June 15, 2004
Drew: I want to see that movie, (speaks a name I don’t catch).
Alyssa: Drew, that’s not the name of the movie. It’s Spirit, not Britney Spirits (in a tone only a girl who’s six going on sixteen can use).
Drew: I SAID Spirits. That’s what it is!
Alyssa: Spirit!
Drew: Spirits!
Alyssa: Whatever.
My son wants to see Britney Spirits, Stallion of the Cimarron?
June 15, 2004
When conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan says that “We’ve Lost Iraq,” it’s pretty eye-opening. What a shame. I really hope that the region will stabilize somehow after June 30, but how? Afganistan certainly didn’t.
June 15, 2004
Ten Super Foods You Should Never Eat.
I’m not sure I agree with them on all of these, but Bugles always did seem like alien packing foam pieces with salt added.
I never liked #10 by the way, in case any of you ask. And for those in the office, doesn’t #6 bring back olfactory memories of an ex-intern’s constant lunch?
June 14, 2004
[My brother Joe lives in Guam and travels all over that part of the world whenever he gets vacation. Right now he’s off to China, and he’s letting me post some of the travelogue notes he’s sending out. Pretty interesting stuff.]
Post 3, China:
“Facts: There are more school children in China than the population of the entire US. Yunnan Province is almost the population of the US. There is exactly one roll of toilet paper in the Peoples Republic of China, and though I haven’t sighted it yet some could argue that it is the greatest sought after tourist attraction. Almost half of the population of China are cultural minorities (other than Han Chinese).
I arrived to a few days ago and its been a magic carpet ride. The city of Kunming is at 1780M altitude and a very cool 16 C, (awesome after Bangkok’s 37C inferno). Immigration was very formal, SARS exam and all… No forex’s open so I hit a cash machine on the way out the door and got loads of Yuan, no problem.
Many people speak decent Chinglish around the bigger hotels and hostels. The city is immaculately clean. I walked for hours yesterday and found exactly two pieces of trash on the street (which were gone by the time I got my camera to take a picture…). That was about the number of white people I saw too. 😉
The food is awesome of course–half of it I can’t figure out what is in it, but it tastes great. There is a beer that you mix from a plant you can pick, lots of mountain food and tasty mixes of grains rolled in pastes with exotic oils that they barbeque on grills. Oh yeah, they are crazy about the barbecued goat cheese, too.
People are extremely pleasant. Smiles everywhere, and the few children that are here are awestruck by anglo-looking people. I met two women at a restaurant my first night who work for a shipping company that has a few American clients. We’ve been hanging out and will be going to a lake tomorrow and Saturday where a town was flooded in an earthquake and is 30 meters below. Shirley is a diver, so we will dive it while Whitney relaxes.
Somewhere here is the house of Zheng He, the eunuch admiral that headed the Dongle expedition of 1421 when the Chinese developed latitude reckoning and mapped the entire world 300 years before the Europeans. His maps are what Magellan, Cook, and Columbus used to sail the “unknown.” A rudder from a flagship was recently found in Nanjing and it was 40M high. Almost bigger than the biggest ship in the western hemisphere. The Chinese imperial fleet that sailed that year were 1000 ships of teak, double planked, with cannons on the bow, capable of crushing the combined naval forces of the world at the time. So whatever happened to China then? The answer will soon be revealed after meditation at the largest Buddha in the world at Leshan in Sichuan Sunday, and Tibet on Tuesday.”
June 14, 2004
Apparently AOL hosts it, but it’s a good site–try out the President Match site that I mentioned a few months ago.
(Sad–I was one of AOL’s first subscribers when they had less than 100,000 members. It really was the best service around by far. I saw things go slowly sour when 5.0 came out in ’95 or ’96, but really, I don’t have anything against AOL. I think people don’t like it because it’s fashionable to dislike the company–it got too big to be the underdog anymore.)
At any rate, in the interests of full disclosure regarding President Match results, I must reveal that I, a registered Republican, came up with 65% for Kerry, 63% for Kucinich, and 25% for President Bush. Please don’t hate me, conservative friends–I plead the case of being a bleeding-heart moderate…
June 14, 2004
Being a parent means making exaggerated coughing sounds to cover up song words on the radio that you don’t want your five and six year old to hear just yet. You find yourself covering up words in songs you never even thought about until you have kids in the car with you, like Bohemian Rhapsody’s “Mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger now he’s dead.” That took an extended fake coughing fit, involving wild gesticulations. Very entertaining, just take my word for it.
Um, good song though. The rest rocked!
June 11, 2004
[My brother Joe lives in Guam and travels all over that part of the world whenever he gets vacation. Right now he’s off to China, and he’s letting me post some of the travelogue notes he’s sending out. Pretty interesting stuff.]
Post 2, Thailand:
“Wrapping up Thaiworld part one. Saw a 5 ton solid gold Budda, the ancient city of Ahuttaya, every temple wthin 2 hours of Bangkok, and scoured the streets studying the art of knock off retailing. Rolex fakes are getting better by the year and fake t-shirts, luggage, purses, shoes, … you name it… Amazing the level of technology. Thailand, the only country never colonized in Asia. hmmmm.
Getting my Visa to PRC was a song and dance. I hope I don’t hit a big shim sham actually getting in tonight. I’ll be hitting Dali right away, a village in the mountains at the base of the Himalayas in Southern China. The to Tibet for a few days (its 5000M so that will be plenty…I’m not crazy about AMS these days). Then to Chengdu (named after Dave Cheng), Leshan (largest budda in the world…you can camp out a family of five on a toenail), Chonqing (Yangzee river cruise), Wuhan and Beijing (Great Wall, Forbidden City etc…). I’ll stop at the Shaolin temple on the way and see if I can snatch the pebbles from the hand of the master. 🙂
If all goes well I’ll be back in Thailand in 4 weeks. Then it will be up north to Chang Mai, then Laos, Burma and Cambodia. Plan B is to go to Vietnam, then Singapore and back to Manila. depending on how much time third world traveling has taken by then. Without fail, I will come back after two months in the third world and come home to Guam and it will be blacked out and without water…”
June 11, 2004
…can be found at this website. Cool. Thanks, Metafilter.
June 10, 2004
It’s been tough to post the last two weeks, between the Memorial Day weekend roadtrip to the Smokies in North Carolina and the end of year stuff at work (school year, that is). But I actually got 8 hours of sleep last night, and despite the charge of an Atkins-heavy bias about my blog, I’d like to point out that I’m slowly sliding into ketosis and am down to 243 today (from 254 three weeks ago and a high of 260 earlier this year). I need to hit the Nordictrack now that I won’t have to take the kids to daycare this summer.
So at any rate, let’s see what tasty bits I can put on the blog, including shredded tire woes and some guest posts by brother Joe in China!
June 10, 2004
So when my tire blew out on route 283 last week, my one thought was how we’d just driven to the Smokies in North Carolina last weekend, all around town there, back to PA (over 1,500 miles round trip), and the tire waited until the next day after the trip to shred.
My second thought was how I was now late for the staff recognition dinner in ten minutes, but my wife came by ten minutes later (she’d planned to drive to dinner separately, but events now occurred otherwise) and we made it to the dinner just a few minutes late!
Take a look at the tire:
The damage isn’t easy to see in the picture, but the top edge is where most of the shredding (and the blowout) took place.
I’ll tell you though, my tire wasn’t half as shredded as Jeff and Lisa’s trailer tire:
Jeff and Lisa are my brother-in-law and sister, and were on their way up to their cabin to meet us Memorial Day weekend. Even though the picture’s smaller than my own tire’s pic, I think we can all agree that the damage was much greater. The rest of this tire was spread out across a mile of I-75 in Georgia, and I think Jeff and Lisa were pretty lucky that the trailer didn’t flip and drag them into an accident. Believe it or not, though, they were off an exit and back on the interstate a hour later with a new trailer tire.
The trailer fender was ripped off, though. I think Jeff had to reshape and reattach it before they returned to Florida.