Enormous

I ate at Burger King today. It was the first time in about a year I'd had a Whopper. I hunted for a BK the last time I was in the States in May, but the three I knew about were either torn down or undergoing renovation.

While in there today, I saw this: the Enormous Omelet Sandwich. Here are its components:

--Sausage
--Three strips of bacon
--Two slices of cheese
--Three eggs
--Bun

Man, I'm glad I got the Jeep Liberty because I'll need it just to haul this puppy around.

Oxygen

I'd like to say I'm enjoying my time in Seattle, but truth be told I haven't even left the house. You see, every morning I wake up and look out the window, and it appears there is no air out there. In Beijing there was daily visual confirmation that the atmosphere hadn't boiled off or something. You could always see there was something out there. On some days the oxygen was so thick you could barely see a quarter mile. I can only assume that the pro-industry policies of George W. have caused the complete destruction of all airborne gasses necessary to sustain human life in North America.

Back

David the Coffee Elf is keen for me to post something about our trip back to the States from Beijing. He apparently wants to hear tales of woe and misery: lost passports, misplaced tickets, bawling babies, etc.

Well, I haven't written anything because nothing particularly exciting happened. You see, David, bad things don't happen to beautiful people. Boarding delays, canceled flights and rude hostesses are misfortunes that befall the comfortably average and indifferently normal traveler.

The worst I can say that happened was that the in-flight movies were all terrible. We flew Air Canada (hi Mayor!) and their entertainment guide had plenty of cool flicks, like "Batman Begins". But did we get any of those? No. We got "The Longest Yard" and "Kicking and Screaming", which I kinda wanted to see but was on at what was about 3:00 a.m. for us, so I slept through it.

The third feature was an absolute abortion of a Hong Kong troubled teen flick. I don't even remember what it was called because my cerebellum has just outright revolted at any order to dredge up memories of this steaming pile of celluloidal fecal matter.

Other than that, the trip was great.

Give Me Liberty...

I bought a car yesterday. A 2005 Jeep Liberty. Yup, first full day back in the United States and I buy an SUV. Had to prove I'm a real 'murkin.

The car is real purty. Dark blue with a grey cloth interior. It just has the bare-bones Sport package, but the layout is clean and simple. It has the 3.7-liter V6, which kicks out a decent 210 horses and a very respectable 235 ft-lbs of torque. Of course it's fully 4x4 capable.

It had 18,500 miles on it and I got it for almost a third less than what a new model would have cost.

Why the Liberty? It really hit a sweet spot in terms of price, functionality and appearance.

It's large enough to haul the family and our stuff down to San Francisco in a week, and will come in handy for all the hiking and camping we plan to do. Yet it's small enough that it won't be a problem to drive and park in the city.

Four-wheel-drive wasn't a must-have for me, but getting it is a real bonus and should help us plow right through snowy passes when we drive back to Seattle for Christmas.

The Liberty has earned good quality ratings, and the builds have steadily improved since the model was introduced in 2002.

Other vehicles I looked at included the Toyota RAV4, the Honda Element, the Toyota Matrix and the Pontiac Vibe. Those are all solid cars, but lacked the people and cargo hauling capacity of the Liberty, and were also often more expensive.

I've only driven it about 30 miles so far but it feels great. One of the common complaints seemed to be that the ride was bumpy and noisy. Maybe it is if you are comparing it to city-oriented people haulers like the Honda CRV, but I felt that the Liberty's cabin noise level and ride were well within my comfort zone. Of course, my other car is 36 years old and makes a Spitfire seem quiet in comparison.

Anyway, the V6 has a decent amount of pep that propels the Jeep to freeway speed in short order and makes passing a cinch. The automatic transmission is okay but has seemed confused on the couple of times that I've eased up suddenly on the gas after flooring it. The main shortcoming is that the engine is a thirsty litter bugger. User reviews I read consistently talked about getting 20 mpg in highway driving.

As mentioned above, the interior is bare-bones. The upholstery is done with a very durable-seeming material that I assume is oriented more towards stain resistance and easy cleaning than comfort. The seats are firm but comfortable, and three adults should fit nicely, if snugly, in the back bench. Some people say the Liberty is too small, but I thought it was surprisingly roomy. There is a lot of headroom. I'm 6' 2" and there is a good 2-3 inches over my head. It has 29 cubic feet of cargo space, about the same as its main competitors like the Ford Escape and Hyundai Santa Fe.

Overall I'm very happy with the car and can't wait to try it out on our upcoming road trip.

No More Horsing Around

Remember that incident a couple months ago where a dude died after getting reamed by a horse on a farm in Washington state? Of course you do.

We'll, a man may go to jail. For trespassing.

Apparently he and another man were in the habit of sneaking on to a neighbor's farm in the dead of night and videotaping each other engaged in diverse acts of buggery and bestiality.

I should insert some really droll observation here, but I'm heavily jetlagged from the flight back from China.

Plus, there's really not much more to add to this sordid little tale, right?

A Big Win

Now THAT was two of the most exciting minutes of football I've seen in years.

Even if the Seahawks had lost, it would have been a great game. Both defenses were all over the other team. Dallas held Shaun Alexander to just 61 yards and no TDs, about 90 and four less than he had last week. The 'Hawks gave up an early TD, but completely stuffed the Cowboys the rest of the game, even denying them a score late in the game from the 6-yard line.

Wins like this are enough to make even the most pessimistic Seahawk fan think this season could be for real.

Insane Coffee

If David's creative process were a household chore, it would be using a sponge to scrub the social mildew of random violence, wipe up the splatter marks on the toilet bowl of his self-respect and then soak in the putrid drain waters of the sexual pervsion that permeates his life.

David's writings are what you get when you wring out that nasty fucker.

Check out his latest (brilliant) drippings here.

Make sure you tell him Scott sent you.

Finally

Things are finally starting to look good for the Seattle Seahawks, who trounced Houston 42-10 on national television.

Yes, Houston hasn't won a game yet this year. But this is exactly the kind of game that Seattle has been known to blow in years past. Games that should be like walking on cake end up putting egg on faces.

Add this to last week's solid win over St. Louis -- whom Seattle hadn't beat at home in seven years -- and this season is suddenly starting to look interesting.

Unbelievably, Seattle has the No. 1 rated offense in the NFL right now. Where the hell did that come from?

Well, they generated a franchise-best 320 yards rushing in Sunday's gamed. Shaun Alexander had 141 yards and four TDs. Maurice Morris had 104 yards and a TD. That's the first dual 100-yard performance for the team in 17 years.

Hasselbeck was 14 of 20 for 168 yards and a TD. He did have one interception, but it was on the last play of the second half and it was only his third this year. Hasselbeck???

His QB rating this year is 96.5. He's completed 66 percent of his passes and picked up an average 7.7 yards per attempt.

To compare, Tom Brady's rating is 92, he's hit almost 63 percent of his passes for a skinch under 8 yards per attempt. Like Hasselbeck, he's had 8 TDs, but he's given up one more interception, for a grand total of four.

Of course with the Seahawks, this all means exactly nothing. A few years ago, with QB John Kitna, they started the season an amazing 6-2. If I remember right, Kitna had one game where his QB rating was something just outrageous, like 140.

Everyone was wondering if the team was for real.

It wasn't. The Seahawks went 2-6 in the second half of the season.

We'll find out more in a week, when we host the 4-2 Cowboys.

(Yes, I can finally say "we" again without that tone of expat desperation. I'll be watching the game in Seattle on a widescreen hi-def TV from the comfort of my Dad's reclining rocker.)

Busy

It has been a bad couple of weeks for blogging out of LMNOP's Asian headquarters.

Not only am I still struggling, after two weeks, to whup this bronchial infection, but it's crunch time as far as our move is concerned.

Today we filled out our household items insurance form, in which we had to itemize the majority of our belongings and attach a replacement value to each of them.

The biggest single item? The Oriental Wife's wardrobe, of course. Believe me when I say that we are not wealthy people, so how the hell can she have $11,000 worth of clothes?

Part of the answer is that the value of each item is listed as what it would cost to replace in the destination country.

The Oriental Wife has bought probably 75 percent of her clothes here in the Orient. That means pants for $5, a blouse for $2, a leather bag for $10. If the ship sinks to the bottom halfway across the Pacific, we'd have to spend $50, $75 and $100 to replace those things in the States.

The other big-ticket item turned out to be media of various kinds: more than 350 CDs, 350 books, 75 DVDs, and 35 Xbox games. If you do the math on that, it works out roughly to a squillion dollars, give or take a jillion. Seriously, more than a quarter of our household value comes from media.

I'm sure that says something about the modern condition, but I can't be bothered to think it through right now.

UPDATE: Against my better judgement, I share with you a mildly tweaked version of a phone text message I sent to my pal J-Dogg:

Oriental Wife's wardrobe: $11,000

Family CD collection: $7,000

Scott's Xbox collection: $1,750

Leaving a ruthless dictatorship: Priceless!

Book Review: Market Forces

I just finished the book Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan, who wrote the awesomely cool military/detective/sci-fi/thriller Altered Carbon. The novel has a hard core anti-capitalist, anti-globalization theme, but I freakin' loved it. Couldn't put it down.

Instapundit didn't like it, but c'mon, who are you gonna believe, me or that guy?

Here's my Amazon.com review:

Before Richard K. Morgan's provocative third novel even begins, he dedicates it to "all those, globally, whose lives have been wrecked or snuffed out by the Great Neoliberal Dream and Slash-and-Brun Globalization". He also makes sure the reader knows he drew inspiration from left-wing extremists like Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Michael Moore. The reader, upon encountering this, could be forgiven for slipping the book quietly back on the shelf with a slight shake of the head. But that would be a mistake.

Despite the ideological chest-thumping, "Market Forces" is not just a wisp of a story wrapped around a shrill anti-capitalist polemic. It's actually a rollicking good read that doesn't get swamped by the author's ideological crusade, except perhaps near the end. But more on that later.

The setting is deliciously twisted. Fifty years from now, the world is run by a handful of financial houses that deal in "conflict investment" -- giving financial assistance to tinpot dictators in exchange for a cut of the country's GDP if they stay in power. Executives vie for promotion or contract tenders by staging highway duels in armored cars. It's a bizzare mixture -- "Liar's Poker" meets "Mad Max" -- but Morgan deftly pulls it off.

Morgan's first novel proved that he is adept at drawing imperfect characters, and here he serves up a whole cast of scummy anti-heros and scummier villians. Chris Faulkner fought his way up from the slums and is a new hotshot executive. His wife, Carla, is a mechanic who keeps his sedan in prime dueling condition. Her father is an idealistic outcast whose socialist views are a constant source of tension in the family. Along the way, Chris falls in with a media vixen, a chummy but brutal partner, and a team of envious colleagues intent on seeing the newcomer go down in flames, quite literally if it should come to that.

The action ticks over nicely as Chris careens between stoking conflicts in Cambodia and Latin America, terrorizing street thugs with Mike, and grinding rival investors into scrap metal under the bumper of his armored Saab. All the while he is trying to rescue his foundering marriage and avoid the plasticene temptations of Liz, a powerful journalist tracking his career.

While Morgan's conclusions on the nature of the modern geo-political/economic system may be black and white, he lays it out for us through shades of gray. The rapacious corporations are clearly the bad guys, but characters like Mike are strangely charismatic, and it's easy to cheer the suits when they wield their power to wipe out white supremacists or permanently cripple an abusive husband for beating his wife. Likewise, those characters with the "right" socialist viewpoints are quick to espouse their ideals but are too weak or scared to act on them.

Morgan's contention that capitalism is inherently brutal and self-destructive only starts to become obvious in the last part of the book as Chris repeatedly snubs chances for redemption and mires himself deeper in the brutal corporate culture he once held at arm's length. But the book works despite this late-game heavy-handedness, and while I might have wished for a cheerier conclusion, I have to give credit to Morgan for pushing things to what he must see as their logical conclusion, insofar as that logic works in the fantasy version of capitalism and globalization he has constructed.

This *is* a sci-fi book, after all.

Canned Coffee

Some of you have, for reasons known only to you and God, been fans of a commenter on this blog named David.

Some of you might even recall that David is associated with Chin Music Press, an alliance of shady and suspicious characters whose aim is to undermine the dominant publishing paradigm, namely by printing books of suspiciously high quality and artistic design.

For a while, David ran a weekly canned coffee review column on the Chin Music Press Web site, providing Monday morning warriors with a bracing dose of perveted humor to kick off the week.

A few weeks ago, David mysteriously stopped his Canned Coffee Mondays. The CMP team locked down tighter than Langley, but still word leaked out that a new project was underway. My sources informed me that a whole new Web site dedicated to the art of canned coffee was underway. I was tempted to post about this earlier, but a midnight visit by three masked men wielding rusty cigar clippers convinced that silence is indeed golden, or at least still able to produce offspring.

But now the veil of secrecy has been swept aside. Canned Coffee is live and the world is a more interesting place because of it. Today's inaugural entry on Truman Capote is classic David.

Also be sure to check out the online store, which offers a high-quality PDF of a long booklet of David's insane scribblings and doodles. This intriguing document will surely get lots of press coverage during David's upcoming trial, so be sure to get your piece of history today. It's only $5, and would be a five bucks better spent than the time you got that Haitian hooker. Yeah, we all know how "she" turned out.

Anyway, David's worked long at hard at making this site a reality, and the dude has some mad writing skillz, even if his last name isn't Sedaris or Eggers. Check him out.

Infected!

Uh, sorry for the non-existent blogging the past few days. I came down with one of the nastiest colds I've had in a long time, and it has had me laid up for five straight days. I finally went to the doc's today and it turns out I have a bronchial infection. So I get 10 days of antibiotics, vitamin C tablets big enough to immunize an elephant, and cough syrup with enough potency to make Kitty Dukakis break out in a cold sweat.

Hopefully I'll be feeling better in a day or two, at which point normal blogging should resume.

Finally

Looks like I'll be able to live way out in the SF suburbs after all.

Holiday

I have most of this week off since China is celebrating a week-long holiday for its October 1 National Day. They have three "Golden Weeks" a year -- also for Lunar New Year and International Labor Day on May 1 -- and it's quite a nice deal to get that time off in addition to regular company holiday.

Anyway, what that also means is that I won't be able to read up on a good chunk of my regular blogroll this week. Basically, if you're on Blogspot, Typepad or LiveJournal, I can't see your site from my home Internet connection.

Yeah, I know you're probably all thinking "What's the point, then?". I sympathize with you, but I want you all to be strong and to think of the children.

360 Economics

Video game blog Kotaku has a post up called "Xbox 360 economics". Unfortunately, it contains very little actual economics.

Thank you China for slave-labor wages.

Ah, we're off to a great start. Last time I checked, actual slaves don't have wages. Whatever you think of China, its people are not actually slaves.

Workers in Southern China are making dollars a day to assemble 360's right as we speak. However, they won't be able to take out loans to buy the machines until 2006. As previously reported, America will get the console first, then Japan and finally China.

Yes, labor in China is cheap. Guess why? No, it's not because Flextronics is using political prisoners to snap together the 360. It's because China's workforce consists of about 800 million people. Instead of making dollars a day working in a clean, modern factory, many of them would be earning pennies a day on the family farm.

This also overlooks the rather important fact that a next-gen console is being launched in China at all. Pirated versions of Xbox games can be bought on the streets for about 1/50 their price in the U.S. A lot of Chinese justify piracy by telling me, "Oh, we're poor, we can't afford to pay high prices for the real thing." Most of the time this is bullshit.

China's emerging middle class has large TVs, DVD players, surround-sound stereos, computers and iPods. If a Chinese person can afford the $400 to buy the Xbox 360 hardware, they can afford to pay real money for legitimate software. Microsoft must have a good reason to think that they can beat not only the piracy problem but also the "Oh, we're so poor" mentality that is so prevalent here, in spite of growing evidence to the contrary.

Rather, America (the biggest economic superpower and where all the profits go) gets the console first. Japan (the second biggest economic superpower on the globe) gets it next. Finally, China (the country that makes the darn thing and has a potentially huge market) gets it last.

Wow, Kotaku has a real scoop here! Imagine that: When Microsoft, a company headquartered in the United States, sells an Xbox game, the profit from that game ends up in coffers back in the U.S.! Oh, but there's the little matter that Microsoft has lost $4 billion on the current Xbox. So much for profits.

But to think that Microsoft is launching the Xbox first in the United States because all Microsoft's profits eventually go back to the States gets it exactly wrong. The United States gets the 360 first because that's where most of Microsoft's profits come from. Looking at Microsoft's earnings report for the fourth quarter of its 2003 fiscal year, apparently the last report in which they broke out regional revenue figures, we can see that sales were $3 billion in the Americas and $1.7 billion in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Asia, including Japan, was just $835 million, and I would hazard a guess and say that revenue from China was way less than $100 million.

Microsoft isn't alone in shipping jobs to China in order to save costs. With all the money they've lost so far on the 'Box, it looks like they need to cut every corner they can. But, if yer gonna underpay and over charge the Chinese, at least give them the honor of being able to buy an Xbox 360 first. We can wait.

This guy seems to have forgotten that Microsoft doesn't actually employ anyone who makes the Xbox hardware. That job is handled by Flextronics, a contract manufacturer that has stepped up its presence in China over the past few years, just like every other industrial firm that wants to stay in business.

I'd also love to see where he figures that Flextronics is underpaying its workers in China. If that's the case, I wonder why the workers even stay there. After all, "underpaying" measures someone's salary against what their industry peers make. Given that China's economy has grown at more than 9 percent for the past two years, it's hard to imagine that a) these workers wouldn't realize a raw deal when they saw it and b) wouldn't be able to find work elsewhere for better wages.

The fact of the matter is that, if anything, Western companies tend to overpay local staff in China. For every sweatshop that is found (sweatshops that are usually run by contract factories run by Taiwanese, Hong Kong or South Korean managers), there are a score of clean, well-run, well-paying factories.

Oh, and since Microsoft hasn't announced pricing for China, how does the author figure that Chinese are being "over charged"? That's some amazing accounting skillz, there.

One final point: This author may feel obligated to wait for the 360 out of some twisted sense of gamer solidarity with his oppressed Chinese brothers, but not me.

I have supported the original Xbox since Day 1. I bought a $50 heavy duty voltage converter so I could play the thing in China. When my original machine fell victim to Beijing's thick dust, I bought a second one. I have about 40 games, all of which I bought legitimately because I believe in the right of the developers to profit from their products, and because in terms of hour of entertainment per dollar spent, games are still fantastic deal, even at $50 a pop.

I am the sweet spot of the 360 demographic. I will either pre-order or line up at midnight to get my 360 in November.

You can send your 360 to China, but I've earned mine.

Most Disgusting Thing Ever

Western fast-food chains have long tried to tap the Chinese market by introducing products that cater to local tastes.

Okay, let's not have any jokes about Dog McNuggets or Kentucky Fried Kitten.

Most of the stuff is fairly sensible: Green tea Frappuccino at Starbucks, KFC chicken wraps with Peking duck plum sauce, that sort of thing.

But this is too much: Eel pizza at Pizza Hut.

The top of the page reads: "Deep Sea Star Eel Pizza".

Under that, it says, "100, 200, 400 meters under the water.... Welcome to the deep site of the submerged reefs of the North Pacific! The rarely seen and hard-to-find 'Ginseng of the Sea', the star eel, is here. Deep sea flavor, a rare experience!"

Then there is a "New product introduction" that says: "A double layer of eel slices, covered with a specially made star eel sauce and sprinkled with sesame seeds. Add to that rich cheese, crab meat, onions and other ingredients. Full of nutrition with rich sea flavor!"

Mmmmm! Make mine an extra large!!!