the interior of the 'healing fruit' , bol, revealing the honey-like syrup interspersed with the dry, pumpkin-like meat, and a thick, impenetrable shell.
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two burmese milkshake makers in the act of cutting (hacking) a bol fruit - the bol fruit is also found in India, where it is known as the medicine fruit, since it cures most kinds of diarreah (everything except amoebic). The fruit has a hard shell something like a coconut, stringy orange pulp which is quite honey-like. Someday I hope to include it in my coffeetable book of "Exotic Fruit Around the World"
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more than just a metaphor, this cart REALLY was before the horse....
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DUCK EGG OMELETTE.....to quote a Christopher Guest film, sometimes "...even I'M jealous of me!"... This morning, got up lazyboy style at 11, threw together this PURFEC omelette lovely jubbly-style, made with toasted garlic, peppered (literally) with sweet red bell peppers, grated hard Gouda and Romano cheeses, the whole damn schlossmik was so good looking and smelling I just had to get this picture (scratch and sniff at your own peril)
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something tells me that the word 'picnic' for these people has a totally different meaning, independent of language translation problems...
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This is a kind of convenience store (the pile on the left, not the right, which is a kind of buddhist-shamanist good luck pile) on a mountain pass in the wilds of Mongolia
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The first time I saw outdoor billiard tables, they were beside a lake in the Himalayas, surrounded by glaciers and peaks over 5000 meters- I thought it was something that these tribes of different traditions could get together over. This picture, from a marketplace near the former capital of Genghis Khan, sort of confirms that theory (Mongols were once many tribes as well)
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Yes, that is a "PARKING" sign there, and next to it, a "Do Not Enter, One Way" sign next to it. The Mongolians can be neat, tidy, AND logical in the middle of nowhere. The tent in the foreground is the equivalent of a tourist trap concession, selling, naturally, things made of wool, the only material availiable here. One wonders how much it cost to build the fence out of wood, which grows ever scarcer here.
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The timelessness of the wheel is reflected in this truckstop in the middle of nowhere (which is EVERYWHERE) in Mongolia....
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For Today's Day of the Dead, this comes to you from the dashboard of our 'taxi' in Ulan Batur - a Mercedes Benz (we had to pay extra)
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Why are you showing us a pile of styrofoam?...Well, for one, it is a particularly LARGE pile of styrofoam, neatly bundled - but the main reason is that when I was in Mongolia, I scoured the capital for bits of throwaway styrofoam, so I could package my bicycle- at one point even dumpster diving, and then I nearly got in trouble for 'stealing' some guys livelihood (I gave him a few bob for it, though) - then the day I come back to Korea, this is the kind of excess and contrast that I witness on the street...
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although I've lived in Korea many years, and have watched nearly as many MASH episodes as the next guy, I never really associated 'choppers' with Korea - but finally got a good closeup of this service helicopter in Sorak San Mountain which was ferrying building materials for a temple being built halfway up the mountain.
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Mongolia was full of fun-looking beer labels. Of course this one didn't pan out so well, sort of tasted like the stub end of Ol' Winnies cigar doused in water...
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mongolian knobs (not as bad as it sounds)
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Welcome to my 'Hometown' of Portland...follow the river south through town, just down and to the left of Lake Oswego, you'll find a very amusingly named town. Apparently town fathers finally got a clue that tourists, especially British ones, were having a lot of fun, so the name no longer appears on maps- replaced by a blank spot- a bit of a shame, really. The old name makes you wonder if everyone in town is like David on The Office...
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I travelled with three polish guys, two polish girls, and another American who teaches at my university. Here Ana, a self-confessed ketchup junkie, demonstrates just how good ketchup can spice up any meal inside of a Mongolian yurt (Ger)
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a natural swimming pool at Soraksan National Park. This emerald-green water is quite a bit different than the turquoise/carribean blue color I photographed ten years ago.
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BUBBLY FOR BRATS...

From a shelf in a rural Mongolian shop, we bring you...Champagne for the kiddies! Why should adults have all the fun?
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? ? ?

Well, we thought the Berlin Wall would never fall, either....I really didn't know what to make of this poster I saw on a wall of an office near mine in Seoul, South Korea.
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Eerie rock piles constructed by bhuddist visitors to Whitelake, TseTserleg, Mongolia
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The office where I work, which was painted over the summer, adding this eerie John Carpenter feel to it. It's actually a much more cheerful place than this.
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NEWS FLASH!
Finally I discovered how to turn the 'Drunken Cowboy' video right-side-up, unfortunately the file size went wacko - over 400 MB at this point, ten times the original size before resampling. Anybody have any clues about how to resample without losing quality?
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"I Hope Your Sheep Are Fattening Nicely..."

This is probably the best shot I ever got out of a car window - it helped that the car wasn't moving at the time - and although I recognize the pictures that come before and after this, I really can't say where it is, though I'm pretty sure this bucolic scene was shot somewhere near TseTserleg, TseTserleg, Mongolia
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SHOVED by Herzog!

I'm a little bummed, gentle readers, not only because in a single week all my appliances went on the Fritz (a North Korean Electro-Magnetic-Pulse bomb?), including a new Samsung Washer, a standing fan, and my laptop hard drive. I'm bummed, like so many other naive computer users, because I hadn't backed it up properly. The drive failed with no warning; I left it on, went to get some tea in the kitchen and when I came back the screen said 'No OS detected' - worse than the 'blue screen of death', I didn't even have blue; my hard drive had just gone 'kerching' and left.

On the drive were some photos I'd taken from my recent trip to Bangkok - since I've been there twenty times almost, I hardly ever get any pictures worth the trouble of looking at. This time, however, was similar to my magical first trip to Bangkok 18 years ago. Back then, by chance, I was an extra on the set of Good Morning Vietnam. I had been in the right place in the right time, and had been able to meet and have a minute or two nearly alone with the great Robin Williams. This time, I got to act in a Werner Herzog film (Rescue Dawn) , and so, of course, I was holding my breath to see if I could meet the great director himself. Holding my breath, because the sort of on location shots that extras get to act in, are usually the kind of things relegated to assistant directors. So it might work out that I wouldn't even see the man from a distance.

I needn't have held my breath. Herzog was there, and before the extras were called up for our shot, he had us line up in our pilot outfits, sweating under the Pattaya sun, and shook each and every extras hand. This was extraordinary. I have been an extra for TV and movies maybe, oh, 10 or 15 times, and never, never, have I seen an extra receive any more acknowledgement than "You there! Move over there!"

He was a kindly man, and I took great pleasure in seizing his hand and reciting the cliche, "I'm a huge fan of your work" - at which he brightened, since on the set, Christian Bale (the star of the recent BATMAN BEGINS ) was stealing all the limelight - since he was also friendly and liked to hang out with the extras (in his makeup for the shot , scraggly beard, tattered clothing and all, he looked like somebody you could meet at a Koh Pangan Full Moon Party, or a junkie you would run into on Khao San Road).

Herzog didn't stop there, though. During the shots that we were in, he was in our midst, barking directions (in a nice way) and even shoving the crowd from behind (CAN YOU IMAGINE? I can tell my grandchildren I was SHOVED BY THE GREAT HERZOG! ). The high point came when, after giving orders to move one of the on-set speakers, a behemoth Public Adress speaker on a pillar stand, he ran over and grabbed the giant thing himself, nearly toppling it (it must have been at least 80 pounds) and started dragging it across the set while we all gaped at him, open mouthed. It wasn't so much the feeling that he was picky and wouldn't trust anyone on the set to 'do it right' - it's just that it was obvious to us that this man lacked any sort of feeling of superiority as a director, that there was no job beneath this man (I'm sure he would have been an extra, as did the assistant director at one point, if he had been the right age for the shot)

All in all, a great moment, and it nearly made up for the grueling 16 hours, the multiple takes that seemed identical (except for the actors flubbing their lines), and the heat aboard the ancient British aircraft carrier (it now belongs to the Thai Royal Navy), of which the assistant director said, "The good news is that they have air conditioning on the ship. The bad news is that it makes you sweat more than no air conditioning."

I had just purchased about five of his films from a pirate shop in Chetuchak market, so I felt guilty. I wanted to dig in my pockets, produce a 100 baht note and walk up to him and pay him his royalties directly. Now of course this is flawed logically, since I'd have to seek out the estate of Klaus Kinski, Bruno S., and so on, and pay them all 50 baht or whatever their share is - but it was an emotional response - I mean, I really like his movies, but at this point I'm totally unlikely to pay thirty or fourty bucks a pop (that's including postage to a non-Western country) plus risk losing it in the mail or to the customs guys (who reputedly have a preference for sports videos over art flicks), especially when I can browse in air-conditioned comfort in the Thai weekend market and pay 3 dollars a title.

Rather than get bogged down in the whole controversy over piracy and copyright and so-called intellectual property (which, the very word, presupposes the notion of a unique creation, a western construct invented by London Publishing houses in the 18th century and mistakenly supported by the Romantics) - rather than get all bogged down in that stuff, I just wished I could have walked up to the man and handed him my money, personally, directly - it would have been money well spent, if only we could somehow get around all the legal/societal taboos of such an act.

My niece's nickname - while combing a backstreet Bangkok market for good Christmas gifts, I came across this happy circumstance. Unfortunately this outfit is for a 2 year old, while my niece 'Beebee' is about 7.
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The Inside of the 'Disco Bar' from where we shot the famous 'drunken cowboy video' (I'll put it up as soon as I figure out how to make the image upright instead of lying on its side, since i shot the video with the camera turned 90 degrees)
This was what we might call a 'one horse town', though in the case of Mongolia, an expression like 'one car town' might be a lot more appropriate.

The Reddened Neck of our Dutch Companion Mark adds contrast to the blue of Lake Khovsgul, which stretches off to the left of the screen (North) some 125 kilometers to the Russian border.

A form of solar panel used for millenia by yurt dwellers, the 'cheese panel' is an ingenious invention that turns perfectly good sheep or yak cheese into dry, perfectly inedible briquettes, to stack for the winter, or even better, to give to your foreign guests to watch the expressions on their faces as the taste curdles in their mouths.

yeah, pretty geeky, all right - I took this photo in the ruins of Ghengis Khan's former capital. I couldn't resist because my mom used to run a business dresssing people up like cowboys and 'antiquing' the print with sepia tone - here was a lady doing almost the same thing we do back in Oregon - but for a fraction of a price ($1). The costumes were big and heavy, of course, and didn't open down the back with velcro the way ours do, so these people had twice as much work cut out for them.
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Reindeer encroach on our camping site before they are shooed off by the Ger Camp workers. In the background is Lake Khovsgul, on the border of Mongolia with Russia, and the deer almost certainly belong to a local family of Tsatan (pronounced like 'Satan' with accent on the last syllable) who live in teepees and only herd reindeer for a living (when they're not asking for photo money)
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Sour Grapes? No, Sour Horse Milk...

Bottles of Kumiss, or in Mongolian Cyrillic 'AIRAK', in a supermarket in Ulan Bataar - this drink, which possibly predates beer as a beverage, which fueled the fearsome mounted armies of the Khan, is made with mare's milk and a particularly vibrant bacteria - I experimented by bringing back a few liters to Korea, and innoculating ordinary (skim) cow's milk - within hours I had a slightly milder version of Airak. The original mare's milk version tastes like a mix between strong yoghurt and horse sweat, and varies between 1% and 5% alcohol content (a by-product of bacterial action, unlike yoghurt bacteria which produce lactic acid from lactose sugars in the milk). Airak cannot properly be called 'beer' because it uses bacterial instead of yeast fermentation - but Mongolia has some fine 'western' beers as well - among them 'Borgio' and a microbrew called 'Great Mongol Hops N' Malt'
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At a peebreak on the road to Khatgal, Khovsgul Lake, we engage in a minor digital camera piranha-style-frenzy. It seems many years have passed since we in The West made fun of Japanese tourists for the same kind of behavior - now I can understand the mentality (especially when you travel rough and don't want to repeat the horrific experience, but don't mind looking at the photos from the comfort of your home)

A reindeer bull grazes by the shores of Lake Khovsgul in Mongolia near the border with Russia. This was taken only ten meters away from our campsite/ger. If you look closely, you can see the trace of a broken hobble, as this is a domestic animal belonging to a local Tsatani family. Just the day before they had asked us for two dollars for taking a picture of their animals - and the next day they were all over our front lawn, free for the taking...

From OUTER MONGOLIA

A blackout in town today (Moron, if you have a good map of Mongolia, in the north central region south of the Khovsgul Lake area) caused us to have no water and I went spinning out looking for a good place to put down the prunes I had recently procured (try an all meat diet for two weeks or more, interspersed with cheese and bread and see if it doesn't happen to you too)

Finally, in a moment of brilliant desperation, I found the high school had an excellent outhouse sitting outside in the middle of what would be the playground, 'wired in series' so to speak....I wonder what the atmosphere would be like here during the school season.

And you thought you'd escape the usual traveler's tales of bowel movements, from the safety of the internet....

gotta cut it here, I'm on a 37.2 kbps modem....

And some more horsey shots here.

Are they wild or not? I suppose the term 'wild horse' in Mongolia is reserved for the horse's ancestor, better known as the Przewalski Horse - but it is possible that this is a group of Feral Horses, the likes of which can also be found in the western U.S., Australia, and Western Ireland...

If you look closely (click to enlarge) you can see the duct tape (undoubtedly Korean-made green duct tape) reinforcing the arrows and the bow itself of this ceremonial archer during the opening ceremony of the archery contest of Nadaam. I thought I had seen all the possible uses of duct tape, but it seems as if we never will.

Horsing around

Trying to deal with my equinophobia, as I prepare for a little horsing around here in Mongolia. The trick is to get out to the outback and rent your horses there, but without western saddles, I wonder how long I'll be able the hard wooden frames of the traditional setup.

Do you think my hat is big enough?

The Last Medieval Festival in the World

The Nadaam festival. Ulan Bataar, Mongolia
It's so incongrous, that I would be sitting here in front of a terminal, air conditioned room, sipping my fermented horse's milk, wondering what medieval viand I'll end up eating for dinner- Lamb Kebab, or roast beef....

I need to back up a bit, and give some background - after finishing my students grades and posting a copy to them, I hopped my flight Sunday, getting to the airport in record time. I even managed to get the 'bulkhead' seat - actually the emergency door aisle- that is so coveted among die hard air travellers. It seemed as if everything was going so well.

I surfed internet until the last boarding minute, then ran down the corridor and got into my spacious leg-room-enough-for-a-basketball-player seat, basking in the warm smiles of the Korean Air flight attendants, and started drinking my last Hoegarden beer. I had also brought a tub of homemade Shrimp Gumbo (in honor of Bubba on Forrest Gump) and some homemade cheese. It was going to be a great flight.

The man in the aisle across from me appeared to be Mongolian. At least that is what I assumed from the evidence: his skin was sunburnt and wrinkled, and he seemed to be uttering gibberish, from a Korean linguistic perspective anyways. Mongolian has that half-russian, half Korean sound to it, and is one of the aurally most dense languages I've heard in my travels.

He smelled of spirits, and strong ones at that. Fine, I reasoned...the man has a reason to celebrate...he's returning home in triumph after having made good money in Korea, and he's just in time for his country's national Festival - what better reason could there be to celebrate?

I assured the very worried looking stewardess that the worst was over, but he kept escalating the situation, getting louder and more belligerent, throwing things and finally grabbing my wrist in a death-grip, I reacted without thinking and bent his elbow around backwards and said quietly 'Stop!'

The man finished the flight handcuffed to a flight attendant's chair in the galley. The police were waiting at the airport and he seemed as amused as ever. I'm not sure what the moral to the story is, but I suppose I got off quite lucky, only having a slightly marred flight experience - at the same time, a friend of mine was 'attacked by a maniac with a tire iron' while enjoying Beijing and wrote me from the hospital. Yes, travel CAN BE dangerous.

Starbucks: Saturday Afternoon. Coffee Junkies in their usual garb.

Let's get a little closer - Hey! what's that girl doing to that Mac?

And a little closer...Oh my God, she's got a knife!...and she's disembowelling her laptop!

Wow! Nice RAM chips.....I mean, nice hands!

Dans L'Escalier

Two rather odd things happened on my afternoon out in Planet Itaewon. For those readers not familiar with life in Korea, I'll attempt to explain the phenomenon that is Planet Itaewon.

P.I. is a neighborhood, formally known as Itaewon-dong in Korean, that has been the traditional zone in which foreigners were allowed to conduct business. Now that Korea has pretty much opened up to the outside world, terms like 'foreigner's quarter' are pretty much historical - though it still does retain an international flavor that other neighborhoods now popular with foreigners, does not have.

Unfortunately, Itaewon is something of a ghetto, if not a textbook caricature of the same. There is a standing mafia, a pretty corrupt police force, substandard housing, and the collection of unpleasant characters that one usually associates with ghettos. On top of this rather unsavory structure is laid an American army base (the headquarters of the US forces Korea) with it's attendant prostitution industry, fist fights in the streets at midnight, and other general ugliness I'd rather not go into here.

Suffice it to say I generally avoid the place, which is actually quite difficult these days, as the place has gentrified somewhat since the nineties, sporting some nicer pubs with imported brews; I've also got some die-hard friends who seem unable to accept the idea that they live in a ghetto, and worst of all, it is the only place in the country that reliably carries my shoe size.

I was there this Saturday with my friend Peter, whose leg is in a rather sci-fi looking black brace, with knobs and levers and buttons that say "Don't Push!". Peter has lived here nearly a decade, the leg brace is a new affect, a gift of a recent scooter accident. He's a decent sort, so much so, that he's the only person I will befriend who has some yuppie traits, like hanging out in the Starbucks all weekend or complaining about Supersizing racism at the Burger King.

There was Peter, in his usual chair, swilling the joe and proofing his latest book about idioms, English Oxygen. There was a new character there as well, a voice talent named Andrew. He had a nice way with words, and we lost no time in verbally abusing the fashion sensibilities of the stream of punters who were filing past us to get their daily drug.

It was in this spirit that we found ourselves, taking the piss out of anything and everything, everyone and anyone, that when a comely young lass came in with a Mac Laptop (sorry, I know it has another name in MacSpeak, but I'm a hopeless PChead) and began disassembling it with a Swiss Army knife (called a 'McGiver knife here). SEE PICTURES ABOVE (clickable)

I mean, it wasn't so much the fact that she was kind of good looking, or a female, so much as of all the incongruous activities one can engage in in a coffeeshop, this has pretty much got to take the cake. I guess Mactops are pretty easy to swap RAM on, or the girl is something of an industry insider - I would never take my laptop apart with a knife in a public place, let alone in a private dust-free NASA facility - but that's just me.

Peter leans over and starts engaging in MacTalk, Backtalk, or something else, but he seems to be getting somewhere, most likely because he already has a girlfriend ( a beauty, at that). That must have been what encouraged me and Andrew, for I leaned over and started snapping the pictures above, but Andrew leaps out of his chair, rushes over and says 'Would you mind if I join you....in a relationship?' It was a kind of pickup line, undeniably, a little flippant, possibly crass to some - but certainly not what I would call a verbal assault.

The friend of the girl reacted before she could: "This is why white guys have a bad name in Itaewon" she intoned angrily, in what had to have been a native-speaking American accent. There was a lot of hostility which apparently had been built up over time, over similar incidents...

Not being a ghetto resident or frequenter, I shut my trap (for I had also been one of those caught snickering red-handedly at the boldness and audacity of it all) but there was a very, very thick silence which suddenly lay over that little region of the coffeeshop, like the moment in Western movies before a barroom gunfight. It was as though we were awaiting the inevitably deadly verbal fallout from this pre-emptive nuclear strike...

Later, mulling this over at home, it reminded me of something I once witnessed at a bar in San Francisco, a total stranger had come in and given this girl sitting next to me (also a stranger) a deep French kiss. It was so sudden, so unexpected, and so totally 'Not Found In the Manual' kind of situation that the girl actually had a beatific 'I enjoyed it' kind of face before she recovered and started protesting her rights, and shooting us at the bar dirty looks for laughing as a reaction, which she interpreted as encouraging such acts.

Yes, in some ways the two things were the same - cultural mishaps, both intra and intercultural in dimension.

And now, I've been suprressing the whole reason why I wrote about this incident. The title of this post refers to a borrowed French idiom which means literally 'On the Stairs' - it refers to verbal retorts, which never seem to occur to one in time, clever answers to a remark only occur to one as they are leaving, or 'on the stairs' on the way out.

Here's my 'dans l'escalier' then, it's not all that brilliant, but at least I can shout out from the safety of my blog, and of the time past:

IT'S GIRLS LIKE YOU THAT ALLOW TIRED STEREOTYPES TO LIVE IN BIG HOMES AND DRIVE FANCY CARS!

Actually, I should say 'Remarks like that' instead of 'Girls like you', because otherwise I just participate in the Stereotype Slaughterhouse Circus, but I can't help but feeling miffed at this sort of Bobbitting behavior which threatens to emasculate any male showing any attention to a woman whatever.

I know from my own experience, from receiving unwanted attention from Gay men among others, from being the recipient of suggestive comments that are unprintable here, that someday we will all be grateful for the attention now long gone. When we are all old, wrinkled and alone (I've already got 2 out of 3) we will pine for that shining moment of misplaced affection, which doesn't make us any smaller, doesn't cost money, or bring us under crosshairs of any kind. They're just WORDS, after all, for chriminey sakes!

Sticks and Stones will break my bones...

But the IRS can really hurt me.

Ciao, Pax everybody as I go to discover Mongolia and the deepest lake in the world.

Do you see anything strange about this young man about to get on a bus? (my bus from Vang Vien to the Capital) - Look closely. Then scroll down.

Now do you see it? Look at where his right hand is in his jacket pocket. Now look below. It's an AK-47 (I think), and he's been assigned to protect the bus from bandits. Cool, isn't it? On this road there hadn't been any attacks this year (yet).

flip flops, anyone? a market stall in one of my haunts near Chun-ge-Chun

LINT

Yes, this represents a new, all-time low in the ephemeral and irrelevant world of blogging- posting a picture of your sock lint.

You see, this lint has come to symbolize my life. Let's just back up for a minute and reflect on where lint comes from:

Lint comes from your skin rubbing your clothing, or your shoes rubbing your socks, like my Doc Martens did to my socks. In case you don't wear 'Docs', the leather uppers are stiff and cardboard-y, so from the action of my heel slapping, tiny, individual fibers are pulled away from the warp and woof and they fall to the bottom of the shoe, where they join other fibers and are matted by the hammer of my heel into lint.

Although you could look at my overpriced Docs as little lint factories, pounding out their products across my foot-miles, another way to see lint is to consider what the bhuddists like to call the Precept of Impermanence - all things must pass, all beings are mortal, even rocks give way to time, etc. To put it simply, lint is clothes death.

As I rushed around on this Friday, the last day of the semester, all the final tests safely behind me, I was determined to get out of this country for the 10 days between now and the next class of Summer Session. I had it all worked out; I would pop over on the boat, getting my visa enroute - or then I had option B, pop over to Bangkok with the stub-end of a ticket I returned to Korea on, essentially costing me nothing.

So I'm rushing around, making plans, breaking plans, forming new plans, formulating ideas, checking the weather, verifying prices, and all the while busily making lint (see picture above). And as it turns out, Sock Lint is all I have to show for all my rushing around; once again, there are no tickets available out of Gilligan's Island-Korea; no affordable destinations (other than Thailand, which sort of bores me now) and no visa possible from the Chinese Embassy in reasonable time (I love the Chinese government and their impossible, thieving, murdering ways, because it gives me something to hate more than my own government)

The travel agent just called. Guy says they can put the fix in for me at the embassy so I can hop tonights boat (the next one is in four days) to Beijing if I want. They ask for 300,000 won (about 300 dollars).

"Is that including round-trip boat fare?" sez I
"No" sez they
"What! 300 for a freakin' visa? It was supposed to be a shopping trip, just there and back in a week" shkreamed I

I guess I'll be here, then. The plus side is I can start blogging again; in China this would have been impossible, as most blogging sites are blocked by the Chinese gov'ment. (gotta love'em, right?)

I'll dish up some more lint later on.

Homage to Lewis Caroll or O Henry? Definately not the most appetizing name for a food establishment -what's all that Business School nonsense about the importance of Branding?

Old paths revisited

I've been off the writing for quite some time, and although I can use the excuse that I have been busy moving into a HUGE palace of a place, cleaning it, planning a housewarming party, catching an unidentified skin disease, healing the same, replanning the housewarming party, and re-cleaning the house again, all 70 square meters of which had somehow managed to gather a huge amount of dust - in fact, if the dust has the right pH level, I can save it up for my roof farm later in the summer....

I want to describe two things; the amazing writing of a popular blog I just discovered, actually a constellation of related blogsites called Festering Ass - so cleverly and realistically written that it blows everything else out of the water. The writing style owes much to the late Bukowski, not only in the imaginative treatment, but also in the gritty nature of the subject material. It is not quite as unpleasant as the parent website domain name would have you think, but for you guys, I'd recommend Tucker Max or Hoo-Ah, whereas women may find a sympathetic node at SlowChildren-AtPlay.

I spent most of this weekend cleaning up for and cleaning up after (no more phrasal verbs please , English Teacher!) my house party, and the rest of my time feasting on Slow Children and Tucker Max. I can't remember having cackled at writing on the Internet in some time.

It even inspired me to dust off my keyboard and make another stab at narrative, and at describing my less-than-drab existence in flashier prose. Tucker Max, for example, has a gift for dialogue - but the man takes no chances, carries around a small voice recorder even while getting shit-faced. That certainly is the kind of dedication (and brazenness) that I need to get my act together.

So in that spirit, I've decided to dig up some of my oldest blogrolls from my times in Beijing, to let you, dear reader, decide whether Korea and my cushy existence here have ruined my prose style or made it slightly better. Here's a sample:


Thursday, 24 June 2004

cat follies
Yuen Lao Shi is the landlord of our courtyard house (in Chinese, four corners house), or is related to the owner of our house, and he lives in the first half of the courtyard, separated from our little foreign enclave by a round Chinese arch/doorway.
He is quite the entertaining sort, by that I mean we have come to love his unique blend of Chinese expressions "Fei Shang Hao! Fei Shang Hao!" and English expressions (he loves to trot out an idiom he's been studying recently), his entertaining way of suddenly bursting into song like some sort of South American Latin romanticentric, and his extreme, often painful love of animal and plant life of every kind.
The pride of his menagerie currently seems to be the cat family he has nurtured from the rooftops to the courtyard floor. There appears to be a floating population in this hutong of anywhere from 2 to a couple dozen cats, depending on whether you count tails or midnight moanings. As the last metaphor implies, the Cat Family is busily reproducing itself into our little ecosystem.
The most recent litter was about two weeks ago, just four days before I got to China. The mother cat apparently had chosen the birth spot to be in our Television Lounge room, in a pile of comforters used by our Weekend visitor Maurice. Apparently she didn't like the cardboard box that Yuan Lao Shi had rigged up for her with blankets and pillows. She scratched the door all night and was apparently all but unapproachable.
Yesterday I came home to find Yuan Lao Shi in a bit of a state. The mother cat had one of the babies in her mouth, and was going around the courtyard in a highly agitated state. According to him, she wanted to move them to a new nest, and was looking for a place.
The problem was, she had already hidden two of the kittens and we didn't know where...they were too small for us to hear our cries, so there was nothing for us to do except watch and follow the mother to find out where they were.
She headed straight for our roommate Joel's room. Joel sleeps on a platform elevated two meters above the floor, accessed by a spindly ladder. The mama cat kept jumping from floor to bookshelf, bookshelf to bed platform, each time an entire meter, wiyh a kitten in her mouth. Then she prowled the parameter of the mosquito net, looking for a way into the bed and cushions.
She did this several times, and finally she gave up. We searched the bed but found no babies. Just in case, I left the mosquito net open and tried to let her go in, in case she had actually hidden some babies where we hadn't looked. But she didn't come back.
Normally I'm not involved in the lives of cats....but this one certainly has even me guessing.

To be continued....The House Party and the Salsa Nazis...

This is basically how I picture my dream retirement scenario. I'm not talking about staring at my hairy, knobby legs, but rather the whole tropical dream thing, the hammock being the archetypical symbol of the same.

One might mistake this picture for the inside of a cheap hotel room in Cuba, instead of Luang Prabang.

Oh Mother earth Nipple pointed at the Mouth of the Sky!