And I’m on fire!

• You can only type “LOL” or “ROTFL” if you are actually Laughing Out Loud or Rolling on the Floor Laughing
• Once a year, every American family must move everything they own, by hand, out of the house and into a standard 20-foot shipping container. Anything they cannot carry or fit into the container will be donated to the African nation of their choice.
• Cel phones will cause physical pain while in use.
• Every automaker must offer at least one car with an AM radio, standard transmission, and carburetor; and with no power steering, windows, or brakes.
• Robin Williams may continue to make movies but all human beings must agree that any movie in which he participates is, by definition, bad, and that, moreover, said badness has become so egregious that it has retroactively bad-ified previously non-bad movies like The World According to Garp and The Fisher King.
• Steve Martin will be warned that the Robin Williams Act may be extended to certain other actors.

“Dear users of the world’s fastest-growing, trend-setting, most-popular computers:

Your business is unimportant to us.

Sincerely,
Netflix”

Update (2008-07-10)

What makes this irksome is not so much the sense of exclusion — longtime Mac people are used to that — as the sheer laziness of it. By the late aughts, cross-browser video capability is very much a solved problem. There’s no excuse in this day and age for excluding potential customers based on their operating system.

3 am, suffering the usual insomnia. Out of idle boredom I’m browsing Wikipedia, entirely because I can. Although, as Wikipedia itself helpfully notes, as of “June 2007” I would, actually be able to do this from China. I’m trying to remember if I looked at Wikipedia at all the last month we were there...

What I’ve learned recently [with the usual disclaimer that this is stuff anonymous unqualified strangers assure me is true]:

• The Earth’s Atmosphere has more Argon than Carbon Dioxide
• China has partially unblocked Wikipedia
• The Robustness Principle (also known as Postel’s Law) states “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” (This has something to do with engineering Internet protocols, but seems like a good recipe for life, generally.)
• Kelly Souders, one of only two Souders on Wikipedia, has written or co-written 17 episodes of Smallville. I’ve never seen Smallville.
• On July 17, 1815, Napoléon made his formal surrender to British forces on board the HMS Bellerophon off the port of Rochefort, France, ending the Hundred Days.
• At Waterloo, Napoléon did not, actually, surrender.
• The tiny Polynesian nation of Niue has effectively outsourced its foreign relations to New Zealand which seems fricking brilliant given America’s performance over the last five years.
• Famous Nebraskan Harold Edgerton, inventor of the photographic strobe, died in 1990.
• Talk pages for the most unexpected subjects provide hours of schadenfreuderific entertainment.
• Schadenfreuderific is not a real word.

My brother and mother have been visiting this past week. I took them to the usual Xiamen tourist sites: Gulangyu Island, Nanputuo Temple, Zhongshan Road. There’s pictures of all the Xiamen stuff on the Flickr Stream. I won’t say too much except this was the most of Xiamen I’d seen, well, ever, including Sunlight Rock on Gulangyu and eating lunch with the monks at Nanputuo. Which was a definite highlight not only of their visit, but of my year in China.

At the end of the week we visited Beijing, and again did as much Beijing as you can do in three days: Temple of Heaven, Tian’anmen Square, Forbidden City, Great Wall. Again I refer you to Beijing pics on the Flickr stream.

This trip represented the only travel I’ve done in Mainland China outside of Xiamen’s immediate environs. Beijing was nice as a contrast to Xiamen — the food was worse, the Mandarin was better, and the air of an unbelievably poor quality. When Karl and I visited Tian’anmen we almost could not see across it (half a kilometer). I will no longer put “Cleanest City in China” in air quotes when discussing Xiamen. (Except this one time, I guess.)

Most remarkable (to me) was how easily I can navigate a strange Chinese city (and Beijing is not easy.) I speak more than just survival Mandarin and my limited literacy is surprisingly useful. But even without my new linguistic bag of tricks, my attitude toward travel has become a lot more charitable. All the hassle stuff (taxis, hotels, public transit, asking directions) — I am much more confortable with this stuff than I was a year ago. I suppose I like it better, too, but probably only in the way that I like doing my taxes better now than I did when I was 25.

The Great Internet Crackdown continues apace. Flickr is now a casuality. Specifically, we can’t view photos on Flickr, although pages load and I can upload images just fine. Blogger remains totally blocked, requiring a round trip through a proxy to view or post. So add “repression” to the list of excuses why my posting has been/will continue to slack for the next few weeks. (Said list would also include “too busy at work” and “packing to leave” and “endless dog-related bureaucracy to get Bismarck out of here” and “interviewing for jobs back in Portland.”)

After viewing the sordid history of China in its capital I am feeling much less charitable towards China, the Nation (and seeing it afresh through my family’s eyes kind of dims China, the People, as well, although I still have a lot of affection in this regard). Yet Another Reason why I’ll be glad to be back in Oregon.