Do I Know You?

Chinese New Year is apparently so crazy that it took me just over two months to recover. Whoops?

Notes:

• I got promoted (kind of): I am now no longer an "academic specialist" but rather an "academic supervisor."
• My oldest friend- at least in my recollection- came to visit China while she was teaching in Thailand. During her stopover in Shanghai, I built upon the lessons of my last guest and tried doing almost no touristy stuff at all. Instead, we tried out random restaurants I had always wanted to try, walked around, and went to the brand new Barbie store. The Barbie store was kind of like a girly Niketown, maybe. It's six floors, slathered in pink, and has an overpriced bar up on the top floor. That being said, it's actually really well decorated.
• More rock concerts, including the group Battles all the way from NY and Hedgehog from Beijing. Battles was outrageous, while Hedgehog was spoiled by the crowd of obnoxious Chinese hipsters apparently unfamiliar with deodorant and toothpaste, not to mention standard rock concert protocol.
• Wow, Bush administration, you just make it easier and easier to paint you as awful villains, don't you? Really? You waterboarded the same two dudes over two-hundred fifty times? I don't imagine I'd take too kindly to being tortured, but I suspect somewhere around the fortieth time, I'd start to be a little nonplussed by the whole affair.
• Baseball season is here! Go Yankees! The managers of my company are all from Taiwan, where baseball is much more popular than it is here on the mainland where you're lucky if people even know what baseball is. One of the managers, being from Taiwan, is a big fan of Wang Chien-ming and the Yankees. I don't think I'd ever spoken to him in the nearly one year of time I've been around him (between my intership and my current tenure) until he approached me after Wang bombed again in his second start to say "Wang Chien-ming..." while shaking his head. I took the chance today to approach him and do the same today, following Wang's third blowout.
• The weather's getting nicer, so I'm taking more opportunities to wander around as a pedestrian instead of as a passenger. It makes the city a lot more interesting, and it's amazing how much closer everything is than you might think。
• I'll officially be returning to the States, although only for two weeks, in June. So, start making preparations now.

And, just like that, we're back in business.

Not So Sure About This Place

A new beauty salon opened up next to my apartment complex recently. I'm not sure they're going to stay in business, though, with the kind of... unconventional... services they advertise:

That was too good to not share.

Can Bud Selig Get Kicked Out of Office Already?

Bud Selig sucks. I mean, how can he always act so surprised about steroids in baseball when it is so obvious that he and the owners were complicit in all of this? If baseball really wants to move on past the steroid era, Selig has to go. And while we're at it, Don Fehr, the player's union chief, is a weasel, too.

These guys clearly don't really care about the integrity of the game, or the bad example they set by turning a blind eye to this cheating. Their reactions to the pressures from the media in dealing with this are blatantly just affectations, and are nothing short of nauseous. Today he announced that he was considering punishing A-Rod for his failed drug test six years ago. This is the wrong move for two reasons: 1) it was not against the rules to use PEDs when A-Rod failed the test; 2) there are 103 others who failed that year and evidently will not be punished.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the magnitude of the game's biggest star being nailed for this. He plays for my team, so it hits especially close to home. But it's incredibly unfair and unproductive to turn him into a scapegoat.

If they really want to send a message, they should release the other names and start making the rules prohibiting PEDs stricter. The costs of using PEDs has to outweigh the benefits of using them, and "the good of the game" is unfortunately not enough to stop players from juicing; the humiliation and official consequences of being caught need to be more intense to create such disincentive.

Baseball also has to expand the scope of these consequences. Players alone should not be punished. Coaches and owners should be punished, too. Even if they aren't aware that a player is cheating, if the consequences affect more than just the individual, he might think twice about acting inappropriately. Not only that, but baseball should make it a requirement that any player with paid endorsements must have in his contract a clause saying that being caught juicing will lead to an automatic termination of that contract. Again, it's all about taking away the incentive for these guys to cheat.

None of this will happen, though, as long as Bud Selig is in charge because he has no spine for it. He knows exactly how much he gained thanks to players using PEDs and is too reluctant to see it go. This is supposed to be a new era of change upon we as a nation have embarked. And as the American pastime (screw you, football), baseball needs a change in leadership.

Economics is the Dismal Science; Politics is Where it Gets Stimulating

Something I don't care for: frivolous government spending. Something I care for even less than that: politicians who act like it's a harbinger of the the apocalypse. Yes, folks, this is about the stimulus. And I'm not going to talk about the economics of it, really. It's borderline hackneyed to point out that tax cuts aren't particularly effective (and certainly not in this climate) or that the package probably isn't big enough. I'm fascinated by the political debate.

I just came across an awesome map of America over at msnbc.com. ("Interactive Timeline...") Take a look- I promise you'll feel blindsided, too. I usually read two newspapers a day, not to mention pickings from an assortment of other periodicals and blogs, and so it's not like I didn't know that unemployment was very high. But seeing it there colorcoded really hit me in the gut. Did you notice that the states with the senators complaining the loudest about proposed solutions seemed to have the lowest unemployment? (I'm looking at you, Nebraska) No wonder they seem so oblivious the urgency of this problem.

If people are complaining that Democrats are going falling back into their old ways instead of adopting a transformational approach in line with the style of the Obama movement, the same can be said for the cut and paste response from Republicans. Did you see the new RNC head on Fox saying that "government has never created a single job"? Never? How about my father's job? How about my great-grandfather's work a WPA mason during the Great Depression? The religious devotion to tax cuts among these people is truly ridiculous. Don't they realize they lost on that platform?

Sure, the stimulus bill probably does spend some money in the wrong places. But can we really say definitively what will and what won't help the economy? We call economics a science, but the practical application of it is nothing close. Moreover, most of this so-called wasteful spending doesn't seem very wasteful to me. In today's WaPo, columnist Steve Pearlstein notes:

[WSJ Columnist Daniel] Henninger weighed in with his own list of horror stories from the stimulus bill, including $325 million for trail repair and remediation of abandoned mines on federal lands, $6 billion to reduce the carbon footprint of federal buildings and -- get this! -- $462 million to equip, construct and repair labs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"What is most striking is how much 'stimulus' money is being spent on the government's own infrastructure," wrote Henninger. "This bill isn't economic stimulus. It's self-stimulus."

Actually, what's striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient. ("Wanted...")

I think he's right on target. Even if the spending itself doesn't save America (and I can assure you, it won't), what it will do is rebuild the fabric of our society. The New Deal didn't save us from the Depression, but it did give us modern American society- everything from bridges to libraries to parks to schools and beyond. It gave us the paradigm through which everything else has developed, and yes, that involves quite a few civil servants. So what?

If Republicans want something to worry about, I've got a suggestion. Did you know that construction is the least efficient industry in America? Okay, that one isn't surprising, either. Once again, though, the numbers behind it are pretty astonishing:

Every other industry has gotten more productive in the past half century – by about 22 percent on average. Construction has seen productivity fall by 25 percent. ("Trillion Dollar Barry...")

If we're really going to be spending so much money on infrastructure, then pols worried about spending should focus on making sure these projects finish on budget and finish on time. I guess they'd still be tilting at windmills, but since the election proved tax cuts are out of fashion, at least they'd be trying out something new.

Lunar New Year/Spring Festival

As Sam unwittingly reminded me, it's so easy to get wrapped up in the whole idea of "Chinese New Year," forgetting that other Asian cultures (particularly Vietnam) also celebrate the lunar new year, especially for those of us that live here in China. That being said, Chinese New Year is probably one of the coolest holidays, not to mention one of the most absurd.

Take, for example, this article from china.org.cn about the wreckage left on the streets in the aftermath of last night, Chuxi (pronounced Chew She), which is essentially New Year's Eve:

About 30,000 sanitation employees in China's finance hub Shanghai worked through the night to sweep up some 1,200 tons of fireworks debris, left behind by revelers on Sunday evening as they welcomed in the Lunar New Year. -Xinhua News, via china.org.cn

1200 tons of debris! I can personally vouch for the sheer amount of burnt red paper that left behind. If you can forgive the camera-phone quality, take a look at these two pictures I took myself:

One of those comes from the street by where we ate dinner, the other is the entrance to my apartment building. That's a lot of firecrackers. I shudder imagining the environmental cost this holiday pays in the name of scaring off dragons. Most of the fireworks get exploded on Chuxi, it seems to me, but the holiday lasts fifteen days. I guess even then, firecrackers tend to get exploded all the time, anyway, so whatever.

Everyone knows, or should know, that I absolutely love fireworks, so there's no reason why I shouldn't have been totally stoked for this. And I was, believe me. But there are only so many times a man can take almost getting killed because someone didn't think it was really necessary to warn me they had just lit firecrackers a bit down the sidewalk. Or so many times a person can tolerate that unexpected "Oh, no! Did they cross the Straits?" panic when woken at 8:30AM by explosions. As my friend Ivan puts it:

" I am in a country where the setting off of bigass fireworks in the street by private, unlicensed individuals (such as myself) is not only legal, but socially encouraged."

It's not that the fireworks are really a problem, and for the sake of getting a full night's sleep at night, I assume that people take precaution. However, there's something to be said about not exploding fireworks in the middle of a busy street, where they'll burst just meters (that's kind of like a yard for you all back in the States) from the glass windows of a tall building.

Over the coming weeks, we've got more holiday to celebrate. Friday is the Money God festival, Sunday is the birthday of the common man (when people traditionally count their age up another year), and the Sunday after that is the Lantern Festival. I'll be eating a lot of dumplings...

Oh, right...

So remember that bit about China maybe possibly sort of kind of beginning to feel the economic crisis thing? Yeah, that's definitely happening. Yours truly has been busy not posting blog entries over the past few weeks because I've been pulling a James Woods and trying to experience what it means firsthand to be affected by an economic crisis. Notes:

1) Having no money in your wallet or everyday-use bank account is bad.

2) Bok choy soup and rice is a surprisingly tasty meal, now that I've had enough practice making it this month.

3) Taking the bus is less of an adventure when you have to do it. On the other hand, it's now "effortlessly" green to do so.

4) Seriously, having no cash on hand is awful.

Just before embarking on this research, I was blessed enough to have a visitor here in Shanghai. This made for a really good opportunity to be a tourist. Too often, I think, we don't take the time to actually check out the stuff around us. Just thinking about the list of places I haven't been in New York is a headache, let alone the places I haven't been here in Shanghai. So, even though this last week might have been partial inspiration for my "research," it was probably worth it. Skyscrapers, gardens, temples, pedestrian streets, and a super cool "museum" definitely helped me close 2008 on a high note.

2009, however, has already been interesting. Work is picking up. Imminently, I'll be taking on a whole new batch of responsibilities as the company plans to do some "spring festival cleaning". (Chinese New Year is called the Spring Festival here. So, it's actually a pretty good joke.) Plus, we have our big new service launching, TalkOnline. I've also made my way onto Chinese TV already, and as soon as I get a copy of the video, you can be sure you'll find it here.

Also, according to China Daily, the government sponsored English language newspaper, "China is about to enter a peak time for mass incidents..." That means riots and protests. So, that's exciting, right?

Anyway, 2009 is here and I'm planning to make it a good one. Now, who's going to join me?

Dodgeball

Time to rub how great my job is in all of your faces again.

Yesterday, I got to teach a class on dodgeball. The timing of the event couldn't have been better, either, thanks to that Iraqi guy. President Bush's surprisingly good ducking skills were very helpful in illustrating proper technique:

White Goodman: "Hmm. Oh, I don't think I'm a lot dumber than you thought that I think that I thought I was once."

It was pretty weird how nonchalantly everyone's been taking this. Most of us in the office reacted to the video with a shrug, as though we were all thinking "I wouldn't mind doing that, myself." But I was more surprised that my students, having grown up in an authoritarian society, didn't really find it surprising to see objects being hurled at our President. I expected them to treat the situation with some severity- what if shoes had been thrown at Wen Jiabao or Hu Jintao?- but maybe Bush really is just that poorly regarded.

Anyway, the actual dodgeball was activity was great. If you're curious, I proved to everyone that sidearm totally dominates.