Thorbjörn Holmlund kicks ass. He is working on a truly amazing project that cannot possibly be overlooked for its contribution to human civilization. Echoing Chares of Lindos, the Greek sculptor charged with constructing the colossus on the island of Rhodes, Holmlund’s legacy will be a modern day Great Wonder: a colossal moose.
The moose is apparently being built not to commemorate a Swedish victory over some invading force. But when you think about it, what reason does there need to be to build the world’s largest moose? This should be a monument to celebrate mooseness, and there need be no other reason, for there can be no reason more appropriate than that anyway.
Sometimes you read something that just utterly depresses you. I have been sick lately, and I didn’t especially need more depression, but today I read this story at Wired, and it made me sink even lower. To summarize, researchers have studied some supposed dinosaur flesh that was recovered with some fossils and concluded that it is in fact bacterial slime that formed on the bones in the ground.
The reason I am so distraught is that I have been harboring a fantasy, for nearly all my life, that one day I would see a dinosaur in real life. The aforementioned dino-flesh held the best possibility of DNA extraction, and then we’d be on our way to a real-life Jurassic Park.
This also means that the rest of my fantasy won’t come true. You know, the part where scientists vastly underestimate the intelligence and breeding frequency of said reconstituted dinosaurs, and then the dinosaurs overbreed and eventually break out of their containment facility.
Just returned to Beijing after a little mini-visit to Chongqing and Shanghai. The trip was good; Chongqing is probably the #1 up-and-coming city in China, and Shanghai, it turns out, is much better when you have friends there. (Go figure.)
This being my second visit to Shanghai, I wasn’t as concerned with traipsing around gawking at touristy schlock as I was with things like drinking beer and eating food and pontificating with other beer-drinking food-eaters about the state of life in China, but I did reserve one touristy thing for my last day.
Upon arrival, I had a ride into town, so the opportunity wasn’t there, but I made my way back to Pudong Airport all by my lonesome, which meant I could feel free to go and do one of those nerdy things that often seems to entertain me more than the poor people who get stuck with me: I rode the Shanghai maglev train.
According to this article at CNN, during trade negotiations with the United States in 1973, Mao Zedong offered Henry Kissinger 10 million Chinese women, saying that “We have too many women…They give birth to children and our children are too many”.
I’m not sure what Mao wanted in exchange, but to me it certainly sounds like a proposition worth considering.
Once I again I want to chime in on the uselessness of tradition. And in this case, not only the uselessness, but the actual net negative that comes from getting set in our ways. In the United States, we have this idiotic tradition known as Daylight Savings Time.
The tradition works like this: twice every year we screw with everyone’s sleep schedule by tampering with the clocks. We move the time either an hour ahead or an hour behind, depending on the season, so as to maximize the light in the morning. Now that I live in a country that doesn’t do this, it makes me rather happy, because I always loathed this twice yearly inconvenience. Now it seems the time change’s downside exceeds mere annoyance: it’s killing people.
Today’s mantra is simple: just let us fuck on airplanes. Let us go into the bathroom and do it. Let us fool around under the blanket. Sex doesn’t hurt anybody; in fact, it’s vitally important to the expansion of the human race, and it’s a right that should be protected everywhere.
And on the new Airbus 380, whose first class has semi-private suites, Singapore Airlines should definitely leave people alone. I mean, for whatever outrageous price once must pay for such a first class seat, I think travelers ought to be able to get their grooves on if they feel like it.
I’m going to be a little “mushy” today and write a short note about friends.
Normally, I am a pretty self-sufficient person. I don’t usually ask people for much, and I try to wriggle out of sticky situations on my own. Sometimes, it seems people are even a little put off by this, as if they would be happier if i asked them for more, but I see it as my way to just not be a burden to anyone. Recently, I moved to China, and this experience has made me more reliant on other people than at any other time in my life.
I decided to pop into The King tonight and purchase a delicious double cheeseburger. There was a rather large, and, as it turns out, rather surly man in line ahead of us. We walked in right after he ordered, and the girl behind the counter was giving him his tray of food.
The man wanted a straw, which is a reasonable enough request in and of itself. The girl, also rather reasonably, pointed to the right where all the straws and napkins and ketchup and stuff was, telling him he could get one.
Surly Man apparently didn’t see the straws. He got really angry, yelling back at the girl: “Look, I see toys for kids meals and napkins and a bunch of other stuff but I don’t see straws. I do see them behind the counter, though, why the hell can’t I have one of those?” As she gave him one to shut his annoying ass up, he bellowed his big zinger: “You ever heard of waitress service?”
I just thought to myself, “Dude…you’re in fucking Burger King, and this girl is not a waitress.” However, his largeness combined with his surliness ensured that this point of view remained safely ensconced inside my thought balloon.
This BBC article quotes Time Asia, reporting about a unique new tourist attraction in India. Apparently run (and started?) by one man (Peter Dorje), this “sport” entails going up on a mountain with a bunch of yaks, attaching yourself to a rope and a pulley mechanism, shaking a bucket of pony nuts*, and then really really hoping or praying to your god that the rope or pulley doesn’t break as this giant yak comes stampeding down the mountain at you. When all works well, you get yanked UP the hill while the yak charges down.
What happens when you get to the top, I don’t know. Maybe you are catapulted off the other side of the mountain and you land somewhere in Nepal. That would be cool. Sign me up.
Anyway, the sage advice from Mr. Dorje is “Never shake the bucket of nuts before you’re tied to the yak rope.”, and, you know, I am not going to argue with the apparent yak skiing inventor.
* I was going to be all cool and informative and link to something describing what pony nuts are, but incredibly, a search for “pony nuts” (with the quotes) returned zero results on Google when I tried it (perhaps some kind of anomaly). So, I’m sorry I can’t tell you what the hell a “pony nut” is…but apparently yaks like them.
