Paul McCartney, You Cheap Bastard

I have spent the better part of the last thirty plus years defending Paul McCartney from John Lennon fans. This is not so much a daily occurrence as something that comes up once or twice every decade. John Lennon fans, much like music critics, tend to dismiss McCartney as a lightweight who writes only “pizza and fairytales”, as Lennon once said. According to McCartney. Lennon never said this publicly, so we only have McCartney’s word for it. Yoko Ono very publicly told us all about a private conversation with her husband wherein she compared his songwriting with McCartney’s and said, “You don’t just rhyme June with spoon”. I can think of no song where McCartney does indeed rhyme June with spoon, but it is a fair point. Some of his rhymes are questionable.

When the real thing goes wrong
And you can't get it on
And your love she has gone
And you got to carry on

“Going Down On Love”

I took my loved one out to dinner
So we could get a bite to eat
And though we both had been much thinner
She looked so beautiful I could eat her

“Well Well Well”

You were caught with your hands in the kill
And you still got to swallow your pill
As you slip and you slide down the hill
On the blood of the people you kill

“Bring On The Lucie (Freda Peeple)”

“Hands in the till” would make perfect sense, but he says “hands in the kill”.

The theory seems to be that McCartney writes the silly love songs while Lennon wrote the political message songs. True enough, McCartney wrote a silly love song with which he anticipated his future mocking and named “Silly Love Songs”, but that is far from his worst song. Unless you listen to the Donny and Marie, Sonny and Cher version. That is absolutely horrible. But the Wings Over America version ass kicks. And Lennon indeed wrote more than a few message songs. Although I doubt that he would agree with some of the messages today.

Free the prisoners, free the judges
Free all prisoners everywhere
All they want is truth and justice
All they need is love and care

“Attica State”

You live with straights who tell you you was king
Jump when your mamma tell you anything
The only thing you done was yesterday
And since you've gone it's just another day

“How Do You Sleep?”

The first two lines are more about Lennon than McCartney and the last line is bad timing. When Lennon wrote it he had no idea that “Another Day” would soon top the charts and make McCartney a bag full of money.

To say that Lennon was the angry lyricist and McCartney wrote the merry melodies is nothing short of ignorant. Lennon wrote more than a few ballads and McCartney invented heavy metal, according to some idiots. It was the head banging flute solos of Jethro Tull, not McCartney, that won the first heavy metal Grammy. Lennon was a great lyricist, but he could write banal crap as well as the next icon.

When you're by my side
You're the only one
Don't you run and hide
Just come on, come on
So come on, come on, come on

“Little Child”, written in 1956

Come on, come on
Come on, come on
Come on is such a joy
Come on is such a joy
Come on is take it easy
Come on is take it easy

“Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey”, 1968

Hold me darling
Come on listen to me
I won't do you no harm
Trust me darling
Come on listen to me
Come on listen to me
Come on listen, listen

“Whatever Gets You Through The Night”, 1974

At the same time McCartney was writing songs like these:

Some day you'll know I was the one
But tomorrow may rain so I'll follow the sun

“I’ll Follow The Sun”, 1958

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life you were only waiting
For this moment to arise

“Blackbird”, 1968

My eye cries out a tear still born
Misunderstanding love in song

“Love In Song”, 1975

People tell me that I should prefer Lennon to McCartney. How come no one older than me ever seems to understand. “Help” was the song that got me interested in the Beatles in the first place. “Yesterday” is a nice little song, but I have always thought it overrated. I prefer “Strawberry Fields Forever” to “Penny Lane” and “I Am The Walrus” to any other Magical Mystery Tour song. But what makes “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am The Walrus” great songs is the combination of Lennon’s lyrics and “all that artsy fartsy shit” that Lennon complained about McCartney adding. Both songs were simple ballads before McCartney whipped out the mellotron. McCartney’s reasoning for being more experimental on Lennon’s songs than his own is dubious and now he has to live with the myth that Lennon was the artsy one while he was safe and middling. At this point in their careers it should be obvious that McCartney is far more open to experimentation than Lennon ever was.

But if you look at each Beatles album and compare McCartney songs with Lennon songs, I am more likely to prefer the McCartneys right from the beginning. The big vocal performances on Please Please Me are “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist And Shout”. Lennon gets all the credit for screaming his song, but McCartney actually wrote his song. With The Beatles, their weakest album, has the standout McCartney track, “All My Loving”. A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Rubber Soul and Abbey Road are pretty even. Lennon comes out ahead on Beatles For Sale. But McCartney dominates Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and Let It Be. Yellow Submarine is evenly split between McCartney, Lennon and Harrison. Pound for pound I think McCartney gave more for the Beatles than anyone else.

Comparing their solo careers is simply unfair. John Lennon only released six proper albums in his lifetime. He has no real live album since he never toured after 1966. He only released one compilation album. Yoko has since released over a dozen.

Paul McCartney has released 19 studio albums so far, not counting Give My Regards To Broad Street, which is really a soundtrack album, and Run Devil Run, which is far and away superior to Lennon’s Rock’n’ Roll. But McCartney was sober when he did his. He also has a dozen experimental albums, ranging from amusing to what the fuck was he on, and five so-called classical albums, including two oratorios, a ballet and whatever the hell Standing Stone is supposed to be. His great weakness is in releasing a live album every time he goes on stage. To his credit he has only released three compilation albums, though each has the same dozen songs. Most of Wings Greatest is also on All The Best and almost every song on both is on the first disc of Wingspan.

This is where the trouble starts. While Lennon mostly released something and moved on (if you ignore Yoko’s attempts to rewrite history), McCartney is the George Lucas of music. All of his studio albums either have been or will be reissued as deluxe super special edition CDs. Band On The Run has been released as a regular album, special anniversary edition, part of the “Paul McCartney Archive Collection” and the “Paul McCartney Collection”. You can hear the song “Band On The Run” on 14 different CDs, excluding bootlegs. Will we ever get out of here indeed.

The Guinness Book people declared McCartney the most successful musician ever, in terms of sales, back when people read books. Sales of new material since then have plummeted. He has not had a #1 single since 1984 or top ten single since 1993. In all fairness, singles simply do not sell the way they used to, and the way all music is marketed and sold is completely different than it was before McCartney started dyeing his hair red. His albums still sell well in a market more concerned with single downloads than full length albums and his concerts always sell out quickly.

But McCartney wants more money. It is generally acknowledged by people with no access to such information that he is a billionaire (in US dollars), but one of his largest sources of income, his music publishing catalogue, has taken a hit since downloading music replaced record stores. McCartney compensated by leaving EMI after 45 years and taking his music to a much smaller company that offered him a much bigger piece of the pie. Your typical international superstar songwriter/performer makes about $1 per CD sold. As his own publisher and copyright holder, McCartney used to make about $2 per CD. With Hear Music, he reportedly gets $4 to $5 per CD. This is one reason McCartney was reluctant to sell music online.

Back before Steve Jobs was burning in Hell, he wanted to sell everyone’s music for 99 cents per song, whether they were Elton John or Milli Vanilli. But the Beatles (ie, McCartney and Yoko) felt that “Hey Jude” should probably be worth more than Five Man Electrical Band’s “Hello Melinda, Goodbye”, based in part on the court decision in the case of Let’s Be Fair to Everyone v. Some Shit is Just Better.

A typical Beatles album has fourteen songs. At 99 cents per song an entire album would sell at a bargain basement discount price. This gives McCartney a much smaller flame of pie, especially since he has to share the performer’s royalties with three other people and the songwriter’s royalties with Yoko, ironically. When he tried to change the songwriting credit on some of his own songs, Yoko successfully cockblocked him in court.

To make up for the loss in record revenue, McCartney started playing more concerts and charging concert promoters more money. In the ‘70s, the height of his toking and selling power, McCartney played three small UK tours, one European tour, and one hugely successful world tour. In 1989 he played his first world tour in thirteen years. Since then he has had four large world tours, three European tours, and four North American tours.

I went to three different shows of the Flowers In The Dirt tour (which was called something else) and probably spent less than $100 total on tickets. I have no idea how much concert t-shirts cost, but I must have considered the price reasonable at the time as I bought a few. And we were all given free tour programs that were more like novels (by today’s standards) than tour programs. I went to one show of the Driving Rain tour (called “Driving Tour” or something equally unimaginative) thirteen years later and spent more money on one ticket than all three tickets from the previous tour. Concert programs were more expensive than free and t-shirts were outrageous, but I bought one anyway because I knew that this would be the last time I saw the man live. My very cheap tickets to the first tour were all good seats while my expensive ticket to the last got me one of the worst seats I have ever had at any concert. I could see the stage with a telescope, but there were fireworks that I could not see at all.

Much of the blame for high concert prices can be placed on concert promoters and the evil Ticketmaster, but people like Paul McCartney who demand exorbitant salaries should feel guilty that their music, rock and roll, the music of the masses, can only be enjoyed live by bankers, carmakers and anyone else to whom Congress gives billions of stringless taxpayer dollars. Or at least people who see credit card debt the way their government sees public debt.

Now McCartney’s website wants to make a profit. I can understand selling his music via his own site. Most music is sold or stolen online, so there is little reason his site should not offer his music for a high fee. But they have recently gone beyond charging people for songs and videos. Now they charge people to be members of his website, as if any non-midget animal porn website is worth paying just to look at.

For the incredibly high price of £32.50 per year you too can have a “Premium” account at his website. What do Premium fans get that unimportant fans do not? Exclusive access to content you already have if you bought his albums. Plus personalised full length audio streaming, complete with improper British spelling, creatively called the “Jukebox”. This is an electronic device familiar to old people who dye their hair red but will mean nothing to the younger hipsters who have enough disposable income to pay to be a member of some website. With the Jukebox, the important Premium fans can play their favorite Paul songs right from his website. After going online, signing in, logging on and clicking all the right buttons. Simply amazing. Sign up today or be forced to play music offline like an asshole. Elite Premium members can also watch all the videos that are on Youtube and were on that $35 McCartney Years DVD from the inconvenience of his website. But wait. There’s more. Premium members also get a free Chinese sweatshop t-shirt. Not really free if you remember that you paid £32.50, but cheaper than any concert t-shirt.

But that’s not all. If you thought it would be, lo unto you. Act now and the first 5000 people with credit cards and nothing better to do can become elite “Pioneer” members. These are the real fans, so they get exclusive access to exclusive content befitting their important stature, which is much better than anything those Premium douchebags get.

Are you a true fan? Are you unemployed or at least have the free time of an unemployed person? Do you like spending all day looking at a website dedicated to a single person? Do you want yet another online account that looks and acts pretty much like Facebook where people try to collect the most “friends”, ie, anonymous strangers? Sign up today.

(Offer void in most of Asia, Africa, South America and probably Antarctica. Must have a Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or Google account to become a Pioneer member.)

It is his website and he is free to do with it what he wants, just as the rest of us are free to ignore it or worship it as if it were a television program about people just keeping it real. My complaint is that Paul McCartney, the guy who said love unto others as you would have them love unto you, has turned a previously innocuous if relatively useless website into a cash register that classifies and segregates his fans purely on how much money they are willing to spend on him. My name, or some retarded “screen name” like MaccaFan1964 or Meigouren, has never been on his website. It will neither harm my real life nor my online fantasy world (where I am taller) should anyone think me not a Pioneer fan, Premium fan or even inexclusive regular member. But I am disappointed that McCartney is cultivating such a dystopian commune at the one place online where people can fawn over him without making it painfully obvious what poofs they are.

Or perhaps I have gotten too old to appreciate the stampede of progress. I used to enjoy going to the record store, flipping through the stacks of LPs until my fingers were dirty, paying my $2.50 and listening to the album while reading the lyrics or looking at the cover art. The first time I heard “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” I thought that the record skipped at the end. My Rubber Soul LP consistently skipped at the end of “I’ve Just Seen A Face” (which was on the American version of Rubber Soul), giving it an extra bar that I thought it was always supposed to have until I heard the CD version. These are peculiarities that the digital generation will never get to appreciate.

On my last visit to Tokyo, where Tower Records is alive and well, I bought Paul Simon’s So Beautiful Or So What, which I did not know existed, for something more than $2.50. When I brought it home I copied all of the songs onto my computer. I have listened to it several times but have never looked at the lyrics. I cannot even picture what the cover looks like. I am thinking baby’s face, but I know that is the previous album. I have abandoned most of the old ways, mostly because I am usually doing something else while listening to music (eg, Mind Games is playing on the Windows Media Player as I type this), but I have not embraced the new ways. I have not bought so much as a single song online. I illegally downloaded most of Billy Joel’s catalogue back when Napster was, but all of my legal music purchases still come in CD form.

While 69-year-old Paul McCartney uses the latest technology to milk even more money from his fans, I am still tilting at online social networking sites as if they were windmills. I cannot shake the feeling that they might be giants.

I also got Miscellaneous T in Tokyo.




Pay to be elite and you get exclusive content.
© MPL Communications LTD
(who probably want money for posting this)

And Then Put Out The Light

Every once in a while, about three or four times each year, the indiligent, unconscionable people who appointed themselves in charge of the building where we live decide that those of us who live here can do without water for a day. I do not mean that there is no hot water or that there is no cold water. There is no running water whatsoever. They turn it all off. The excuse is that the water towers that hold the water supply need to be cleaned from time to time. I would have no problem with this if it were what actually happens. Water towers do indeed need a good cleaning every now and then. The pipes around here are old enough, and the water source is suspect enough that drinking tap water is advised against. Every year people die from drinking local water. This is not Montezuma’s revenge. This is Quetzalcoatl’s revenge. Some people boil the water before cooking with it. I simply cook with bottled water, which itself may or may not be loaded with contaminants.

My issue with completely closing off all avenues of running water to clean the water towers is that I have never seen anyone actually clean the towers. I know where they are. I pass several very large tanks every time I take out the garbagie. When we lived in the three bedroom apartment in the better building I could see the towers on top of the adjacent building from my bedroom window. On more than a few occasions that the water was turned off I checked for signs of activity and found none. It is possible that I was simply looking at the wrong time, but when the water is off between 8am and 6pm and there is no one anywhere near the water towers between 8am and 6pm I have my doubts.

The one good thing in this entire situation is that they let us know when they are going to turn off the water. They usually post notices in the elevators. This was not always the case. They used to simply turn it off and let the residents wake up to a world without running water. Eventually people started to complain. A major difference between Chinese types and what I like to call rational humans is that the Chinese types often wait a very long time before complaining about anyone in any position of any authority screwing them over. We humans complain right away. The powers that be may never support any change that we can believe in, but we certainly can complain.

About a week ago I noticed a notice announcing that the water would be off on Sunday from 8am to 6pm. Why they always do it on Sundays is beyond me. You would think that they would turn off the water during the week when most people are at work rather than on the one day when most people are most likely to be home. Such is Chinese logic.

As I always do, I prepared for the big day by filling a few buckets with water. This is mostly unnecessary since I can always use bottled water to clean, wash and brush that which needs to be cleaned, washed and brushed during the affected time. Bottled water cannot, however, flush the toilet. Buckets can. The streets of this city already smell bad enough. I can do without my home smelling like everywhere else.

But a funny thing happened at 8am, as far as I know. I was asleep. The water remained on while the electricity turned off. This was fairly obvious to me as the air conditioning was off when I awoke.

One of the most annoying idiosyncrasies of living in this building is that the cheap, lazy bastards who own it turn off the air conditioning every winter. The entire building is equipped with central air and not those individual units that dangle out the window. This is convenient most of the time, but terribly inconvenient when they render the air conditioning useless. This may be November for all I know, but I still require air conditioning during sleepy time. Our humidity stays on from late January to early January. It is not especially hot, and I rarely use air conditioning during the day, but I want it on when I am asleep. When I found it off, I thought that they had turned if off for the year. November is far too soon to play that game. They usually do not bother to turn it back on until March. Four months without air conditioning would be entirely unacceptable. The time that it is off is based on when the cheap, lazy owners of the building, and not the residents, think that it is not hot enough for air conditioning. Why it is not simply left on and up to the residents to decide when they are hot is more of that Chinese logic that escapes me. It would make sense to me if the cheap, lazy owners could save money by turning it off, but we all pay for our own electricity.

Every once in a while, about three or four times each year, the corrupt, extortionist puppet masters who decide what everyone is to do, say and think decide that certain parts of the city can do without electricity for the day. I have no idea what the excuse is. Entire blocks are shut down for the day for reasons unknown to those of us who are not important enough to need to know such things. Again, it is always done on Sundays. Since most people are at work on weekdays from 8am to 6pm they probably use very little water. But electricity is something we all use whether we are at home or not. I had thought about buying ice cream the last time I went grocerying, but fortunately, did not.

Not long after waking up I realized that it was the electricity that was off and not the water. Although without electricity there was no hot water. The water is heated by a gas tank which is activated by an electric motor. The stove is also gas, but requires electricity to switch on. The toaster oven and rice cooker are purely electric. This makes cooking anything fairly difficult.

My computer can run for about two hours on the battery, but connecting to the internet requires electricity. On one such day when the electricity was off and the Wife could not watch her local whacky game shows on the color television set, she suggested that we watch a digital video disc, or what the kids call a DVD, together. I let her figure out why that was never going to work. It is nothing to do with stupidity. She is far from stupid. It is simply a case of Chinese logic. If the peasants have no bread, let them eat toast.

I had prepared for the loss of water with buckets, but could not prepare for the loss of electricity. There is little one can do short of eating all the ice cream before it melts. As there was no ice cream in the apartment this was not an issue.

The reason I thought that we would lose water was the notice in the elevator. It said that the water would be off on year 100, month 11, day 27 from hour 8 to hour 18. It even pointed out that 8 to 18 is ten hours. Proof that these people are good at math. In human terms this translates to 8am to 6pm on Sunday 27 November. There is always the possibility that I misread the notice, but I know the difference between 水 and 電. Knowing what I know about the cheap, lazy bastards in charge of this place and the culture’s complete lack of pride in their work or any semblance of efficiency and honesty, I would say that it is more likely they who were mistaken. Their Chinese is better than mine, but when they fuck up they could not care less. If I printed a notice with such a mistake I would correct it and print a new one. They would simply ignore it, if they even noticed, and feel that they have done their job. 没事.

Typical Chinese Drivers

I have said it before and I will probably say it again and again until I am killed by some functionally retarded drunkard; Chinese drivers are assholes.

The one about my student in an "accident".
The one about taking the joke of a driving test.
The other one about taking the joke of a driving test.
The one about getting hit by a Chinese driver.
The other one about getting hit by a Chinese driver.
The one about lazy Chinese police.

If you live anywhere in the Chinese-speaking world you have likely heard about Yueyue, a two-year-old girl who was hit by two different cars and left for dead on the streets of 佛山市 in central 广东. While her mother was shopping, the national pastime in China, she wandered about aimlessly in the street. This is not at all unusual. I regularly see unattended children of all ages blocking traffic. The more I think about it the more I have to correct an earlier statement. Blocking traffic is the national pastime in China.

While Yueyue was amusing herself with the aforementioned wandering about, a van hit her in broad daylight. It was 5:30pm but there was still more than ample light and this particular part of the street was under an awning of sorts with lights. Almost like Freemont Street in Las Vegas, but a thousand times shittier. Think of it as a covered, and lit, pedestrian mall with cars driving through. The unusual part is that it is covered, not that cars drive through.

The first driver claims that he never saw her. That is probably true. Chinese drivers rarely see the people and things they slam into. But the driver stopped after hitting the child, paused briefly and then continued driving over the rest of her. He knew he hit something. He simply did not care what it was.

What comes next is what seems to shock most people. Running over a child when there are no visible obstructions is apparently not all that shocking to the Chinese. After Yueyue is run over, several people walk by as though a dying child bleeding in the street is a common occurence. And it probably is. I have seen the way these people drive. I have read several reports that say that an average of 300,000 people are killed in traffic “accidents” every year in China. I have to assume that more than a few of those people are children.

After the two-year-old is run down and after several people walk by without giving two shits, a small truck runs over her dying body as if she was just another garbage bag in the road. In all fairness to these assholes, one cannot drive more than five minutes without encountering a garbage bag in the road. I have hit one or two myself. But in all fairness to me, I actually stopped. The second driver, being as blind, suicidal and/or functionally retarded as most Chinese drivers, may very well have assumed that the crunching body under his tires was indeed someone’s discarded goat heads. But the people who walked by could clearly see that this particular garbage bag was actually a small child bleeding to death.

Eighteen people, and I use that word loosely, walked, bicycled or scootered by the dying child and did not do a single thing to help in any way whatsoever. One scooter monkey stopped and looked back, but quickly drove away. I guess it was not his child, so why give a shit. Several people looked at her dying body and went about their business. One jackass was walking directly toward her and had to drastically alter his trajectory to avoid stepping in her pool of blood. As soon as the annoying little obstacle was cleared, he turned back onto his original path.

These people clearly saw her. It was not dark. It was not raining. The street was well-lit. Chinese people are generally oblivious to anyone and anything around them, but to not see a small child lying in a pool of blood literally in the middle of the street is an extreme level of oblivious far and away from the common knocking down old ladies to be the first in line. And by line I mean mass of people crowding together and all screaming at the clerk at once.

Eventually an old lady collecting garbage from the street dragged Yueyue away and prevented a third truck from running over her. I have often said that these old people who rummage through the garbage looking for recyclable material provide a valuable service. Without them the street garbage would simply pile endlessly higher. Millions of tons of trash that could be recycled would otherwise fill more holes in the ground. They also seem to be the only Chinese people willing to keep small children from being pounded into roadkill.

Yueyue is currently listed as anything from critical to brain dead. Different news agencies disagree.

About half of my drive home every night is on a street with no street lights and little to no houses or shops. The only light in front of me is from my own headlights, the headlights of the cars that almost hit me in their endless quest to always be first all the time regardless of how much slower they are going (of the few cars that bother to use headlights), the headlights of the cars driving on the wrong side of the road and coming directly toward me (of the few cars that bother to use headlights), and the occasional full moon. Weather permitting. More often than not there is no visible moonlight.

But I can see every dog that runs in front of me, every child wearing dark clothes and riding a dark bicycle, every scooter driving perpendicular to the road, and every single one of the 68,000 potholes in the road. It seems that the only things I can never see in time are the black garbage bags (I can spot the pink ones) and the orange traffic cones that have turned black with dirt and apathy. I would see a bleeding two-year-old. And if I could see her while dodging every car, van, giant truck carrying a precariously stacked load, blue truck, taxi, bus, scooter, bicycle, ox cart, tractor, those weird battle bot trucks that look like something out of a low-budget straight to Beta movie about an oppressively dystopian future society, then someone walking by her on the street who cannot see her has no business walking without a white cane.

Unfortunately, the only reason people are talking about this particular two-year-old victim of a horribly selfish culture is because it was all captured by a surveillance camera. Ordinarily, when the Chinese run over the Chinese they simply drive away. If they stop for some strange reason or if, even stranger, the police who make Clancy Wiggum look like Tony Baretta bother to get off their corrupt, lazy asses and do their job that month and find the driver, they have to pay the medical expenses for the person they almost killed. There are also a wide variety of fines available, based on the victim’s gender, age, occupation and importance. There is a flowchart that makes determining the fine pretty simple. If the person who was hit dies, the driver does not have to pay the medical bill.

In Yueyue’s case, every second was captured on tape. This has brought cries of moral outrage, nationwide soul-searching, actual arrests for horrible driving, endless comments on websites, and what I am typing right now. What bothers me the most is that only now are people talking about this. Actually what bothers me the most is that when I watched the video of this two-year-old being run over by two vehicles, I was not horrified, shocked, disturbed, angry, in disbelief, aghast or agog. I simply nodded my head to myself and said, to myself, “Yeah. That’s how they drive.”

I find it horribly hypocritical of the Chinese to feign outrage over something that they never gave a flying fuck about before. Chinese drivers have been driving like Helen Keller on meth since Henry Ford invented slave labor. It never bothered them until people in other countries could see on Youtube how horribly selfish the Chinese are. Most Chinese are apathetically unaware that any of their actions will ever have consequences. If something bad happens, it is not because of the horribly selfish thing they did. It was simply an unlucky day.

Soul-searching is a moot point in a nation that has no soul. I do not mean this in a religious way. Baby Jesus and I are not exactly on each other’s Twitter rolodex. They probably call it something hipper than a rolodex, but that is clearly not the most relevant misuse of pop culture here today. The Chinese invented a few good things in the past, and they were probably a decent people once, but from what I have seen in the present they are soulless automatons who desire nothing more than money, terrible television programs and have a violently strong urge to be in the exact space that I am taking at any given moment.

Arresting people only for crimes committed in front of surveillance cameras seems like a bad idea to me, but since there will one day be at least one camera pointed at each and every person at all times, it will eventually work itself out. Arresting people for lawless driving in a country where any and all laws pertaining to driving are constantly ignored probably only confuses those arrested. How can it be bad today to do what has always been socially acceptable. When you have watched the police sit idly by while people do the most batshit stupid things humanly possible, there is no reason to assume that the police will ever do their jobs.

The two drivers who ran over Yueyue have been arrested. They probably have no idea why. Surely, having an unlucky day cannot be illegal. Some of the passersby have publicly said that they never saw her. The surveillance footage clearly shows them looking right at her. But letting a small child die in the street is not illegal.

The comments on the information superhighway are mostly hilarious. Many are in Chinese, and illiterate Chinese is so much funnier than illiterate English. English comments by Chinese speakers can be amusing at times, but after seeing so much Chinglish, if you will, over the course of so many years, it loses much of its novelty.

It has been said that we, the rest of the world, cannot judge the entire Chinese culture on a single isolated incident. I would ordinarily agree. In fact, if this were the only time that Chinese drivers have driven like functionally retarded drunkards then I would say that, overall, they are doing pretty well. But I judge the entire Chinese culture on innumerable incidents. Many I have witnessed. More than a few I was lucky enough to experience firsthand. Some I recorded on the camera in my car.

When you buy a car here, some of the standard options include air conditioning (a requirement), a CD player (ours is a piece of shit), and a camera that records everything in front of the car while driving. This feature is fairly common because so many people run into so many people that one cannot count on any police officers at the scene to do, frankly, anything. What people are most concerned with in any collision is fault. Since it is always the other person’s fault, a camera on your dashboard takes away a lot of the fines issued by government offices that base their decisions on gender, age, occupation and importance.

When we first got our camera I thought it might be amusing to show my loyal reader some of the batshit stupid things I see every day. I have talked about horribly selfish Chinese drivers once or twice. I thought it might be nice to show them. But the problem is that I, and the camera, see batshit stupid things every day. The amount of information is simply overwhelming. If I went through everything every day I could post each day’s highlights here, but it should be obvious to anyone paying any attention that this website is not something I consider on a daily basis. And the camera automatically divides everything into two-minute files. Each file is about 80mb. That is simply too much to upload. And the pictures look like they were taken from a cheap Chinese car camera.

Not too long ago our cheap Chinese car camera recorded a scooter monkey taking a dive while driving over 80km/h. This is only 30% above the speed limit. In other words, average. He was in front of me and there was no one between us, so I got a clear shot. I ran over his helmet. His head was not in it. Fortunately for both of us, these helmets are cheap Chinese pieces of crap.

After turning his helmet into tiny bits of trash that will be in the road for weeks to come, I stopped. I am such a foreigner. The cars around us used the fallen scooter and my stopping as an opening to speed their way in front of everyone else. That is the most important thing. It still intrigues me how much everyone always wants to be first. Including and especially those going the slowest. At the very least four other drivers and maybe a dozen scooter monkeys saw this guy go down. I was the only person who stopped.

Here is the best part. This would be the punch line if any of this were a joke. I stopped after I ran over a cheap scooter helmet in poor visibility in the driving rain where there was no camera but my own. At least twenty people passed or ran over the two-year-old girl in the infamous footage that clearly shows good visibility, no rain and plenty of light where the presence of a surveillance camera should be common knowledge.

I am not the nicest person in the world. I do not generally like to be around most people. If I were Henry Bemis it would not be tragically ironic since I do not wear glasses. But even I showed more compassion for some dipshit scooter monkey, exactly the kind of horribly inept driver that I regularly deride, than any of these Chinese people showed for an innocent little girl.

While looking for footage with the least commentary I found a Chinese article about an American tourist in China who jumped into a lake to save a Chinese woman who was drowning. The article, written by a Chinese writer, said that “only a foreigner would dare such a rescue”.



This video is fairly graphic and ends with a typical
“how do you feel” interview with the parents.



This video is less graphic
but shows the same attitude.



This video is far less graphic and contains no death,
but it illustrates my point beautifully.



These are compilation videos of Chinese drivers
slamming into each other.

Top Ten Reasons Why I Am A Better Humanitarian Than You

清明節 fell on 5 April this year. Since that was a Tuesday, both it and Monday were public holidays. We get few holidays off where I work, but Tomb Sweeping Day is always one of them. Boss Lady II has recently deceased relatives whose tombs are not about to sweep themselves.

Tomb Sweeping Day is a day set aside for, not surprisingly, sweeping tombs. About a million years ago the rulers of China decided to create an opiate for the lazier amongst the masses to clean up their family grave sites. Since there is no way in hell people are going to do such a thing on anything resembling a frequent basis, one day each year was deemed good enough. Those who do not clean 祖父的 grave risk losing serious face. Since the Wife has no recently dead in her family, I have never had the opportunity to burn incense and light firecrackers at anyone’s grave to keep away the unlucky spirits. At least not legally.

Having an extra Monday and Tuesday off gave me five days in a row where I did not have to drive amongst suicidal assbags. But the Wife had a conference in 彰化 so a trip to somewhere interesting was out of the question. I could have gone with her to 彰化 but that is where her oldest sister lives, which means that she will always stay in the sister’s house rather than a hotel, which means that I would rather stay home. I have absolutely nothing against the sister, her husband or their loud, immune to impulse control children. But given a choice, I would prefer to sleep in my own bed or at least in a hotel bed where there are no screaming children within sight.

Five days at home mostly alone is far from the worst thing in the world. I was looking forward to playing music without anyone turning on the television and having five days without the phone ringing. For reasons I have yet to understand, the in-laws always call the Wife on the house phone, even though she has two or three cell phones. I would think that calling one of her cell phones is best since she has them with her at all times. The house phone is only effective when she is actually home. But I am not Chinese. And they always know not to call when she is out of town. This is not much of a mystery as she always lets everyone know where and when she is going. One of the best ways I can tell that she has come back, other than her physical presence and the higher noise levels, is that the house phone will begin ringing almost immediately and will not stop until every one of her sisters and brother has called. I understand the concept if the not the practice of a close family, but when one of them is only a few cities away for a day it is not like they just got back from a Peace Corps mission to Urucurituba.

When anyone wants to reach me they call my cell phone. That is the phone I answer. I do not give out the house phone number. I do not know the house phone number.

At the last minute the Wife decided not to go to the conference in 彰化. This is not so unusual. Most of her final decisions are made far after they should have been. The rest of the time is spent changing her mind so often that I completely ignore whatever decision she has made since I know it will only change. I have learned not to trust anything she says where it concerns actions or inaction that are not immediately happening. If she says she is going to sit down I will believe it when I see it.

Instead of five days of peace and quiet at home I was faced with five days with a restless wife who needs the living room television on regardless of what room she is in and who could not make up her mind if my calm depended on it. When I woke up that Saturday morning I decided that I should take a trip. She was free to come, but I knew that there was not enough time for her to change her mind a million times and that she is not too terribly keen on taking trips for which she did not have a week to pack. Unfortunately for me, last minute trips are rarely as cheap as I am. Fortunately for me, though not so much for the people of Japan, one of the greatest earthquakes ever known struck their tiny island and brought massive tsunami damage just three weeks earlier. This made travel to Japan far cheaper than usual. Though only a three hour flight, tickets to Tokyo are ordinarily more expensive than they need to be. I can fly to Indonesia for less, even though it is twice the distance, as the Boeing flies.

But I chose not to go. The Wife destroyed my plans, but a last minute trip to a land with little electricity and intermittent train service was not going to bring me a week of quiet. I was not so concerned with the radiation. I am already invisible when I drive around here, and most people are pretty easy to see through without x-ray vision.

Two months later was 龍船節. This fell on 6 June, giving us only Monday off. My school rarely takes Dragon Boat Day off, but we did this year.

Dragon Boat Day is an ancient Chinese festival of which no one knows the origins. There are a million stories that probably have nothing to do with anything, including the story of a poet who killed himself because the emperor did not pay enough attention to him. This poet is now a folk hero throughout the Chinese world, as suicide is a popular extracurricular activity to the Chinese. To honor his death, people race dragon boats on the nearest river or lake, eat rice (since eating rice is such a rare treat around here) and light firecrackers to keep away the unlucky spirits. Dragon boat races are about as exciting as one might imagine, if slow moving canoes on dirty water is your thing, and a fitting way to memorialize some attention whore who is to Chinese poetry what Louis B Mayer is to the studio system.

Faced with a three day weekend followed by one day of work and one day off, I decided to actually go somewhere this time. The Wife would have to take off more time than I, but that is always the case. It took about a minute to figure out that flying to Japan would be much cheaper than flying anywhere else. This is almost never the case. Tickets to Tokyo were even cheaper than Bangkok. I would almost always prefer going to Tokyo since Japan is a fairly large country with plenty more to see than Tokyo. Thailand is basically one large city, a few expensive resorts and lots of tiny dirt villages. I have nothing against tiny dirt villages, but I have already lived in one, so there is little novelty, and they are usually difficult to get to and not the best places to find public toilets. Thailand’s slow and dilapidated rail system does not help. Japan, on the other hand, has modern bullet trains that shoot past the tiny dirt villages and go straight to the other happening towns. But when faced with a very short trip I would rather simply stay in Tokyo or Bangkok and avoid long train rides altogether.

The Wife was originally going to go with me to Japan but changed her mind once or twice before I finally booked the trip. The plane tickets would have been cheaper earlier, but I had to wait for her to give her final answer. If this is the kind of thing that would bother you, do not marry my wife. It happens every single time.

About a week before the trip, I got a vague e-mail telling me that JAL had made changes and that I should probably call the American company from which I had bought the tickets. There was no useful information other than an American phone number. I only used an American company to avoid the endless bullshit of booking a trip with a Chinese company. The American company was always reliable and efficient, up to this point. Comparable Chinese companies are nothing close to reliable and always require lengthy and baffling phone conversations for days on end until the deed is done. All transactions with the American company were always online.

Until I had to call them.

As much as I hate calling Chinese businesses, I absolutely loathe calling American businesses. Chinese transactions are never quick or straightforward, but at least they answer the phone, and the person answering the phone is often the person you need to talk to. American corporations have no idea how to answer a phone call. After a machine told me how important my call was to them, what sounded like death metal played. I have known that I am too old and it is too loud for some time, but has heavy metal really become appropriate corporate elevator music? In another generation, old people will call in and hear, “Don’t you get it, bitch. No one can hear you. Now shut the fuck up and get what’s comin’ to you. You were supposed to love me. Now bleed, bitch, bleed.”

After a solid thirty minutes on hold, a person who may or may not have been speaking English answered the phone. I rarely speak to people in English whose accents do not make them difficult to understand, so what I thought was a woman speaking to me in Spanish that was unlike any Spanish I have ever heard left me not entirely plussed. When I asked her whether she was a person or a machine, I was met with silence. This often happens, and I should probably stop asking such questions, but I would rather confuse someone who is just biding their time until the sound of five than have a ten minute conversation with a recording.

As it happened, the woman was indeed a person and was speaking English, although I never really understood what she said. When I told her about the vague e-mail, she may have said that she was going to transfer me to some other department. The next thing I heard was Dan Fogelberg telling me how long fishes had lived in the ocean, ironically. While I appreciated the juxtaposition of gothic speed metal and adult contemporary soft rock, I did not so much enjoy waiting another twenty minutes on hold.

Eventually another woman, who sounded very much like the first woman, asked me the same question and I gave the same answer. The only difference was that while she was talking I could hear the laughter of her amigos and the radio on her desk more than I could hear her. I have no special objection to a slacker attitude in the dead end job workplace, but after almost an hour on hold while calling from the other side of the world to clear up some problem that I know nothing about, I would like at least some of the slacker’s attention. As has been mentioned previously, I am old. So I did what old people do and asked to speak to her supervisor. She tried to steer me in a different direction, and even turned off her radio. Or at least turned it down. But I was ready to end our relationship and used my authoritative voice, which is enough to get Chinese children to sit down and shut up, so it can certainly handle a corporate peon.

After the third holding pattern, this time with no music, a third woman who sounded very much like the first two answered. Though she sounded exactly the same, I could tell she was a different person. She did not seem like it was her first or last day on the job and I could hear no background noise. Anyone with an office rather than a partition should be able to answer my question. She also said her name was Miskpa or something sounding similar. The others did not. The e-mail situation confused her, as she probably had no magical powers that told her what every vague e-mail sent from her company was about, but after a few minutes fumbling with her computer she was able to tell me that JAL had made changes and that calling was the thing to do. This brought me exactly to where I was before making this expensive, tedious and rather loud phone call. After more computing she told me that JAL moved the flights to different airports.

Miscpah told me that my return flight from Tokyo would leave HND instead of NRT, but rather than say HND and NRT she said Anita and Narita. The Spanish pronunciation of Narita is pretty much like the Japanese, and it is the primary international airport in Tokyo, causing no confusion. But I had no idea where Anita Airport was. I knew there was a Haneda Airport in Tokyo, but it is pronounced the way a British person would say Canada, and nothing like Anita. When we cleared that up she told me that the flight would leave at a different time. I was originally supposed to leave NRT at 1855. After she told me that the flight out of HND left thirty minutes sooner she paused, trying to figure out the new time, “So that would be…”. When I told her that it would be 1825 she said, baffled, “How did you know?” Since I was raised to only call people stupid dipshits behind their backs I refrained from responding and continued my quest for more information.

My return flight would now land at “Fungshan” airport. I know of no Fungshan Airport anywhere in the world, but there is a 鳳山, which can be spelled Fongshan or Fengshan, very near where I live. But it has no airport of any size. Flying there would be terribly convenient, were it physically possible. I asked Miss K’Pah the airport code, but she had no idea what I was talking about. This is not ideal from a customer service supervisor at a travel-related company. I asked her how it was spelled since Fungshan, Fongshan, Fengshan could be common place names for all I know. The problem with spelling Chinese is that there are usually a variety of options. 中, 證, 蒸, 珫 can all be spelled zhong, zheng, chung, chong, cheng, but all have very different meanings.

When the dust finally settled and I was optimistically cautious that I might receive some kind of e-mail with some kind of information sooner or later, I asked Pah if I could give her some advice. I then politely but sarcastically pointed out that while dead end shit jobs are not the most exciting in the world, it is generally helpful if people on the communication side of things are able to communicate with their customers. The only reason I was speaking to her and not the second person was because of all the music and laughing. Pah then gave me the requisite bullshit speech about her future talk with #2 and I asked her what time it was. My concern was that I was calling at 2am Washington time (where the company is located) and yet I had to wait on hold for an hour. If it is that busy in the middle of the night, what is it like in the middle of the day? Or, more likely, am I going to have to pay a large phone bill just because their customer service office likes to party? She reluctantly told me that they were in Manila.

This just pissed me off.

I have no problem with American companies outsourcing jobs to countries where people are willing to work for pennies and not demand unreasonable extravagances like restrooms and fewer beatings, but had I known that I would be calling Manila I could have called them directly and saved my own pennies. The American companies assume that since their customer service line is a toll free number that it is toll free to everyone. It is not. I did not call from within the United States and, as such, such is not the case. Manila is much closer than Washington, making an hour long phone call much cheaper.

Within a day I had received an e-mail confirming everything which I will have to pay a small fortune to have reluctantly changed. I also got an e-mail asking me if I would like to take a survey about my recent customer service experience. Boy, would I. I really went to town on that survey, so it is only a matter of time before they make vast improvements to their corporate ideology. Mankind can thank me later.

My least favorite aspect of traveling to Japan, and international travel in general, is how long everything takes. The flight to Tokyo is just over three hours. It took thirteen hours to get from my apartment to the hotel room. The taxi to the train station took about twenty minutes. Had I taken the airport I had originally wanted to take, that taxi ride would have also taken about twenty minutes. The train to the airport took two hours. I took an earlier train than I normally would have because the Wife went to a conference in the same general direction and we went together. The shuttle bus from the train station to the airport took thirty minutes.

I assumed that it would take at least half an hour to check in, as it normally does at this airport. But for reasons unknown to me there was absolutely no line and several clerks were just sitting there waiting. I have never experienced such a thing outside of tiny regional airports. At security, there was only one person ahead of me and no one behind me to get radiated, but I was still on the Chinese side of things, so a mother with three children felt it was vital that she ram her way in front of me. This is a daily event around here. No matter where you are, no matter what you are doing, these people will jump in front of you. I could have walked through in half a second, as I eventually did, and it would not have hurt her at all to wait her rightful turn, but it was the most important thing in the world that the mother not be behind anyone since she and her children had to fumble more than anyone really should with more bags than three people should have and give in to any and all distractions. The slower the Chinese move, the more they have to be first. I had a little over three hours before my flight started boarding, so I watched with insouciance, but she had no way of knowing this, nor did she care. The Chinese me-first selfishness in all things disturbs me in practice more often than not and in principle always.

The last time the Wife and I went to Tokyo we stayed at a nice little hotel in a quiet little neighborhood. There is little within walking distance, other than the Imperial Palace and National Diet, but there is a JR station across the street. The rest of the city is never very far away as long as you are near a station.

But Tokyo is a very large city with somewhere around 13 million people. The three subway systems are easy to navigate (although someone in charge of such things might want to consider that the English names Tokyo Metro and Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau are fairly similar), but they are always crowded. Since I was traveling alone on this trip and had no particular agenda, I wanted to spend as little time and money as possible packed like a lemming into a tiny metal box.

Within an easy walk of the Shibuya station is a wider variety of more food than I could ever have anything to do with and enough tourist crap to find the requisite postcards and something to bring home to placate the Wife. It is probably one of the better neighborhoods to stay in if you want to spend most of your time in a single neighborhood. Most gaijin will tell you that Roppongi or Akihabara are better, but I have little interest in the things in which most foreigners in Japan are interested.

What I liked about Shibuya the last time I was in Tokyo was the fact that the train station, Krispy Kreme, Shakey’s and the coldest Pepsi vending machine in the country were all within walking distance of each other. Cold drinks can be difficult to find in East Asia. The Asian definition of cold is not much lower than room temperature. I like drinks that are this side of forming ice crystals. While vending machines are everywhere in Tokyo, the only cold one that I know of is under that metallic elephant horn thing at the famous Shibuya crosswalk. Unfortunately, it no longer has Pepsi. Nor does any other vending machine, grocery store or convenience store that I saw. There is plenty of Pepsi NEX (the artificial sugar version) and Pepsi Dry (the sugar-free, sweetener-free version). I like sugar in my Pepsi. I do not like saccharin or aspartame or whatever they use now. I tried Pepsi Dry, which has neither sugar nor any artificial sweeteners. It is absolutely horrible. Imagine pouring a drink onto a public sidewalk and then coming back the next day to lick it up. That would probably taste better.

Fortunately, Krispy Kreme had cold Pepsi. Real Pepsi. I assumed before the trip that I would be going to Krispy Kreme every day because Krispy Kreme is miles ahead of any other donut and they are all over Tokyo. Mr Donut used to be everywhere, but I have not seen any since Krispy Kreme took over. The Japanese would not know a cold drink from an open sewer, but they know which way the donuts blow. The irony is that Mr Donut, an American company, used to have more stores in Japan than anywhere else while there are more Krispy Kremes in the United States than in every other nation combined. On this trip I went to Krispy Kreme every day for the cold Pepsi alone.

There are several Shakey’s throughout the city, though I never noticed any the first time I went to Tokyo. The Shinjuku Sanchome Shakey’s is just like any California Shakey’s, other than all the Japanese. The Shibuya Shakey’s is flawed. It still tastes like Shakey’s, which is really all that matters, but the shop itself does not look and sound like Shakey’s. The interior is more Japanese than olde tyme and the Dixieland jazz is replaced with Super Junior or any number of J-Pop and K-Pop bands that all sound like Super Junior. The managers and/or owners of both restaurants are Arab. This makes sense to me since my favorite pizza places in Brussels, Long Beach and Paris are run by Arabs. The Shinjuku Shakey’s Arab spoke terrible English, but he was friendly, gave us free drinks and made a very good pizza. The Shibuya Shakey’s Arab spoke better English, but he seemed annoyed that I wanted to order a pizza rather than get the Viking. When I tried to order a pizza with olives, he said they were out of olives. When I tried to order a pizza with mushrooms, he said they were out of mushrooms. I asked him what they had and he pointed to the wacky Japanese variations on the menu. When I tried to get just cheese, he said they were out of cheese, even though all the Japanese styles have cheese. And, really, how do you run a pizza place without cheese? I went in on a different day when he was not there and the Japanese clerk did not want to show me a menu. I knew what I wanted, but without the ability to order in Japanese, pictures on a menu are essential. It seemed like a battle just to get them to sell me their merchandise. But when I left they bowed and thanked me profusely, as is usually the case in most Japanese businesses.

If I were 16 years old I could eat Shakey’s and Krispy Kreme every day. But I am ever so slightly older than that and, while gaining weight is still not much of an issue, vomiting all night likely is. So the good people of Japan were kind enough to invent Japanese food, which is an excellent buffer in between pizzas. Shibuya also has Outback, TGI Friday’s, Sizzler, Denny’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Lotteria, Royal Host, MOS and Freshness Burger, but I am not about to eat any of that crap.

What is odd about Tokyo, to me at least, is that I have no idea where any good, world class grocery stores are. I know exactly where to find excellent markets in most of the large cities I have ever visited, but I can only find average stores in Tokyo. I had heard that there was a Dean & DeLuca inside the Shibuya station, which would have been terribly convenient, but it turned out to be only a tiny stall selling only a tiny fraction of what the SoHo store sells. Most Americans seek out tourist traps and whores when they travel. I look for grocery stores.

I was originally going to fly out of Narita, but JAL changed it to Haneda for some reason. I had always flown out of Narita. It is the primary international airport in Tokyo. I know how to get there from the city. I know how long it takes and how much money it costs. I know how much time I need to get from check-in through immigration to the gate. All I knew about Haneda was that it is south of the city.

But Haneda is so much more convenient. A trip to Narita can easily set you back an hour and ¥2000, depending on which mode of transportation you choose. It took me about twenty minuntes and ¥480 to get to Haneda. Where Narita is always crowded, Haneda was practically empty. I liked it for the simplicity and speed with which all transactions were accomplished. I would have arrived much later had I known. The Wife would hate it for the lack of shopping and a food court with a single small restaurant.

I sat next to an Australian on the flight home. Several things are unusual about this. Ordinarily I end up next to a tiny Chinese person who has to take up far more space than tiny people need, unless I fly with the Wife. She takes up plenty of space, but I would rather have her than some sweaty betel nut dude invading my personal buffer zone, such that it is. The longer or later in the day the flight is the more likely the tiny Chinese person next to me will sleep. This leads to loud snoring, lots of guttural noises and clearing of nasal passages. And the sleep of the Chinese always leads to the infamous dragon breath. The inhumane amount of space given to paying customers on commercial airlines only amplifies Asian strains of halitosis.

Sometimes the tiny Chinese dudes will try to strike up a conversation. This does not bother me in principle. I rarely have better things to do on a plane, unless I am sitting next to the Wife. Then I would rather talk to her. But the tiny Chinese dudes always want to speak English. Any English speaking foreigner who has spent more than an hour on this side of the world can tell you how excited Chinese/Korean/Thai/Malaysian/Japanese people get when they spy a free English lesson. The enthusiasm of people learning English seems endless, outside of the classroom. It is a completely different story with far more disturbing use of mise-en-scène in class.

The Australian next to me did not need any English lessons. It is probably her native language. But like most Australians, she does not seem to know how to pronounce vowels.

She was also female. The airlines are usually kind enough to keep me away from lingerie models and staid librarians with a smoldering sexuality lingering just below the surface. They almost always put me next to some tiny Chinese dude or big fat sweaty dude. This Australian was none of the above. She was an English teacher in Japan heading off on holiday. We had the usual comparative country conversation, but she spent most of her time playing with electronic toys that were to me what color televisions and video cassette recorders were to my grandmother. I realize that I have been out of touch with the modern world for a few years, but this woman had gadgets that James Bond would love, if only they had a killing capability and could be used once and never be seen again. I have yet to figure out how to access the voice mail on my cell phone.

This was also the first time I flew into 松山, which was an international airport until something bigger and better came along. But the real airport is not connected to any metro system and requires a shuttle bus to get to the nearest train station. It can easily take ninety minutes from plane to train. 松山 has an MRT station which connects directly with the high speed train station. This was all fairly important as my flight got in at 9pm and the last high speed train left at 10pm. There is no way I would have caught the last train had I landed at the real international airport. Even from the fake international airport it was unlikely. None of this would have been an issue had JAL honored my original itinerary, which included leaving from and returning to an airport much closer to home. I would never have purposely planned to give myself such little time.

There were two immigration lines at 松山; one for locals and one for foreigners. As always, the foreigner line was considerably longer than the citizen line. Had I waited in that line I never would have caught the last train. But the bureaucrats who are in charge of changing the rules every six months actually made a change for the better. Those of us with alien residency can now take the citizen line at immigration. This new rule was in place the last two times I entered the country, but no one said anything the first time and I was only told about it the second time. Having been here long enough to know that what I am told one week might no longer apply the next, I was not entirely confident about using the citizen line, but I had little to lose. The only risk was that I would get to the front of the line and be told to go back to the foreigner line. Then I would surely miss the last train. But I was never going to catch that train if I went into the foreigner line anyway. I was surprised to find that not only was the new rule still in force, but that the immigration clerk at this tiny airport knew about it and was completely unfazed to see someone who is clearly not at all Chinese in the Chinese line. I was out of that airport faster than a speeding scooter driving on the wrong side of the road at night without headlights.

The great thing about any large Chinese city is that you always know you are in a large Chinese city by the large volume of Chinese people who all have to be first all the time. I ordinarily let the babies have their bottles, but in this case I was in a bit of a hurry. Missing that last train would have meant spending the night in a large, dirty, crowded Chinese city that I do not particularly care for rather than sleeping in the large, dirty, crowded Chinese city that I call home. In a city like Amsterdam or Cape Town I would never consider acting like a selfish Chinese on the metro, but since I was surrounded by selfish Chinese I went ahead and did as the Romans do. It is almost impressive how quickly I got to the train from the airport. I can see why the Chinese are such selfish assholes in public. It really saves time. I might have pushed a few old ladies to the ground and stepped on a baby or two, but fuck them. I was first. Chinese style. Had I let all the Chinese people who tried to push their way in front of me push their way in front of me, it would have taken hours. By doing things the Chinese way I was able to get a ticket for the last train with enough time to call the Wife and tell her when to pick me up. And I did not lose face by being a selfish asshole because no act of selfishness causes one to lose face. Not cleaning a tomb is a far graver offense than acting like an assmonkey.

But I still wish these dipshits would drive like human beings. Driving your elbow into me to be first on the MRT is not nearly as bad as driving your car into me at 100km/h to be first at the red light that you are going to run anyway.

The changes also sped up the entire process. It took thirteen hours to get from my apartment to the hotel room in Tokyo but only eleven hours from the hotel to my apartment. Just to take a three hour flight. If we followed TSA rules it would take days.

I am still waiting to see what superpowers all that radiation gave me.

Life In The Fast Lane

The Wife was watching one of her Chinese talk shows on the low definition television set when a commercial advertisement came on. I do not ordinarily notice these things as the commercials sound just like the shows. Everything has people screaming at each other over loud background music with wacky sound effects on top. But instead of digital penny whistles and muted trombones I heard the Eagles singing a song. This caught my attention because it is not the sort of thing one hears on Chinese television. Ever. The commercial was advertising their concert in 香港 in three weeks. I pointed out to the Wife that they were the band that I was trying to watch in Bangkok. I wondered aloud if tickets were still available and if going to 香港 just to see a band might be a bit much. She casually mentioned that they would be in 台北. This piqued my interest. 台北 is cheaper and easier to get to than 香港.

My Internet told me nothing useful and the Wife’s Internet was doing things for the Wife. She is the type of person who will drop whatever she is doing to help her family and friends. If someone is in the hospital she will go. Right now. She even helped a friend get a pacemaker. No minor task, I say. But when it comes to doing things for me she would rather wait until later. And later usually means procrastinating until there is no point in doing it at all. Looking up concert information is not quite as important as heart surgery, but it would be nice to be somewhere on her list of priorities. I know I will never be above her mother, father, shopping, brother and sisters, eating, the rest of her family, complaining, friends, but I would like to at least be on the list.

Eventually I got her to do what I wanted. And she complained every step of the way. At first I simply wanted to know if they were indeed playing here. The Wife has a habit of stating assumptions as fact. Of course they would come here. Why not? Because very few “Western” bands come this side of 香港. Not many play 香港 either. Asia in general, outside of Japan, is mostly ignored by artists who are not from Asia. The Eagles are not the most popular band around here. They are not a big KTV band. Outside of “Desperado” I doubt any KTV machine anywhere in the country has any of their songs. I have never seen any of their CDs in any store. I doubt many of my students have Eagles posters next to 5566 and Hello Kitty. This is a place where Paul McCartney CDs are hard to find.

But according to the Wife’s Internet, Eagols were here with their #1 Super Hitsongs “Hotel of California” and “Peace and easy Feelings”. Good enough.

The concert was sold out, she said. So much for that. I assumed it would be since I was just hearing about it while they were advertising future shows. Then she told me it was on Saturday, the day of our wedding reception. I could not have gone anyway. But then she said that another day was added since the first day sold out almost immediately. When I asked her if that was also sold out she told me to wait. Every piece of information comes slowly and requires me to ask what I consider an obvious question. I then have to wait for the next tiny fragment of what I want to know before asking the next obvious question. This process used to bother me and I still wonder why she cannot anticipate the next question, but I am used to it by now.

The additional show was on Sunday. In three days. I assumed it had to be sold out but the Wife said it was not. So I asked her how much tickets might cost. There was more waiting. When she found the website that sold the tickets she showed me their seating map. It looked like any other stadium concert map. This was surprising for several reasons. After a difference of opinion on how to read the map, we decided to do it my way since that only required one step, while hers required loading a separate page to see the seat section and another page to see a price list. Changing pages is unpleasant with the Wife because she will not wait more than half a second for it to load. She either closes it and tries again or opens another window to do something else.

There were many seats available, though the most expensive floor seats were gone. This did not bother me since they were far too expensive and I do not particularly care for floor seats unless I am near the front. I like the tiered effect of the bleachers. Twenty rows of people bouncing up and down in front of you on the same level is never fun. Then it occurred to me that this place would be full of tiny Chinese people. Sitting on the floor would not be so bad.

After I asked the Wife how I might go about purchasing one of these available seats and waited for her to find the answer, she said that we could not buy tickets from the website that sold the tickets. Some people might find this peculiar, but I have lived here for some time. I would be surprised if the website that sold the tickets actually sold the tickets. But there was a ticket office where one could buy tickets by phone. So I asked her if we could do that, and waited for her to find the answer. We could not since we were doing this after they had closed and it was too late for them to mail tickets to us anyway. I asked the Wife why the tickets had to be mailed. In my opinion there should be a way to pick them up at the stadium. So I waited for her to find that information. There was, of course, no way to buy tickets and pick them up at the stadium. That is crazy talk. I then offered the opinion that it is rather stupid to have something on sale that no one can buy since it is too late to mail anything. The system assumes that people will buy tickets well in advance. The system also failed to realize that in this case the second show was added well after well in advance had come and gone.

The Wife then remembered that we live in a country where there is a 7-11 on every corner and every single one of them is open 24H. But I still had to ask her if it was possible to buy tickets there, even though she knew what we were looking for and she was the one who brought up 7-11. So she looked into that while I waited. She eventually decided that we could and that we should go there tomorrow. I suggested that tomorrow might not be ideal as we both had to work and that was the day she was going to do all of her last minute wedding reception tasks. She likes to do as much as she possibly can at the last minute so her day was fairly full. I thought we should go to the 7-11 downstairs right then and there. She did not want to because that would interfere with her policy of putting things off. She also completely lost interest when she realized that she would be unable to go to the concert. Since Sunday night is almost always followed by Monday morning, and since she had to work on Monday morning there was simply no way she could be in 台北 at midnight and at work seven hours later. I could do it since I always go to work much later in the day and I did not have to work at all on that particular Monday as it was a minor public holiday commemorating the massacre of thousands of innocent civilians at the hands of a previous regime’s government forces.

After I convinced her to go with me all the way downstairs even though it was not for her, we still had to go to the website that sold the tickets but did not since it had the seating map. I wanted to write down a few seat numbers from which to choose. The Wife assumed that 7-11 would have the same seating map. I relied on my wealth of experience in the inefficient ways of the Chinese to deduce that there would be no such map at 7-11. One of us was correct. I seem to be complaining about her a tad too much here so I will be discrete and not mention that she was completely in the wrong.

The easiest stage of this night’s ordeal was buying my ticket at 7-11. We simply told a small machine what we wanted and it printed out a receipt. The receipt was given to the sleeping clerk and he printed out what looked like it could be a concert ticket. One of the greatest aspects of living here is that one can do pretty much anything at any 7-11 at any hour. You can buy junk food, drinks, fresh eggs, thousand-year-old eggs, stale bread, phone cards, disposable underwear, concert tickets, pay utility bills, credit card bills (below a certain limit), parking fines, make copies, scan, fax and print photographs. But they do not have Pepsi.

I had no idea where the stadium was, but I was not about to ask the Wife to help me find it. She had just spent an hour doing something for me in which she gained nothing. We were at her limit. I assumed I could find it later. Just as I assumed that going to 台北 and getting a hotel for the night would be as easy as it always is. I was completely in the wrong.

Life with the Chinese
Surely makes you loose your mind
Life with the Chinese, 哎哟

The Wife spent the day after all of this excitement doing wedding reception business. After I got home from work I went to my Internet to find this mystery stadium. My Internet was uncooperative. The Chinese websites were all message boards with people talking about whether they would go or not. Mostly not. There was no useful information. But I did learn that one middle aged Chinese virgin would rather die a thousand deaths than go to an Eagles concert. Unfortunately this told me nothing about the venue. The English websites were mostly press releases from last year announcing their intended arrival. Everyone else knew in December that they were coming. I found out Thursday night.

The Eagles’ website said that they were playing at a stadium that the Google said did not exist. I decided that this was because the Eagles’ site wrote the Chinese name in English while the Google site writes Chinese names in Chinese. The Eagles’ site also said that they were playing in Japan on Tuesday, so it seemed unlikely that they might add another show Monday night.

Saturday was the big wedding reception. I knew that the best course of action was to not even mention this concert to the Wife at least until the end of the day. That would give me Saturday night and possibly Sunday morning to figure out where I was going. This did not cause any concern since 台北 is easy to get to and I have never had any problems finding a hotel once I was there.

After the Wife returned from dinner with her family after we spent the afternoon with her family, she agreed to help me find the stadium. This led to more Internet adventures where hers said one thing and mine another. I chose to believe hers since mine had already proven useless. But her Internet said that the stadium was not actually in 台北 even though everything we had seen so far, including 7-11, told us that it was. It was in a suburb about an hour outside of town. It was like taking the train to Penn Station only to find that you really want to be in Scarsdale. It is not impossible to get to, but the subway does not even come close.

Usually when I go to 台北 I take the high speed train into the city and take the metro wherever I need to go. I know of a few hotels where I can always find a room on demand. This was what I had planned to do when I realized that I would be going there to see the Eagles on sixty hours’ notice. But the Eagles chose to play in a city that was not on the high speed line. Nor was it on the low speed train line. It was not close to any of the stations and nowhere near the nearest MRT stop. The good news was that this town had a hospital owned by the Wife’s hospital. This meant that I could stay at their hospital hotel. The hospitals owned by the Wife’s hospital keep tiny hotel rooms for family of patients and select employees. But there was not enough advanced notice to book a room.

More good news was that the hospital has a free shuttle service from the nearest high speed train station to the hospital. This was very good since a taxi from the train station would be expensive and we could not find any other way to get there. But the shuttle does not run on Sundays (the day I would go there) and this particular Monday (the day I would return) since it was a minor public holiday commemorating the massacre of thousands of innocent civilians at the hands of a previous regime’s government forces. But we booked a hotel room across the street from the hospital anyway since it was relatively close to the stadium and employees of the Wife’s hospital get a discount. The hotel also had a free shuttle to the stadium.

The next day I took the train to 台北 and a very long taxi ride to 龜山. They would not give me the Wife’s discount at the hotel. Not because I am not the Wife but because they were giving me an “executive suite”. I did not need an executive suite. I was planning on leaving in 18 hours. I simply needed a rat-free place to sleep. I do not ask for much from Asian hotels, but I do like to sleep without rats crawling on my face. I am spoiled that way.

The executive suite was a larger than average room with a separate sitting area and a kitchenette, which in Asia means a sink near the tiny refrigerator. It was the kind of room that Chinese people look at and think is fancy. The rest of us see the 40-year-old décor and questionable stains. What made this room more executive than most was that it was in the corner and as such had far more windows than most Chinese hotel rooms. There were two.

On the long taxi ride to the hotel from the train station we passed the stadium. This showed me that it was too far to walk but a reasonable taxi distance should the shuttle bus have issues. The people at the Chinese message boards who went to the concert on Saturday all complained about traffic at the stadium. Driving by on the way to the hotel I could see why. There was construction on the only street that leads to the stadium, reducing five lanes to one in each direction. It looks like they are expanding something to go directly to the stadium. This will probably be very useful to people like myself in the future, but did me no good on this day.

At the hotel they told me that the shuttle bus operated on Saturday night only. The Wife had previously suggested that I leave early if I took a taxi since there would be heavy traffic. I was going to leave early anyway since the shuttle would face the same traffic, and probably more since taxis have a way of ignoring all rules of the road.

The taxi ride from the hotel to the stadium took about ten minutes and cost me 100元. This was very reasonable since the meter starts and 70元 for locals and 85元 for foreigners. There is always a price difference for foreigners. This would cause me problems later.

I’ve got a pissed off Chinese feeling
I know they will let me down
‘Cause I’m already stranded in some town

Inside the stadium I found that I had a very good seat. From the website that does not actually sell tickets I simply picked the closest available seat that was not in the highest price range. I had no idea it would be so close to the stage. I was within spitting distance of the people in the front row on the floor. Since there was absolutely no press and only two people filming the show for the large video screens, the people in the front row were within spitting distance of the people on stage. I was only two loogies of separation from Glenn Frey.

The stadium itself was very small. It looked like any other old stadium, but to scale. I have no idea what kind of sporting event could be played there. Perhaps there is some miniature Chinese version of basketball. Maybe it is a ping pong stadium. I could easily see why the first night sold out so quickly. Air Supply and Tony Orlando could sell out here. Those are probably bad examples since they are far more popular than the Eagles and they actually do sell out. It would not take much to sell out this stadium.

One of the first differences I noticed about seeing a concert amongst Chinese was that they are not the most rambunctious bunch. Where I come from the audience erupts in applause and whistles every time a roadie walks on the stage, no matter how far in advance of the opening bell. This audience did not react at all. I was a little concerned that the Eagles were about to face a silent crowd. But what everyone else in the audience probably knew was that the show did not begin until a Chinese voice from above announced that it was starting. The lights then went down and everyone cheered.

The band opened with an a cappella version of “Seven Bridges Road” immediately followed by “How Long” from their latest album. Glenn Frey then announced that they would be playing a lot of songs from Long Road Out Of Eden to which nobody cheered. Frey did most of the talking that night. In English. He did not even try to hit us up with some Chinese. That was Timothy B Schmit’s job. He was the designated China talker. He said “你好” a few times and “你好嗎” once. And it made him very popular. The audience went crazy when he sang each of his three songs. When he announced that they were about to do a song from Hell Freezes Over, the audience erupted in cheers and applause. Maybe that is the most popular Eagles album around here and Schmit is their favorite. But knowing the tiny amount I know about Chinese culture I think it was the fact that he spoke a tiny amount of Chinese.

Despite Schmit’s Chinese appeal, the second most popular song of the night was “Hotel California”. It started with a trumpet solo, but you could tell what song was coming. At least I could tell. The audience did not react until the guitars came in. There was absolutely no initial reaction to Don Henley’s “The Boys Of Summer”. That one has a distinctive drum/guitar opening but no one seemed to recognize it. Joe Walsh got the same treatment when they did James Gang songs “Walk Away” and “Funk #49”. I did not recognize “Walk Away” either until he started singing. They changed the music considerably. And all of the Long Road Out Of Eden songs were met with opening silence. Every time Frey announced the titles of each new song, he reminded us that the album is currently available for purchase. His whoring was all the more amusing since that CD is not actually available for purchase at our local retailers. The only solo song anyone seemed to recognize was “Life’s Been Good” and just before singing it, Walsh told us a little story and got the crowd worked up. They might have been excited by his antics more than the song. Walsh is supposedly sober these days, but he seemed just as off as ever. In between trying to sell the new album and telling stories that most of the audience likely did not understand, Glenn Frey invited people to sing along.

In the band’s home country, people clap, cheer, whistle and call out song titles and “Free Bird” in between numbers. Around here it gets very quiet in between songs. It was an unusual experience. I could hear people move equipment on stage. It was just like the time the Wife and I saw the New York Philharmonic, except that the seats were more uncomfortable and the giant speakers probably caused more hearing damage than I really need at this point in the game. This was a tiny stadium but they had speakers suited for an American arena, and from where I sat I could have easily heard them with the little speakers they have on stage. I believe it was Shakespeare who said, “If thine music is of an infortuitous mien, peradventure thou hast encroached upon the tusseled shores of the aged.” Verily.

But it was painfully quiet in between songs. So I did what I could to make the band feel welcome in this strange land. Don Henley and Joe Walsh had played solo songs, so during one of the quiet gaps I yelled out, “Smuggler’s Blues” to which Glenn Frey chuckled and responded with a simple, “Oh, shit.” I will be amused if they include that on the live CD. I will also be flabbergasted if there is a live CD of this show.

I have often said that “monkey see, monkey do” should be the national motto. In that spirit, other people started shouting song titles. I guess they needed an American to show them the way. But people kept shouting “Rocky Mountain Way” right after Walsh did a solo song, as if he would have two songs in a row. He did not have that plastic talk box guitar hose that he sticks in his mouth so there was no way they were playing that one, although in other countries it is part of the encore, according to their website.

After about 45 minutes, Henley announced that they were taking a short break with a joke that five people understood. As the band left the stage, the audience started shouting “encore”, which sounded very much like the way my students pronounce “uncle”. I could not understand why people were shouting “uncle”. It took me a while to realize that more than a few people in the audience thought that the show was over. But when the lights came up, the Chinese voice from above announced that it was only intermission. After what I went through to get the tickets and make my way to this little stadium I would have been ever so pissed if the concert only lasted 45 minutes.

One of the second differences I noticed about seeing a concert amongst Chinese was that I could not smell any marijuana anywhere. No one was passing joints around and no one raised lighters during slow songs. This is the first concert I have ever been to where I could not smell Mary Jane being passed around like the cheap little whore she is. Being in a country that executes drug traffickers might have had something to do with it. I guess Joe Walsh had to get sober before they could come here.

There were three large video screens; one behind the band and two off to the sides for the people in the cheap seats. I could not see the side screen from where I was sitting but half of what was shown was filmed by a woman working in front of me. Everything she shot was from the same angle as my line of sight. They also showed prerecorded images that were largely obvious; pictures of New York during “In The City”, clouds during “No More Cloudy Days” and the video for “The Boys Of Summer” during “The Boys Of Summer”. It got more interesting during “Life’s Been Good” when they showed footage of a much younger Joe Walsh acting like a much younger Joe Walsh and when things got political during “Dirty Laundry”. I have a feeling that Don Henley is not a big fan of Fox News. The message of “Long Road Out Of Eden” is anti-imperialism, specifically American imperialism, and the video footage reflected that. I could not help but wonder how many people in the audience understood what they were watching, or indeed what they were hearing. “The road to empire is a bloody stupid waste” does not translate well into a language and culture that proudly remembers being ruled by emperors for thousands of years. There were also pictures and themes from middle America during “Waiting In The Weeds” that would mean nothing to people who are unfamiliar with hayrides and county fairs. The Eagles are a very American band, and probably best appreciated by Americans. Watching these images and listening to these songs, even when they were shitcanning the American Dream, especially when they were shitcanning the American Dream, is the closest I have ever come to feeling homesick.

Another difference that I noticed about seeing a concert amongst Chinese was that there were no concession stands anywhere in the stadium. I was expecting to see lots of deep fried animal chunks on sticks, but there was absolutely nothing. This is a country where you can literally buy food on the street from some dude’s truck. Movie theaters and internet cafés have large menus. You can buy food on trains, buses and in temples. Food is available practically everywhere. Except at the Eagles concert. Fortunately, there were no filler songs. Stepping out for a jumbo beer was not an option. And this is a country where men love their beer. There were t-shirts available outside, but they looked like someone made them in their garage. And they probably did. I wanted to get something with some Chinese, but the three options only had the name of the band and some of the Asian cities. The European leg of the tour probably has much better t-shirts.

After a second half that was much longer than the first, the band left the stage to more cries of “uncle”. They played “Take It Easy” and then pretended to leave again as the lights slowly came up. Then the stadium dramatically went black and a single spotlight shone on Don Henley. When the piano started playing “Desperado”, the audience exploded. Maybe not literally, but that is how it sounded. The cheers put Timothy B Schmit’s Chinese applause to shame. For the only time that night I could hear people singing along.

“Desperado” could have easily been the only song most of the people in the audience knew. Like “I Will Always Love You”, it is one of those songs that has been recorded by every Chinese singer. And like “I Will Always Love You”, I have never spoken to anyone who seems to know that the big famous version that all the Chinese singers copied was not the original version. The Wife and others always thought the Carpenters’ “Desperado” was the original. The Chinese would probably prefer a Carpenters concert to the Eagles, were that possible. And when I played Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” to the Wife, she said she preferred the original, meaning Whitney Houston’s version. Dolly Parton will likely never come here. Whitney Houston probably lost her voice to all that blow she did when she got married. The Carpenters are mostly dead. The Eagles are the most this country will ever get.

It was a pretty good show. Not as good as Peter Gabriel’s “Growing Up” tour, but much better than Paul Simon’s “Born At The Right Time”. The band looked like they had seen better days, but they sounded good. Henley and Schmit can still hit the high notes and Walsh played some funky guitar riffs. Don Felder’s replacement, Steuart Smith, is probably a better guitarist than Felder. The backup band seemed to be enjoying themselves and no one phoned it in. I was a little concerned about that, considering the location. This is not exactly their target market. My main complaint of the show was that Henley spent very little time on the drums. He only played on a few of the biggest hits, and spent most of his time on guitar. With Walsh, Frey and Smith, they really have no need for another guitarist. Walsh and Smith had some shredding solos, and even Glenn Frey made a decent effort of it. Walsh and Frey did an amusing guitar duet on one song. Don Henley’s limited guitar skills were not required.

My plan had always been to take a taxi back to the hotel after the concert. Even before I knew that there was no shuttle bus on Sunday I assumed that it would not run so late at night. This is a place where very little public transportation operates after 10pm. With hundreds of people gathered in the same place all wanting to leave at the same time, there will always be taxis.

An inconvenient truth about Chinese taxi drivers is that they are some of the greediest racist bastards on the planet. In the middle of large cities where there are multiple transporation options there are fewer problems. In the middle of nowhere when the demand equals the supply, things get interesting. The taxi ride to the stadium cost me 100元. Several taxi drivers offered to take me back for 500元. That seemed a little high. I got some Chinese people to get a driver down to 200元. Prices are always much lower for locals. But as soon as I got in the taxi he told me 400元. This is the kind of thing that annoys tourists and turns people who normally remind you of Donna Reed into the typical angry American. Sometimes some people are not wild about getting screwed six ways to Pittsburgh. But I have lived here long enough to expect the worst from people who equate a white face with an unlimited expense account and a willingness to flush money down the toilet. I not only accept the racism and greed, I expect it.

The walk back to the hotel took me about an hour. That is probably not much to a healthy, physically fit person. But it was interesting in that I have likely never walked so far while surrounded by so little. Half of the time I was walking in the street with dirt fields on either side of me. Walking in the street is not generally a smart move when there are Chinese drivers about, but there were none here. This in itself is noteworthy. Even in the tiny farm village of 崙背 I could never get very far without encountering others. I did not walk in the fields because there was little moonlight and the millions of stray dogs that foul the countryside literally foul the countryside.

On a dark Chinese dirt road
Stale air in my face
Warm smell of open sewers
All over the place

When I finally wanted to go to sleep I pulled back the hotel bed covers to check for tiny insects and leftovers from the previous tenants, as I always do. This is a lesson I learned from years in Asia and finding dog shit in a hotel bed. The bed at this weekend’s hotel was feces free, but there was a large greasy stain on the bottom sheet. When I called the front desk, the woman who sounded half asleep seemed surprised that I wanted to change the sheets at such a late hour. I tried to explain that changing them the next day would do me no good. She wanted to take the Chinese path of least effort but I was insistent. By 4am I had given up on the quaint notion that I was going to get clean sheets and tore the bed apart and went to sleep on the cleanest sheet of the lot. Four hours later the phone rang. I ignored it, but it had already woken me. The very long taxi ride to the train station cost me 350元.

I cannot recommend a visit to 龜山, and bands should probably find a better place to perform, but Eagols put on a good rockershow.


© Someone