive name could really fit it? The Texas lard butt? The American diet burger?  Nah, it’s something much more subtle. Much more profound.

Look close.

[better late than never]

A few weeks back, Bob convinced me that it would be a great idea to go see a drift “race” up at Sears Point raceway in Sonoma. What exactly is going to go on at a drift race, I kept asking myself before we went. Maybe just a bunch of guys racing really slowly around the track—’cause screeching your tires around a turn, all drift style, definitely isn’t the fastest way to travel.

So, we headed up there. Me and Stephanie, Bob and his girlfriend (who’d recently been staging her way around Tokyo), and John.

The first thing that we figured out about the day was that there weren’t really that many people at the drift race, and more importantly that it meant that we could’ve brought beer directly into the event instead of paying ballpark prices for it. Next time.

The second thing I learned is that drifting isn’t run like a race where the fastest driver wins, it’s more like figure skating, where the fanciest and most technically correct moves get the most points.

The first even was qualifying, where cars hurtled solo down a hill, through a right hand 270° turn, and then back left through 180°. That’s it. That and a lot of tire-smoke.

Drivers get docked points for going off the track, spinning out, keeping a bad line, and not pleasing the crowd.

After qualifying, we shuffled down to where all the teams had camped out to show off their cars and give out massive amounts of swag. Plenty of scantily-clad, I-hate-my-dad floozies were prowling around for fat guy photo ops, too. We skipped the photos, Stephanie snagged a Blanco Basura Trucking Company shirt (means White Trash in Spanish, check the left picture below), and we all got hooked up with driver Ken Gushi’s face on a stick. Some teams were even handing out used tires. We passed on those.

On to the main event. The drivers that qualified line up in front of the judges pavilion, soak up some applause, and then proceed to do their meanest donuts on the way back up the starting gate. Somehow, I learned, it’s actually possible to do a donut while hanging out the window of a car, waving to fans. Bub, you must have some long legs and a cool hand.

The main event was run round-robin elimination style, but instead of going solo, the cars now went in pairs in double runs where each car got a chance to lead in one of the runs. This was way cooler than the qualifying, and got huge rises out of the crowd (me included) because they were usually going somewhere between 50 and 90 mph and in a state of near-collision while massive clouds of smoke were blasting out of their tires.

In the end, Chris Forsberg and his 350Z roadster won the race, with Vaughn “the hairy American winning machine” Gittin Jr taking second in his teal ‘Stang, and Ken Gushi (represent!) coming in third in his blue Mustang. Full results here.

Check out this video for a different look at the event.

[edit: I un-embedded the video because it was breaking my site, and I'm too lazy to figure out why]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylH_Xe7KKo8 
fin.

Sometimes one shot will do me
sometimes it takes four or five
Sometimes I shoot all around
before I’m satisfied

When you hear my pistol poppin’
you better hide someplace
Cause I ain’t made for stoppin’
and I come from a shootin’ race

Lyrics like these could easily show up in a rap song today, but these are from the 1930 song Pistol Packin’ Papa by Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music. A little bit later in the song, he even refers to his gun as his gat. Way ahead of your time, Jimmie. Way ahead.

I used to be the kind of person who’d happily listen to the grittiest gangster rap but turn up my nose at country. But the more I hear, the more similarities there are. At least with older country, and maybe newer honky tonk. Now, I can happily admit that I listen to country. And I like it, a hell of a lot. I couldn’t tell you what’s popular on the radio (though a few years ago I could).

Maybe I can chalk some of it up to living in California, and particularly in Alameda county, home to rodeos and sideshows. A few years back I went to the county fair out in Pleasanton, where you get an odd mix of 4H clubs, livestock shows, Mexican food, Berkeley hippies, and thug-life types probably from Oakland. A huge cross-cut of American life.

Anyways, here’ the song, Pistol Packin’ Papa in all its gun-blazing glory. Don’t expect it to sound too much like Clipse, though. Rodgers yodels between bars.

click the arrow to give a listen. download it here.

About 3 years ago, I fell in love with Deadwood, a swear-laden, whiskey-soaked western on HBO whose life was cut short by creator David Milch’s new project: a surf noir titled John from Cincinnati.

What does the title mean? Who is John from Cincinnati? What is a surf noir? Even after 8 episodes, I have absolutely no idea. John is a cartoon-haired numbskull of a character that annoyingly parrots dialog back at the other characters. Maybe he’s an alien, maybe the return of the messiah, but Milch isn’t giving anyone an inch.

Beyond John, few of the other characters have believable motives or are particularly engaging. The story drags, kicks, and occasionally looks to pick up, but after so many swells, there haven’t been any good waves. Oh, there’s almost no surfing in John, either.

The show is jam packed with retreaded HBO actors like Jim Beaver, Paula Malcomson, Dayton Callie, and Garrett Dillahunt (all from Deadwood), along with Willie Garson (Carrie’s buddy Stanford from Sex in the City), and Paul Ben Victor (the Greek’s emissary in The Wire). Throw them in with Ed O’Neill’s nutty-Al-Bundy character who talks to birds and spits the phrase “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” every 5 minutes, and Dylan from 90210 as a pseudo-evil surf-company antagonist, and it should be good. Lot’s of talent, right?

I don’t understand a second of it, and my guess is that Milch is attempting some sort of career suicide. You’ve heard of “suicide by police,” where someone commits a heinous crime with the intent that it will end in a standoff with the cops, a shootout, and finally death? Maybe Milch just wants to be released from HBO’s shackles. He can’t just walk away into obscurity Terrence Mallick style, so he gets himself fired.

Whatever. The most inexplainable thing about this show, the part that I really don’t understand, is why I watch every single one of them. I hate the show, but I’ve seen every episode.

Tonight’s episode promises to reveal all the secrets, or at least that’s what the ads say. Maybe that’s what I’m watching it for—the resolution. An opportunity to hear the explanation, to hear the justification, and say to myself, “that really was stupid.”

The one shining light in the show is the intro song, a highlight of very few HBO shows. John’s intro, a filmsy, sunny montage of surfers, is set to a Joe Strummer song called Johnny Appleseed. Click the arrow to give it a listen.

Joe, you’re sorely missed. John, I’m afraid I’ll never say the same about you.