Happy Tunguska Centennial Day! On June 30, 1908, a tragic meteorite accident blasted a giant swath through a Russian forest and caused the creation of several television programs about UFOs that don’t belong on the History Channel.
(Also, Alan Parsons wrote a really cool trippy song about it. David Gilmour on guitar FTW.)
An exceptionally well-presented review of the Charles Daly Defense D-M4LE can be found here. I have yet to see one in the wild, but I’m certainly going to keep an eye open at the upcoming shows; I’m especially interested to see the street price on these.
First, a dude in my neighborhood bought an AMG C-class Mercedes. I can always tell that it’s him when he drives by; those engines sound like no others.
Last month, another dude bought one of the new V-8 BMW M3’s. The sound is more subdued and more exotic than that of the Benz.
This weekend, though, another dude trumped both of them and came home with a shiny new red Dodge Viper convertible. That’s another one that sounds like nothing else when it rolls by.
Gas prices, meh, doesn’t seem to be slowing anybody down here in the oil & gas belt.
I just finished a hugely entertaining 291-page book about, of all things, Chinese food. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles - Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee confirms what you always suspected about General Tso’s Chicken - that there was a General Tso (Zuo Zongtang, to be precise), but that’s not his chicken - and hundreds of other little-known but intriguing facts about the curious modern American-Chinese hybrid cuisine.
Some selected quotes:
Describing her long and varied odyssey through America in search of the state-of-the-wok in Chinese food:
I must pause to acknowledge my Garmin GPS machine, which is one of the best dollar-for-dollar investments in happiness I have ever made. If you simply have faith in it, you can let go of your worries. You may not understand why it is telling you to do whatever it is telling you to do, but you trust that it will get you to your final destination. Like religion.
I know that paragraph is just an aside from the story of Chinese food, but it strongly resonates with me because of my similar experiences. Our summer vacation to Atlanta, GA, last year was made immeasurably better by our traffic-receiver-equipped GPS. So Peachferrytree Road is congested with 2 m.p.h. traffic? Push “Avoid Traffic,” and now the GPS says to take Ferrytreepeach Alley instead. We often found ourselves following the imperious artificial voice of the lady in the box as she confidently guided us down back streets and through industrial areas … and repeatedly saved us huge chunks of time we would otherwise have spent waiting in the hundred-degree heat with the gridlocked Atlantans.
Anyway, on to the story. About Houyu, China, a village from whence come many workers in American Chinese restaurants:
Today Houyu is a village of gnarled banyan trees, languid afternoon naps, and abundant hand-caught fresh seafood. It bursts out of the grassy wetlands in a cacophony of smooth colors and glinting metal - monstrous four story mansions with bulbous spires, ornate front gates, and tiered balconies. Many of these have stone lions out front, the females with their paws on cubs. This wonderland has been made possible with money from Chinese restaurants in America. This is what General Tso’s Chicken buys in China.
But what makes Houyu strange is that many of the houses - each built with hundreds of thousands of American dollars - are empty. Except for the sound of construction and an occasional chicken clucking, few sounds of life bounce down the narrow alleys.
The residents of the town do not live there. The village has sent more than three-quarters of its population to the United States…. The working age men are missing. Old men and women, dressed in drab outfits, shuffle down the streets or sit on stoops. Chubby toddlers run about. It is like a village in a nation at war, except the men are not at war. They are working at Chinese restaurants in the United States.
Fascinating, especially because I am familiar with an American parallel, albeit one based on collapse, not success: You could replace “Houyu, China” with “Lake Charles, Louisiana, circa 1985″ and “Chinese restaurants” with “Houston” and I know just the scene she’s talking about.
Ms. Lee is a Metro reporter for the New York Times and so is familiar with the crime beat. On the progress of a search for a missing Chinese deliveryman:
It is unusually difficult to hide a corpse in New York City. Nearly everything is paved, so you can’t bury it. Only a fraction of people have cars, so the odds are slim that a killer can toss a body in a trunk and drive far away. Ordinary people are about during all hours, so it’s hard to lug a large, bulky package around without attracting attention. And there aren’t that many woods to go dumping bodies in. Murderers aren’t, in general, the sharpest pencils in the box. Nor are they necessarily forward thinkers. With such a high-density population, the bodies are almost always discovered, sometimes in unpredictable locations - wrapped in carpets, in suitcases, in giant Rubbermaid winter storage boxes.
Death is only the lowest point in what is almost universally the miserable existence of a Chinese restaurant worker. …
Corpse disposal in the city is, frankly, a woefully under-developed topic of study.
After police arrested a black male as a suspect in the disappearance of the deliveryman, only to release him when it was discovered that that stain was, indeed, barbecue sauce:
Troy’s friend told me, after his release, “Every black man who orders Chinese food is under suspicion.” Not only is there DWB, there’s also OWB - Ordering While Black.
(The deliveryman was located, unharmed. He had been stuck in an elevator for three days, but since he spoke only Chinese, he was unable to communicate his predicament to the astonishingly indifferent people at the other end of the elevator’s security phone.)
The most jealousy-inspiring section of the book is entitled “The Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World,” and it’s just as it sounds: Over the course of a year, Ms. Lee goes on a grand tour of the most notable Chinese joints on six continents to experience them all and to define the archetypal great Chinese restaurant. Yeah, not a bad gig, huh, like Michael Palin but “Wok to Wok” instead of “Pole to Pole.” I can hear the food editor(s) at the NYT thinking “How did she manage that? How can I get a publisher to pay me to find the best steakhouse in the world?!” (Ms. Lee’s answer to the greatest Chinese restaurant question is on her blog; sadly, the restaurant is in financial trouble.)
The book manages to take a seemingly narrow subject and expand it, Hoberman-sphere-like, into culture, religion, race relations, politics and economics. Wonderful! Fortune Cookie Chronicles has the Boater Stamp of Approval.
Oh, and my favorite fortune cookie fortune is something of a non-sequitur:
You Never Have Trouble If You Are Prepared For It.
(And seeing as how I talk about a lot of “stuff” here: For whatever it’s worth, I receive no compensation, remuneration or any other sort of -ation for anything I write here. My Amazon links are bare non-kickback links. All opinions are my own. Your mileage may vary.)
We’ve been watching Michael Palin’s excellent “Pole to Pole” series lately, and we’re at the episode where he’s traveling through east Africa. This reminded me of something cool that I don’t think I’ve posted before: a map of the distribution of lightning strikes across the world. East Central Africa FTW! Orlando, Florida is pretty impressive too.
VICTORY.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Or, more colloquially:
We have miles to go before we sleep, but today the air is sweeter and the sun shines brighter upon our journey.
I live in the #8 sweatiest place in America!
So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
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