Bored of being busy...

It's been a while since I've posted in this blog. No apologies, I've been busy.

I joined a band. If you didn't know that you can check out the root page of the band's site at www.mackenzienellis.com/abominati, or perhaps in the future a direct migration to www.abominati.tk if you want to see media related to the band. Tim asked me one time after jamming on the guitar for a bit one night, "If I put a bass in your hand, do you think you could play our band?" I was like, "okay."

The next Monday we hopped down to a little basement studio in Lishuiqiao and rocked out four songs. The next week it was six. But that was a long time ago. By this time that band has learned 7 songs. Sadness.

The band's gone through some changes. Originally Zhaolizhi, Lizhichao and Qidan were backing us up, but now we have Ibragim Dzangiev and Vlad Ivanov...all told we have about 13 songs we can perform already. Frickin' awesome.

Most of the new music is just pop rock covers, but we have a new song called Fly Away that'll rock your socks off. It's kind of poppy, too, but it still has an edge...pure genius. The core of the song is pretty simple, just five notes on the bass, but it's really totally sweet. I could never get tired of playing this song.

The TV director we're working with right now, Zhaolei is cool. He just called me, though, and said our show is too "rock and roll" for his crowd, explaining that his leader thought it was too "noisy." That's okay. So we got together this weekend twice to learn about five new songs. All of them pop songs. We'll see.

There's more: I'm considering volunteering a big sum of my time to the Justice Party (http://justicepartyusa.org/) but I want to make sure I go into that with a clear goal.

The Justice Party is the only party raising the issues I think the most important in this race. How are we going to prosecute the unending cycles of corruption bringing our great nation down? How are we going to end wars and not put millions out of their hard-earned living? How are we going to get a country to rally behind any goal, however great, however obvious and right? My prescription, the one I wish to promulgate with executive authority, the kind granted to kings, not presidents?

Maintenance mode.

Keep the companies with outstanding contracts and maintain contractors' expected future contracts at healthy but not exorbitant rate of profit. This will take away their incentive to corrupt the agencies of government. Yes, basically I think we should buy off corporate America, allow them to get back to what they do best: inventing, innovating, and producing, while the destructive corps discover better ways to meet the demands of a peacetime market.

We throw the meat to the corporate beast, so the people of America have a minute to think about their next move. With the kind of enormous surpluses the American machine is truly capable of, what kind of society do we want to build in our peacetime state? Could schools with holographic projectors be a common thing? Could we create a classroom in outer space? Could we make large multipurpose construction bots like in all the sci-fi movies? Could we do it all with clean and renewable energy systems? Of course we could. We're America.

We end all offensive operations. (I think no matter how hard the lawyers spin it, offense and defense mean different things. An offensive defense is in fact defensive, but it is also certainly offensive to people not attacking you.)

So, first we announce our intentions to the world. Then we move our actively deployed troops to defensive positions to await further notice, pursuing only active engagements and maintaining active operations. Does this sound like suicide? I don't think so. We just have to make sure we pull back to a defensive perimeter. Who knows? Maybe one of these days all our troops will make it back home?

The prescription drug industry should be allowed to sell prescription drugs more freely to people who are willing to pay the higher cost of medicine through pharmacies, while the government continues to negotiate a nice, heavily government-funded solution befitting any advanced industrialized nation.

We purchase back the schools we've sold, maintain the ones we have. Create a new "Brain Trust Fund" to fund teachers' salaries as a mandate, commensurate with society's demand for education and nothing else.

We should handle the corruption of local officials, like corrupt county clerks, self-interested judges, and so on, with care. They are all skilled and important members of society, just like the drug offenders they throw in jail willy-nilly. But we also need to get a handle on the prison-industrial complex. Police are arresting folks they don't want to, because the laws are forcing them to. One-strike laws that can turn decent poor folk into slaves, for want of the price of their docket fees and bail. It's getting like revolutionary France, these days.

But you have to get elected before you can govern.

So anyway, I've delayed writing this email long enough. Drop me a line if you read this.

Coming to America

This post will later contain pictures. That's great. Maybe it'll have videos, too. I have a great one of the view out the left hand side of the Keisei high-speed line as it carries me to the Narita airport. For now check out the one below of the JR Yamanote line near the Shinjuku and Harajuku areas of Tokyo:

So the point is, I really want blogger to work when I'm in China. So I need to find a VPN.

The way this one VPN I use, Hotspot Shield, works is simple. It encrypts your internet requests using a secure key, then asks a server here in America to make that request on your behalf. It sends the response back to you in an encoded format, so your HTML requests never get blocked by your truly ubiquitous Chinese "Golden Shield."

Project Golden Shield was designed by some twisted fiend of ignorance to make my life, and the life of everybody on the wrong side of China's "virtual great wall" a total pain. I just want to write posts on Blogger and check my friends' statuses on Facebook. I don't even care that I can't read Icelandic PM Jonsdottir's Twitter.

Sounds simple, right?

Okay I'm being facetious. I just want a simple way to do it. I don't want to have to pull up a proxy to update my blogspot. I think I have a lot of great things to say over there, when I'm in China. I just want to help this harmony they keep talking about. You know? Tong yi ge shijie, tong yi ge mengxiang--one world, one dream.

Well maybe they don't care what I have to say. Maybe they just want to keep letting a robot tell them what's safe to look at.

That video is coming soon. I just need to upload it to youtube.com--which is also blocked in China.

Chinese Food

I'll start today's update with a no-brainer: China is fast-becoming a truly capitalist consumer society. I mean, when I go shopping at the grocery store, I don't do it with government-issued food stamps and I certainly don't do it for free. I pay with cash. Cold hard cash.

But don't get the wrong idea. This blog isn't about politics or government or any of that. It's about stuff, and more specifically the stuff you find in daily life living in a semi-rural post-industrial Beijing.

Stuff like this bag of Cheetos. You know, I always thought the idea of cheese flavoring was inextricably linked to the very heart of Cheetos. I guess that had something to do with the brand name sounding so much like "cheese." But when Cheetos came to China the brand had to undergo a little name change -- you know, they speak this whole other language here, called "Chinese" -- so now they call it 奇多, or "Qiduo."

Now, 奇多 can mean any number of different things. The "qi" part could be translated as surprise, wonder, queer, odd or strange, while "duo" can mean excessive, numerous, or (also) odd. Well as a matter of fact these Cheetos are strange. They've abandoned the classical cheese doodle shape for a neat little ravioli-like puff. And, oh, yeah, the cheese? It's gone too. The flavors available range from chicken to steak to veggie shish-kabob. But no cheese.

Actually, "no cheese" is a fairly prevalent phenomenon here in Beijing. It's hard to find. The Wal-mart has some, but they only have Land-o-lakes medium cheddar and Kraft singles slices. I've tried to share my love of cheese with some of my friends and students here, but I've made no headway.

Milk is another story. I'm going to guess that when you think of milk you think of cartons, jugs, or, for my Canadian friends, 1.33 litre transparent bags. Well here the more common form of milk is the long-lasting kind, the kind you can keep on a shelf for months on end because milk is frankly not very popular either. So milk comes in boxes of twenty or so heavy duty paper foil bags. The milk is sweeter than American milk, and, actually, it's really delicious once you get used to it. Each bag of 242 mL is just enough to fill a standard glass, or to pour over a bowl of cereal.

Ah, Cereal. That daily part of your complete breakfast. Well, cereal's a luxury item here, and so far it hasn't gained much traction. I discovered my first cereal in China three months after I got here. There was a girl modeling the cereal, you know, like those people who demonstrate juice makers or knife sets. Well she was standing there with a tray of paper cups, each with about ten pieces of this Nestle cereal called "Milk and Egg Stars" inside. I was so happy to find it, I bought six boxes of cereal right there. Probably as much as everyone else who bought cereal put together.

I should say a few words about overpackaging in all this. I mean, you might have thought about it momentarily when I described the milk packaging, but you know, there's another side to the consumer equation -- waste. So, every corrugated cardboard box of milk has twenty individual sachets of milk, and I should also add that every box of cereal usually comes with two sachets of cereal. Cookies generally come with a tray that divides the cookies into little pods, but so do the Lay's and Pringles potato chips, here. You can buy sleeves of Lay's potato chips neatly arrayed in a sturdy plastic security tray. All of this goes without mentioning the KFC/McDonald's/Starbucks explosion. So packaging is a passion here, but I'm afraid with a rapidly-growing supermarket economy, China will soon have to face the demon of overpackaging head on or find itself swimming in piles of garbage like New York's Staten Island.

But now for a lighter note. Remember MSG? That oft-demonized food flavor additive? Is it a carcinogen? An addictive drug? An allergen? A curse? Well at Wal-Mart in 昌平 (Changping), it's got its own section, easily ten times the size of the cheese section, by way of comparison. Doing just a little research on MSG, I think it's safe to say that most experts and professionals agree that its biggest problem is it's just too darn tasty. Yeah, it's a salt, technically, so when you ingest it it's not necessarily going to be the most nutritious part of the meal, but, yeah, after you eat it you're going to feel full. That "full feeling" known as "Chinese food syndrome" has an explanation. After you eat a lot of delicious food, you feel full. Anyway, now I know why the Chinese food in China tastes so much better than that lousy American stuff. Hooray! MSG!