Planet of the Legendary Soylent Omega Men

We saw I Am Legend yesterday. I was familiar with the premise going in, but I hadn't planned on seeing it at the theater, so I wasn't entirely sure what it was all about. None of us were too crazy about the film, but it did make me wonder how the storyline compares to other last-man-on-earth stories. The only other film I could think of was The Omega Man, which I have never seen despite having had it on my Netflix queue for about the past two years. As it turns out, The Omega Man was adapted from the same novel as I Am Legend. According to this post, I Am Legend takes numerous liberties with the original story, which is more of a Planet of the Apes kind of story than a traditional zombie movie. If you have a lot of free time on your hands, you may wish to view The Omega Man and The Last Man on Earth and read the book before going to see I Am Legend and decide which version you like best. If you're going to do all of that, you might as well watch Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green while you're at it to complete the Charlton Heston dystopic science fiction trifecta.

'Sup Skinny?

Ever want to know how you stack up to all of your neighbors from a demographic standpoint? You can head over to ZIPskinny and plug in your zip code to get an idea of how your lifestyle choices are bringing the statistics for your neighborhood up or down. I learned about this site while wandering around the Freep's website looking for a holiday gift guide. I wouldn't recommend giving anyone this URL as a Christmas present, but it's at least worth a look.

Market Correction

Saturday, November 24: We headed for over to old town this morning to check out the markets and the Yu Gardens. From the moment we left the hotel, it was obvious that it was a weekend, as the streets were much more crowded than they had been our previous two mornings in Shanghai. As we approached old town, we came upon a run-down section of town where modern buildings gave way to garbage-strewn vacant lots and squalid apartment buildings. On the streets of this ghost slum, a crowded market that covered every square foot of street frontage in this several square block area was doing a brisk business in everything from live poultry and fowl to 1990s era personal electronics. None of the vendors were set up in stalls, they simply spread there wares out across blankets on the street. This market catered to locals, obviously, so we were spared from the fake designer watch and handbag sales pitches that await western tourists on nearly every street corner as
we strolled through this impromptu flea market. The market slowly blended into a food market located in the residential area abuting the vacant lots, which led into the antiques market.

The antiques market definitely caters to tourists. While there may be some bona fide antiques for sale, most of the stores sell replicas of Chinese art, clothing, and ceramics. Prices generally aren't marked, so haggling is the name of the game. I wound up only making a single purchase. I picked up a travel wallet for 45 Yuan (about 6 USD). It was at one of the stores that actually had prices marked on their items and it was in the discount bin, so I didn't wind up bargaining for it. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to make a deal, but I decided to put off the rest of my purchases until Beijing since I didn't find anything at the market that really caught my eye.

After making our purchases, we toured the Yu Gardens. The gardens were very similar to the gardens we toured in Suzhou yesterday. Like the garden in Suzhou, they hail from the Ming dynasty. It wasn't quite as nice, but it was still a relatively serene oasis in the heart of Shanghai.

We planned on sampling Shanghai's famous steamed buns and dumplings for lunch. As it turned out, this was a very popular lunch plan, and the line at the restaurant in the market was out the door and down the stairs. Fortunately, Chinese resturants are at least as efficient over here as they are back in the US, so we only had to wait for about half and hour to get a table and food started coming shortly thereafter. After throughly stuffing ourselves on delicious steamed dumplings, we walked back over to the Bund to take in the northern part of the road, which we had neglected on our first visit to the area on Thursday. We spotted the Goodyear Blimp flying up and down the river, which seemed odd to say the least. We stayed out until sunset to watch the buildings on the Bund and the skyscrapers across the river in Pudong light up the night sky. The light show in Pudong is somewhat disappointing, as a number of prominent buildings did not turn on their
lights until it was already completely dark. The iconic TV tower never got it lights fully going before we left shortly after 6 pm. We walked back to our hotel along East Nanjing Road, which turns into a pedestrian walkway lined with neon lights, stores, and masses of people that seems to run for mile until it ends at People's Park.

I think the reason it took me a while to warm up to Shanghai is I didn't really see the human face of it until today. I saw the architecture and the museums and the skyscapers, but it wasn't until today that I went into the market and saw people who weren't rushing to and from work. Shanghai is obviously much different than Hong Kong. It's a huge, sprawling city and I really only saw a small chunk of it. I was surprised by the relative lack of construction activity going on, at least in the areas that I saw. I was surprised to see vacant storefronts and vacant lots within spitting distance of shiny new skyscrapers. Not that the tourist areas of Shanghai are full of empty buildings or bereft of construction activity, but from the way China is portrayed in western media, I sometimes get the picture that the entire country is a construction site that stretches as far as the eye can see. We head up to Beijing tomorrow morning, so this may be my last blog
entry from China as I doubt that our hotel room in Beijing will have a computer.

Silk Road

We decided to take a day trip away from Shanghai today. So far, I've found Shanghai somewhat underwhelming so I was hoping that getting away from the city might help. We arrived at the Shanghai Rail Station around 9 am. The station did nothing to improve my opinion of Shanghai. It's a dilapadated example of typical soul-crushing socialist architecture. We purchased our tickets for the historic city of Suzhou in the equally depressing ticket office next door and waited for the train.

Suzhou is a city of 5.7 million people, so it's kind of small by Chinese standards. It prospered as a center of trade throughout most of Chinese Imperial history due to its strategic location on China's Grand Canal. It was at one time (and perhaps, still is) the center of China's silk industry. Marco Polo even visited Suzhou on his travels through Asia, so it's not exactly your typical provincial city.

The train ride out was interesting. The countryside between Shanghai and Suzhou, which is about 50 miles to the west, is sparse and comprised of open fields, dingy apartment blocks, factories, and brand new roadways completely devoid of traffic. The train station in Suzhou is much nicer than Shanghai's, but the surrounding area is not very attractive. Once we got to the main street, Remin Lu (People's Street), things started looking a little better.

While looking for the Silk Museum, we were approached by a man with barely serviceable English skills who was trying to get us to take a tour of a silk factory. I was going to pass on it, but Michelle was interested so we decided to check it out. Upon entering, we were met by a young man in a suit who spoke English well and gave us a tour of the factory. The tour was very interesting; we learned a little bit about the lifecycle of the silkworm, handled silkworm cocoons, watched the workers operate the machinery and learned about the two kinds of silk they processed in the factory. The tour was ultimately a sales pitch, as it wound up in their factory store, but it was a very informative and low pressure sales pitch, more like a tour of a Napa Valley vineyard than the street vendors waiting outside of every train station and tourist attraction to accost any white person they see. We wound up purchasing a silk quilt before leaving.

After touring the factory, we headed up the street for the Silk Museum. The museum, like most museums in China, was not very impressive or interesting. The highlight was the live silkworms munching on mulberry leaves that they had on display. After breezing through the museum, we were standing on the street contemplating where to get lunch when we were approached by two young women, presumably from Suzhou. One of them was holding a camera so we first though they wanted us to take a picture for them, but we quickly figured out that they wanted to have their picture taken with us. Alan and I posed for the photo while Michelle took a picture of the girl taking a picture of her friend with us. We definitely got a lot more looks from the locals walking the streets of Suzhou than we have gotten in Shanghai or Hong Kong. I'm sure most people in Suzhou have encountered westerns before, but it's probably still not that common to see us on the streets. We weren't
the only western tourists in town today, but there were very few tourists in town from the west or the east who weren't there with a tour group.

After lunch, we visited one of the many gardens for which Suzhou is famous. We went to the largest and, at least according to our guidebook, most impressive - The Humble Administrator's Garden. The garden was quite nice, albeit quite crowded. Still, it was large enough that we occasionally had a small corner of it to ourselves, which was a welcome respite from the crowds and noise that have pervaded nearly every moment of our trip so far.

We then trudged our way back to the train station. When we arrived at 5pm, it was jam packed. The area outside of the station had the aura of a concert or some sort of large outdoor festival, with people gathered into small groups eating, talking, and playing games. We boarded the fast train at 6pm and were back in Shanghai by 6:30. We enjoyed another night of excellent Shanghainese cuisine at a restaurant called 1221. Unlike Wednesday's restaurant, this place was packed, mostly with expats and western tourists, but the food was excellent. After dinner drinks at an expat bar were a fitting end to my favorite day in (and around) Shanghai so far.

Shanghai Nights

Wednesday, November 21, 2007: We left Hong Kong this morning. We took an express bus to the airport but we arrived a little later than we had planned due to heavy traffic. Still, we managed to check in, cash in the remaining balance on our Octopus cards (Hong Kong public transit cards), and exchange our leftover Hong Kong dollars for Chinese Yuan before boarding our flight. We weren't able to grab breakfast, but since we're in a part of the world where airlines still believe in serving meals on two-hour flights, that wasn't too big of a problem. Our two-hour flight wound up taking about three and a half hours. We were handed a slip of paper after boarding informing us that flights to China may be delayed without notice due to unexpected and unknowable Chinese ATC directives. Our flight wound up sitting on the ground for about 45 minutes due to one of these delays. Once we reached Shanghai, we were put into a holding pattern for about half and hour, and
then we had to taxi for what felt like at least 15 minutes. We finally parked on the apron and climbed down a flight of airstairs before boarding a bus to the terminal. This is apparently not usual at Pudong; there were at least 20 other airplanes parked on the airfield away from gates.

The differences between Hong Kong and mainland China are immediately visible upon arriving in Shanghai. There is a general drabness that pervaded the entire airport in Shanghai. Of course, few airports can compare to Hong Kong's, so that might not be a fair comparison. Pudong does feel a bit like old Detroit Metro in places. The bilingual signage that pervades in Hong Kong is nearly absent in Shanghai. This is understandable, of course, but I have still been a bit surprised. I have read that Beijing is pushing to get more bilingual singage in place for the Olympics, so perhaps it will be more like Hong Kong in that respect. The second obvious difference, which became visible on the eight-minute maglev train ride from the airport to the metro, is that mainland China is a lot larger than Hong Kong. Instead of high-rises as far as the eye can see, it's full of fields, forests, and modest apartment blocks until you reach the edge of the city, where the
buildings begin to rise, but the heights and densities never approach the scale of Hong Kong.

After checking into our hotel, we started walking over to the French Concession. Shanghai and Hong Kong are both fairly young cities in terms of their history and development, but Shanghai is the younger of the two. With the exception of the transit system, Shanghai's infrastructure definitely looks newer than Hong Kong's. Everything else, however, looks and feels older. The roads are jammed with people on bicycles and mopeds. Shanghai has its French Concession and art deco architecture while Hong Kong has demolished most of its historical structures.

We dined on some delicious Shanghainese food at the Restaurant Art Salon, a restaurant where all of the decorations and furiture are available for purchase. We were the only patrons in the restaurant, but the food was very good. We then headed over to the Blue Frog, a western-style chain of pub/club bars that caters to out-of-towners and ex-pats, I assume. After a couple pints of Tiger, we decided to call it a night and head back home.

Lonely Continent

If you've ever looked in the travel section at your local library or bookstore, you are probably familiar with Lonely Planet series of guidebooks. Unlike some travel guides that only focus on the most popular travel destinations, Lonely Planet tries to provide guidance to all travelers, perhaps to a fault. I remember flipping through their write-up of Kinshasa a while back, which offered many useful pieces of advice, such as how much to bribe the various characters you were likely to encounter on your way from the airport to the hotel and the hours of day during which it may be safe to leave the hotel. In spite of this, I was still somewhat shocked to find a copy of the Lonely Planet's guide to Antarctica when I was at the bookstore last week. According to this this article, Antarctic tourism is exploding, with an estimated 28,000 visitors in 2006. That's a lot more that I had figured, but unless a fairly large percentage of those visitors are buying a copy of the Lonely Planet's guide to Antarctica, I doubt it's a moneymaker. If nothing else, it cements their reputation as the go-to source for travel information for obscure destinations (at least, for Western, English-speaking travelers). I'm kind of surprised they haven't enlisted one of the Apollo astronauts to write a Lonely Planet guidebook for the Moon.

Links for People Who Enjoy Wasting Time

This post let me to this site. I scored a 78% on Cities of Rhode Island quiz, which is a decent score for a non-native, I think. I also tried the World Leaders quiz. I scored a 98%, but it took me about three minutes. The quiz is a bit out-of-date, showing the former Nigerian, British and French heads of state. They did manage to update Japan, whose Prime Minister has been on the job for just over a month.

I also found this site, which ranks the top 101 cities in the US according to all kinds of different criteria. Prepare to waste time.

Dog Eat Dog

I just watched Dog Day Afternoon for the first time. I'm not much of a film critic, but I know what I like, and I really liked this movie. I'm obviously not the first person to express this sentiment, but I felt it was worth mentioning since it's been a while since I was that impressed with a movie. I've watched a number of films from Hollywood's so-called second golden age, and while I've appreciated almost all of them, I don't think I've ever enjoyed one as thoroughly as I enjoyed "Dog Day Afternoon". Perhaps Taxi Driver, but I watched that one was back when I was an angry teenager, so it may have seemed more poignant.

I'm not going to review the movie, but I will offer one observation. I found the depiction of the crowd and media circus surrounding the standoff to be one of the most interesting aspects of the film, both in the way that it reflected the spirit of the times and how it made me think about a similar situation would be depicted in the media today.

Panorama-rama

Panoramic shots are one of my favorite features of digital photography. Here's a panorama I took on our hike up Mt. Monadnock. It wasn't a great day for photography, but the panorama still looks nice.



We visited Paine Field in Everett, WA while we were out in Seattle. Paine Field is home to one of the two factories in the Seattle area where Boeing manufactures commercial airliners. Paine Field is home to Boeing's widebody assembly lines. They are currently churning out 747s and 777s and will soon be building 787s there. The factory tour left a lot to be desired. It was fairly short and didn't really get into too much detail. We weren't able to get very close to any of the aircraft either. I did snap a pretty neat panoramic shot of the field, however. The composite image shown below is made up of eight separate photographs. The aircraft visible, from left to right, are an unmarked 777, the modified 747 DreamLifter that is used for ferrying parts for the 787 from various assembly lines around the world to the facility in Everett for final assembly, two Air India 777s, a Cathay Pacific 777, three more unmarked 777s, a 737 (I think), and a China Cargo 747 freighter.

Summer Reading

Astute readers will notice a new set of links on the right-hand side of the page. I dropped in a widget from Google Reader that includes links to stories from around the web that I have decided are worth reading.

Pumpkin Cutter

Kudos bar to Michelle for the great job she did on the jack-o-lantern yesterday. She usually sweet talks me into carving the gourd by praising my carving skills, but I think this picture shows where the real pumpkin carving talent lies in this household.

Buffalo Stance

Free exchange has been blogging about Buffalo, NY a lot this week. The posts are all interesting, and all related to an article written by Ed Glaser in the current issue of City Journal entitled: Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?. I'm not very familiar with Buffalo. I've driven through it many times and I once stopped at LaNova for dinner, but I am something of a armchair rust belt historian and urban planning wonk. I agree that cities like Buffalo and Detroit are probably not going to return to prominence any time soon. Still, I'm more bullish on the future of the rust belt than Glaser, if for no other reason than I'm not sure how things can get any worse. Glaser's argument is that federal, state, and local governments should stop throwing money at "prestige" economic development projects. I didn't realize that we were even still arguing about this; of course convention centers, unusable public transit systems, and other such boondoggles are bad ideas. Glaser's piece comes off sounding contrarian, but he's not really saying anything new. I agree that a lot of money has been wasted and that a more friendly tax and regulation climate could have helped, but is there really anything rust belt cities could have done to prevent their demises? Even if Buffalo had decided in 1960 that it needed to get into the knowledge economy in a big way, would it have even been possible? Even if all of the labor unions had disbanded, manufacturers would still have had to pay a higher hourly wage in Buffalo than in the south due to the higher cost of living, higher cost of land, etc.

The real tragedy of rust belt is not the blighted downtowns and shuttered mills and factories, it's the colossal amount of human capital that has gone to waste. If Buffalo can find a way to harness the power of the human capital that exists within its core and metropolitan area, it will be able to reclaim at least a little bit of its past glory. For another cautiously optimistic viewpoint, read Richard Florida's assessment of the greater Toronto-Buffalo-Rochester,NY region.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it

I finally got around to checking out Yahoo! Pipes today. I was trying to figure out an easy way to create an RSS feed that would pull out all of the Fanhouse posts written by MDS. The default RSS feed that AOL publishes for all of the Fanhouse bloggers is the general feed for the entire site. I heard about Pipes whenever it came it (sometime last year, if memory serves) and I thought it could do stuff like this but I really wasn't sure. As luck would have it, this is exactly the kind of thing that Pipes was designed for. I have created a pipe called Fanhouse MDS and made it available as an RSS feed that mines the Fanhouse RSS feed for Michael David Smith's posts. It seems to be working correctly, but it only fetches the 20 most recent posts at a time. This doesn't seem to be a problem once you plug the feed into an RSS reader that keeps track of history, but if you're viewing the output of feed by itself, you might only see a couple of MDS posts (or possibly none), although I can't image it's too often that his Fanhouse colleagues manage to crank out 20 or more posts before he has a chance to publish at least a couple.

Georgia on my Mind

This year marked the first time Michelle and I didn't dress up in complementary Halloween costumes. None of the other Arrested Development characters were a good fit for her, so she put together sort of a generic vampire outfit. Perhaps this was why no one commented on my costume while we were out on Saturday night. I figured going in that my costume was going to be something that people would either find hilarious or not understand. I hadn't counted on a third possibility, which is what happened with the friends we went out with. All of them were somewhat familiar with the show, but none of them were big fans. They didn't get the costume at first, but after some prompting, they found it funny.

Part of the problem was we spent most of out night at Trinity Brewhouse. Since I was sitting at a table the whole time, my cutoffs were not visible. The rest of the time we were at Waterfire, which was sparsely attended due to the rain. Plus Waterfire never seems to draw much of a young crowd, so most of the people there were not in costume and presumably had never heard of Arrested Development. Still, I was a little disappointed that I didn't get any comments about my costume. The highlight of my night, from a costume standpoint, was when a middle-aged woman from Georgia (the country, not the state) came up to us before Waterfire and asked if she could get her picture taken with us. I'm not sure how popular Arrested Development and/or never nudism is in Georgia, but with any luck, these things may be getting a little more recognition over in that part of the world.

We shan’t be telling your mother this, shan’t we?

Happy Halloween.

Mountain Do

We did our annual fall hike this weekend. We climbed Mt. Monadnock, a 3165 foot peak in southern New Hampshire. According to signs I read at the park, it's the most climbed mountain on earth. Everything I've found on the web says it the second most climbed mountain (after Mt. Fuji). I'm not sure which one is true, but needless to say, it's a fairly popular climb. We visited Mt. Fuji on our trip to Japan a few years ago, but we didn't manage to make it to the top. Had we done so, climbing Monadnock would have made for an impressive 1-2 punch, but it was still an enjoyable hike.

The fall colors were at or near their peak. It was a little hazy and the sun was right on top of us since we reached the peak shortly after noon, so none of the pictures from the top came out very well. Michelle snapped this nice photo of the colors during the hike up the mountain.



We started on the White Dot trail, then took the Cascade Link over the the Spellman Trail. The White Dot and White Cross trails are the most popular routes up the mountain so they were quite crowded, but once we got onto the Cascade and the Spellman trails, we hardly saw anyone else. The Spellman is supposedly the hardest way up the mountain. It involved a lot of scampering over boulders on all fours, but it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Once we reached the end of the Spellman, we took the Pumpelly trail up to the summit, where we had lunch. We then fought traffic all the way down the White Dot trail back to the parking lot.

All in all, it was about a five hour round trip. It wasn't as grueling as the hike we did up North Moat Mountain last year and views weren't quite as nice, but it was a very good hike and less than a two and half hour drive from home.

Great Moments in Blog Commenting History

According to MDS, Kevin Everett, the Buffalo Bills TE who suffered a severe spinal cord injury, is walking on his own and expected to make a full recovery. This is great news, of course. I couldn't help but notice the first comment on this post. It's from a reader who goes by the name of BrettFavre4, who says:

GOD BLESS....From a Packer fan....

First of all, I find it amusing that someone who uses the online persona BrettFarve4 feels the need to state that he's a Packers fan. The way he qualifies his comment with this information almost makes it sound like he thinks that in football, fans generally root for the opposing team's players to suffer life-threatening injuries at the hands of their favorite team. I guess there are probably a handful of people whose favorite part of professional football is watching players from teams they dislike getting hurt, but it can't be a very large group of people, even amongst the Eagles and the Raiders fanbases. I can't image that there are very many Packers fans who harbor any sort of resentment towards the Bills, nevermind bloodlust. The two teams have only faced each other ten times in their history, and never in the postseason.

Speaking of MDS, make sure you read Larry Brown's (not that Larry Brown) interview with him.

Road Food

One of the joys of travel is eating great food that you can't always find at home. When we were out in Seattle last month, we ate at a superb Chinese restaurant, the New Kowloon Seafood Restaurant. With the exception of a cold chicken dish that I didn't much care for, everything dish they served was outstanding. I'm sure there are a number of great places in Seattle for authentic Chinese food, but you definitely can't go wrong with New Kowloon.

If you find yourself about 800 miles down the Pacific coast from Seattle and you're in the mood for Spanish Tapas (and really, when are you not in the mood for Spanish Tapas?), check out a place I visited back in May when I was in San Francisco. It's a little place in the Mission called Picaro. I've only had Tapas a few times, but I've always enjoyed it thoroughly. The chorizo at Picaro was amazing. I also discovered a delicious Spanish cheese called Manchego, which is made from sheep's milk.

Used to it

A friend of mine has recently re-launched her used book online store. You can check it out here. I'm not sure how I feel about shopping for used books online. As I've said before, I'm a big fan of the used book store atmosphere. I generally don't go to a used book store looking for a specific book; perhaps a genre or even an author, but if you go in looking for a specific title, you're generally going to be disappointed. The website is a bit rough around the edges, but it looks like it will get the job done. Perhaps its lack of polish is intentional, a paean to the thrown together style of the used book store. If you love used books but avoid used books stores due to the weirdos who hang out in them, this website may be the answer for you.

Revved Up Like a Douche

I was astounded to learn recently that the song "Blinded by the Light", a long-time staple of classic rock radio, was written and originally performed by Bruce Spingsteen. I heard his version for the first time last week, and I like it a lot more than Manfred Mann's more famous rendition. I was never much of a fan of Springsteen but I've been warming up to at least some of his older stuff lately. My favorite Springsteen songs combine rock and roll with spoken word and even orchestral sensibilities, and "Blinded by the Light" is a great example of this style. You can listen to both version here.