And speaking of Mark McGrath, this poster confronted me at a Burbank bus stop.
W.T.Fuck?
Now, I happen to have seen DEUCE BIGALOW 2: EUROPEAN GIGOLO in Amsterdam with a Dutch audience and it brought down the house. So, I realize that seeing a comedy with the right audience can make all the difference.
But on the Venn diagram of fans of the first JOE DIRT and people who stream movies, where is the intersection? Shouldn’t this poster say “Exclusively at Redbox”?
California, here we come. Right back where we started from.
I was kind of hoping this was the song that would greet me when I got off the plane at LAX. Alas, this was what was actually playing on the P.A. system:
How am I celebrating China’s Golden Week the first week in October? By leaving and going to Japan. Just booked a leisurely trip to Kyoto and (for my birthday) a small village called Nikko.
But does anyone happen to know if autumn is the right season for daikaiju?
My living room & bedroom air filters — front and back — after 80 days. 
Previous air filter check ins here and here.
Fought my way through a typhoon to walk to the doctor’s office this morning. Apparently, typhoon Chan-hom is named after a Laotian tree of some kind and not, as I had first thought, a minor member system of the United Federation of Planets.
And what was on next as I flipped channels? 500 Days of Summer. Now my lungs and heart ache.
I’m at home recovering from bronchitis, watching CCTV (as is my wont.) In the middle of a documentary on mammals — just as they were putting a crow in an MRI machine — they started playing FC Kahuna’s “Hayling”. The was one of my favorite songs of 2009. I still find it haunting, every time I hear it.
Just as I was thinking to myself, “There is, like, zero chance CCTV9 paid to license this song…”
…they played The Temper Trap’s “Sweet Disposition” which was one of my other favorite songs of that year and indelibly marked in my mind because of 500 Years of Summer, again, from that same year.
All a surreal reminder of the late Noughties (as the Brits like to call it.)
Computers often confuse the suffix at the end of my name for my surname. So I assume the nurse glanced at my medical chart and took Mr. IV to his private room.
My latest terminus adventure (note how carefully I avoid the more correct but more ominous “terminal adventure”) took me to the Utter West, but was extra challenging because Metro Line 11 has two spurs.
First, I tried the north spur. It had more hustle and bustle than any of the other terminal stations I’ve visited. And much like the northern ends of Line 1 and Line 9, it was a land of orange taxis.
Line 11 took me past hundreds of empty and under construction apartment buildings on my way west.
From the tattered state of this poster on a construction site urging workers to put on hard hats, I have to imagine that both these construction workers are dead.
Backtracking, I then tried the western spur. It took me past this station, which I found particularly amusing.
光明 literally means “light bright.” I guess I would have expected something more like this…
Finally arrived in the Utter West. Line 11 is the only Metro Line that actually peeks out over the Shanghai city limits.
It’s far enough west that my iPhone thought I was in Suzhou.
Here you can see Line 11 arc out back to the east and a lonely orchard nearby.
It’s far enough out that the taxis switched back from orange to blue.
The businesses seemed to be doing better than this business park sign is.
But — as in other parts of China — it’s always a mix between thriving urban life and what just simply looks post-apocalyptic.
Previous terminus adventures can be found here, here, here, and here.
It was a three day weekend in China for the Dragon Boat Festival. I was so lazy, I didn’t even bother looking up what it was. Something about a poet.
This Qin-era weapon is called a “gē”. It usually gets translated into English as “spear” or “pike” or “dagger axe”, but as you can see from the picture it’s kind of weirder than any of those and I can’t really think of a good Western equivalent. (Then again, I had always thought I knew the difference between a “two-handed sword” and a “hand-and-a-half sword” but that just lead to me spending an unhealthy amount of time poring over nomenclature in this Wikipedia discussion page. So what do I know?)
I had never seen a gē in real life but I had heard about them tons because the Chinese written language is littered with them. Let me explain.
Tons of other Chinese characters include 戈 (gē). Seemingly unrelated words like “salty” (咸) and “prestige” (威). But the reason that I feel like I see this character all the time is that is the right half of the character for the pronoun “I” (我). It’s supposed to represent a hand (手) holding a gē (戈).
Now that I’ve finally seen one up close and personal, I know what “I” am supposed to look like.
Rented a bike atop the Xi’an city walls and rode the 8.5 miles around it. The speakers on the lampposts play traditional Chinese music, which really added to the whole experience.
Took about 90 minutes (with stops at all four corners for gulps of water and liberal application of sunblock.)
“Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.” Or, if Shelley isn’t your thing, insert a relevant Siouxie Sioux lyric instead. Because I’m certainly not here to tell you how to run your life.
I took an hour long public bus ride out of Xi’an into the mountains east. The girl selling tickets on the bus kept asking me “Harry Potter? Harry Potter?” (She was saying “terracotta”.)
China continues to impress.
Sure, you can see these guys out front of any P.F. Chang’s, but these are echt. When they were all made, across four decades two millennia ago, they were each painted with vibrant colors, flesh tones, etc. A realistic army.
And then they were all buried. No mention of it in any of the court records. It’s a strange case of inconspicuous consumption.
To quote Lisa Simpson, “They’re just like the terracotta warriors of Xi’an!”
I’m sure soldiers of every era and every culture give each other nicknames. I like to think this guy’s buddies called him “Tex”:
As a total bonus, there is a 360 degree movie presentation (just like the old Circle-Vision at Disneyland!) with ratty prints of a fabulously 70s, bombastic documentary film entitled “THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD” [emphasis theirs].
But, per usual, the things that strike me as most fascinating are the things most people couldn’t care less about. (You might think it was the miniature statues of bronze chariots with Li’l Sebastian-sized horses. But you’d be wrong.) After two thousand years, the site was discovered in 1973 when villagers were digging a well. This is the location of where they were digging that well:
Dumb luck. And they uncover this! And just at the front, leftmost point of the entire pit. Amazing.
Yet it’s hard not to imagine Indiana Jones uncovering this site himself.
It belongs in a museum.
Twenty years of Shanghai Metro development.