Now That's A Traffic Jam

You think your commute is bad? Have you heard about the traffic jam in China? Holy canoli, it's unreal.

Get this: There has been a traffic jam for the past ten days! DAYS! Not hours! DAYS! What the what? How is that possible?! According to The Wall Street Journal, it's pretty basic. Too many cars and not enough roads. Really? Yeah, we had no idea that was going to be the answer. Seriously, Wall Street Journal? That's all you've got?

That's all they've got. Apparently, it's a combination of roadwork and a bunch of heads up a bunch of arses. When you're selling at least 13 million vehicles per year and you only have the roadways to keep up with about a thousand vehicles per year, eventually, you're going to find yourself in this sort of a pickle.

The cars are moving somewhere around the rate of about a third of a mile per day. Umm, no. You can't tell me that people aren't just abandoning their cars and saying, "Screw this! I'm walking!" It would be tough not to. At that rate, you could be in your car and stuck in this crap a mile from your home and it would take you three days to get there?! Are you kidding me? Are we sure this is real?

It apparently is. And if you're wondering, as was I, how one makes it through a ten day (and counting) traffic jam, the kind folks over there at The Wall Street Journal have provided pictures for us to get some sort of an idea of what a hellhole that must be right now. It also allows us to be pretty freaking thankful that we're not there. Behold! A ten day traffic jam!

Oh, well. That seems to explain it. They appear to start off with no lanes at all and then expect folks to move in an orderly fashion into only three lanes. Yeah, that should work about as well as...well, as it's working. And they also seem to keep the cars and trucks separated until a specific point, at which time things don't seem to go as smoothly as one would wish. Behold!

That seems highly ineffective. That and the fact that they've been stuck in traffic for ten days! Yeah, that was my other clue. I suppose you might be wondering how these unfortunate drivers take care of various daily activities when they're stuck in their car on a Beijing road. (Don't get too excited. They explain everything except for the one that you know everyone wonders about first.) As far as eating, "Villagers along Highway 110 took advantage of the jam, selling drivers packets of instant noodles from roadside stands and, when traffic was at a standstill, moving between trucks and cars to hawk their wares." Behold!

Hmm. I suppose the sanitary conditions in which those noodles were prepared isn't exactly foremost on the minds of those folks, eh? But man, those "vendors" get into position quickly. And if this picture is any indication, they're not going to be caught empty handed. Look at this, will you? Behold!

They're certainly an entrepreneurial people, aren't they? Now, just because the drivers are willing to eat food that was prepared under questionable conditions at best, that doesn't mean that they're just going to sit around in their own filth! They're going to have to "bathe" somehow. Behold!

Oh. Well. That's...off-putting. Or...something. I'm just glad he kept his spandex undies on...or whatever those are. Once the bathing is finished, then the fun can really begin! And nothing says passing the time in a ten day traffic jam like eating some watermelon wedges and playing cards on top of a newspaper. Behold!

They don't seem to be too concerned with eating their melons. Why is that? Shouldn't they be more concerned about some sort of nutrition than they are about playing Go Fish? Well, regardless, they're going to get awfully tired after a few days of doing nothing in their cars. Don't expect them to sleep in there, either. Why do that when there's a perfectly good roadway to lie down on and a perfectly good truck to curl up under? Behold!

That guy can get as comfortable as he wants, as rumor has it that the traffic might not clear out until the middle of freaking September! Stay tuned!

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A Non-Blinking Militia

Happy Anniversary China! Communist Congratulations to you! Look, I know that China is a world power, not quite a superpower (though they do have boatloads of money and it's not long before they buy a "super" to go with their "power"), but after seeing pictures from their 60th Anniversary celebration, I'm not as concerned as I might have been before. (Actually, I'm only concerned about China's power when it comes up in the news. It's not one of the myriad of things that keeps me up at night.)

When I say that China is weird, I don't mean China-China. I mean the people that run China. They are weirdos. Regimented weirdos. It's the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution that uses the phrase "A well regulated Militia". Gathering from the pictures I saw of the celebration that China threw itself, t makes me wonder if China hasn't borrowed a little bit of it's regiment from that part of that Amendment. They're very regimented. And not just with their militia, either!

There were many aspects to this parade that China threw itself in celebration of it's 60th anniversary. According to the folks over there at The Guardian.co.uk, "Students flipped colored cards to create huge slogans such as "Long live China" and "Loyalty to the Party". We've all seen this attempted here in the US. It doesn't always go so well. People are lazy, they spilled beer on their card, they're in the bathroom when the thing is going on, so many reasons why every time this is tried in the US it looks like we're lending huge support and showing great appreciation to Swiss cheese. But look at how seamless the Chinese do this task. The top one was the first one they did and then they all instantaneously flipped their cards at the same time and the bottom photo appeared. It's amazing. They're almost seamless. Behold!

Ah, the wonders that people can accomplish if they're in fear for their life within the communist state in which they reside.

There were floats dedicated to China's space program. You may remember China's space program. It was the one that they said that they had when they showed a bunch of footage of the "astronauts" in space doing...something. It all would have been fine and good if they had just edited that footage a little bit so that we didn't see the air bubbles from the tank of water that they were in to simulate the weightlessness they were supposed to be experiencing. Yeah, they weren't so much up in outer space as much as they were in a tub. Unfortunate. In fact, I'd wager money that the float that they had in the parade was probably the same prop they used in their little outer space propaganda video scam. It looks just about as believable.

According to the narration on the video over there at The Guardian.co.uk, "Choreography was more precise. The soldiers had been trained to blink only once every forty seconds." Um, wait. What now? BLINK?! Blink once every forty seconds?! China, I'll get back to you in a minute, but for right now, um, Guardian.co.uk folks? Since when does blinking constitute an element of choreography?! OK, back to China. You freaks! Blinking?! What good does that do to not have your poor soldiers blink? You think that messes things up if they're a little more blinky than once every forty seconds? I haven't studied this at all EVER, but let me tell you that if you think that, you're wrong. You're wrong. You're just wrong. And you're also weird.

If I hadn't done a freeze frame from the video to bring you the photo below, I would have swore it was Photoshopped by taking just one soldier and then copying and pasting him all over until you had a shot that looked like the one below. But they really look like that. It's as if the folks at LEGO are in charge over there. The video narrator says that they march at 116 steps a minute. I don't know if that's a lot or a little, but I do know that someone had to count those out or come up with that number in order for it to be known to the narrator! China, listen, I know you mean well (actually, I kinda think you wouldn't mind invading our shores and taking over this lovely land, but I'm trying to be nice) but couldn't your time spent coordinating the number of steps and the amount of eye blinking of your armed forces be spent doing something a little more...oh...what's the word I want? Oh, that's right! I've got it! Shouldn't it be spent doing something a little more useful??

Well, here's the Grand Poobah of China on his way to inspect the troops. Maybe he found this to be more useful? He rides around in that car there and all of the military troops stand at attention (otherwise they'll be shot. I'm paraphrasing there, of course.). He yells things at the troops and they yell back. He shouts things like, "Hello comrades!" and "Comrades, you have worked hard!" Meanwhile, as the comrades were not quite at the time frame for blinking, 25,000 contact lenses popped out of their eyeballs as they shouted back, "Hello commander!" and "Serve the people!"

But here's what really put me a little bit more at ease as far as what China has going on over there military-wise. Here is their women's militia. Behold!

Oh, good Lord! They've finally found uses for all of the old stewardess uniforms from the US airlines of the 1960s and 1970s!! Now that's some recycling! Are you kidding me? THOSE are their female soldiers?! Do you know what American female soldiers look like? That's right. MALE American soldiers! And I'm not speaking strictly about stature or appearance or sexual preference. I'm speaking about the uniforms and the gear. I don't recall any female American soldiers wearing go-go boots.

Holy crap. Do these female Chinese soldiers practice on a pole when they're not marching in formation? Who is their commander in chief? Ken? Do they not have barracks and instead they retire to the Dream House? By the way, they don't always wear pink like the one photo up there. Sometimes they prefer blue. Whatever the color, the boot is a constant. Behold!

You realize that they're just a quirk or two away from wearing Wonder Woman outfits, don't you? They've already got the boots. All they need now is a sparkly, one piece swim suit and some metal bracelets and they're good to go. By the way, it's worth noting that this parade that they had to celebrate their lovely Communist state is two miles long. TWO miles!! Two miles of this stuff?? Wow. God bless America.

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And The Nobel Prize Doesn't Go To.....

In another not so startling indicator pointing toward humankind slowly but eventually facilitating its own slow and painful to watch demise, we have a suggestion for a Nobel prize nominee. Brace yourselves.

It's Twitter.

Oh, my God. What now? Twitter? The, um, text messaging service for the masses? THAT Twitter? Yeah, right. OK then. I think we're done here. Well, ALMOST done here. Mankind will cease to exist shortly after ideas which are inane begin popping up and regarded as genius. Yep, almost done here.

According to The Telegraph, among other sources, a one Mark Pfeifle (pronounce that however you'd like to) wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor. In said piece, he starts off with all of the unruly unrest in Iran (where the citizens (in a regime where the "winner" of Presidential "elections" is all but assured ahead of time and the candidates of said election are hand picked by a bunch of mullahs) were not feeling as if the election ballots were counted fairly) and how "When traditional journalists were forced to leave the country, Twitter became a window for the world...It became the assignment desk, the reporter, and the producer."

It's the "producer" part of that which I have the most problem with. No, wait. I think it's the "reporter" part I have a problem with. Hold on. Yes, yes, I believe I can take issue with that whole statement. See, I prefer my "reporters" to be "neutral". And by "neutral" I mean "neutral". I highly doubt that the "reporting" that was coming out of T.I.S. (Twitter Iranian Style) was all that "neutral" and unbiased. As for the producer, they make the decisions on how to present the programming, yes? I don't know that those not-so-neutral reporters, having just stepped out from behind their self-assignment desk, are going to produce a clear picture of what's going on. You have 140 characters. Not words. CHARACTERS. Use 'em for all they're worth, I figure. Reel 'em in with the most extreme 140 characters you can come up with. (Preferably in English because that Arabic writing stuff just looks like doodles people make when they're on the phone.)

He continues along those same lines with "Without Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy. They did so because they knew the world was watching." The world was watching. But we're America. We watch ANYTHING. We also have the attention span of a gnat. We were all into your plight for justice over there. Yep, right up until Michael Jackson died and then it was like, "Sorry Iranians! We've got a dead pop star to deal with. You're on your own!"

Here come the questionable and probably misleading statistics: "At the height of the protest activities, according to Mashable.com's Ben Parr, more than 221,000 Iran tweets were sent in one hour." Well, that doesn't say that there were 221,000+ tweets coming from INSIDE of Iran! It implies it, but that's not what it says. That just says "Iran tweets". "I wonder what it's like in Iran" would count as an "Iran tweet" would it not? I'm not saying that there weren't a lot of them. I AM saying that there were likely not 221,000 tweets coming from INSIDE of Iran during that magical hour cited there.

Staying with the category of "More Misleading Statistics": "In one day, 3,000 Iranian videos were uploaded on YouTube, and 2.2 million blog entries were posted." Blog entries in general about Iran? I can believe that. Do you know how many freaking "bloggers" there are out there? A gazillion. And bloggers will write about damned near anything that they want to. Why? Because they're bloggers! That's what they do! It doesn't mean they know what they're talking about, and it certainly doesn't mean that they even had a blog "entry" that was anything of substance. (I'm still looking for the number of blog entries on Michael Jackson death day. The only point in that being that it doesn't matter what the news story is, it's going to get blogged about and 2.2 million might seem like a lot at the time, but it also might seem like nothing when you compare it to a dead Jackson.)

He says that "Although we don't know how the uprising in Iran will end....Twitter and other social media outlets have become the soft weapons of democracy." I'd agree with the part about how we don't know how the Iran deal is going to turn out. Oh, wait a minute. Yes we do. I'm A Dinner Jacket will continue to be the President. Protesters will continue protesting until they realize that they're going to get their heads kicked in if they do. The uprising became a "downsinking" when the government cracked down and cracked some heads to quell the protests. It worked well. I don't advocate that approach, by the way. I'm just saying that's what happened, that was the outcome and I'm A Dinner Jacket is still in control We DO know how it will turn out. It's turned out already! It's over. Twitter isn't going to change the political system of Iran.Tweet that!

By the way, there are serious uprisings in China right now, with at least 140 people killed by the government and over a thousand arrested during some riots that have been building up for a while now. And just like the situation in Iran, the pictures and the videos and the Tweets are coming in on Twitter. So how come we aren't hearing about China the way that we were hearing about Iran? I just said that there were Tweets! Is is broken? No, of course not. But Twitter itself isn't responsible for anything is my point. People pay attention to what they want to pay attention to, regardless of if it's Tweeted (or is it twat? No, no! Definitely NOT "twat"!) or not. And right now, we're busy paying attention to a dead singer. You're on your own China. You too, Twitter. You're on your own and you're not getting a Nobel Prize. That's ridiculous. That'd be like someone suggesting Al Gore get a Nobel Prize. Ha! Like that would ever happen!

::: sigh ::::

Twitter is NOT worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Have those Google boys gotten a Nobel Prize for The Google? No? Not yet? Well, when that happens (which will likely be never. And it probably should be never.) let me know and then we'll talk about Twitter. Or tweet about it. Or something. Twitiots.

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Head On, Head Off

So many things popped into my head after reading the following over there from our friends at The Telegraph:

"A Chinese woman boiled a man's head in a soup because she believed it would cure her daughter's psychiatric problems, a local newspaper reported on Tuesday."

Uh-huh. Some woman is boiling a human head, but it's her daughter who has issues. OK, then. I believe the appropriate response would be WTF?!?!

Human head soup? That should never be on the menu! I don't care what your "psychiatric problems" are! I don't care if you're Jack the Ripper, you don't go around making head soup! EVER!! I need more information. (And I just want to say that no amount of information is going to explain this to the point where I go, "Ooohhhhh. OK! Why didn't you just say so in the first place?' No, THAT won't happen.)

It would seem that a one lunaticcrazy person resident of Sichuan, a one Lin Zongxiu, had "...heard in 2008 that soup made with a man’s head could help cure her daughter who had suffered from psychiatric problems for years." That from the Chengdu Commercial, a newspaper in....Chengdu? Sichuan? China? Can I just go with China? Look, if they needed something involving a human head, couldn't they just have gone with some of that Head-On stuff? Seems pretty simple. It's basically Chap Stick that you rub on your forehead. What say you guys try that first before you go off with your noggin chowder, eh? What's that? Too late? Ooh. Unfortunate.

Wait a minute. You heard where that a soup made with the head of a human would cure the crazies of your daughter? Where did you hear that? One of your Cannibalism Anonymous meetings? The ol' C.A.? Did you read it? I can't imagine you did, as I'm unaware of a publication such as Hannibal Lecter Weekly or something of that nature. But hey, what say you go with some Prozac or something before you go with the human head remedy? Just humor us. Try it!

So, back in December, the adventurous chef Lin and her crazy-enough-to-stick-around husband managed to find a guy who basically acted as their hit man. Too bad it was like a hit man in a really low budget movie. Nothing fancy to this caper here. The guy saw a 76-year old drunk dude wandering by one day and just knocked him unconscious. I'm guessing it's unlikely that he regained consciousness "before (they) behead(ed) him". Just one more reason why you should always call a cab when you're drunk and needing to get home.

After that it was just a matter of doing all of the cooking. The Telegraph reports that "The couple then gave their 25-year-old daughter soup made from the man’s head, and duck." Right. "And duck". Of course. Head soup flavored with duck. Because, you know, without the duck, well, that would just be gross. And incredibly weird. ::: blink ::: ::: blink :::

What in the hell is wrong with people?

But here's where the entire thing just completely falls off the rails. The hit man guy was sentenced to death on Monday by a local court. The article reads that he was sentenced to death "with a two-year reprieve." What that means is "...that his sentence will likely be commuted to life in prison as long as he commits no further offences in the next two years." Commits no further offenses? Isn't he going to be in jail? How does that work? Oh, wait. Never mind. This is China. A country where at least two of its residents feed human head soup to their daughter who they deem to be unstable. Yeah, it's probably not a good idea spending a whole lot of time trying to make sense out of this one.

For some really odd reason, they don't even say what the sentence was for the mother who "...was convicted of helping to destroy evidence that included the culprit’s bloody clothes and shoes." I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that some of the other evidence that she helped to destroy was the guys headless body?! Just a guess.

They also don't tell us how the soup turned out! Did the daughter eat it? Was she cured of her "psychiatric ailments"? What does human head soup look like? I mean, is it a broth? A chowder? I'm assuming that you need a really big pot for something like that. A cauldron would probably me most appropriate. And they wouldn't actually be able to put the entire head IN someone's bowl because, well, that would be silly. You'd have to have a really big bowl. This also doesn't sound like a recipe that you can try out at dinner parties. Everyone would be fighting over who got the head in their really big bowl, it would just cause problems. It's more like a dinner for one. One solitary person. Locked in a room for the rest of whatever so that they may never escape. You, lunatic, you.

By the way, any day now I fully expect to hear a press release from PETA complaining about the duck in the soup. Wait for it. Then meet me at the walled off compound.

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Geographical Goofs

The Great Wall of China is just a big ol' lie. Anything you've thought that you knew about the Great Wall of China is probably not true. That is, unless all you know is that it's a wall that is located within China. If that's all you've got, you're good. A little simple minded perhaps, but good. If you know more than how to give basic definitions of words, then you're in for a surprise, because that 'great wall' is really a 'great lie'.

Actually, the Great Wall of China really should be the basis for determining when it is appropriate to use the word 'great' when describing something other than that particular wall. The Great Wall of China is really, really long. It was built as a means of protection from attacks by those to the North. Considering it was built between 1368-ish and 1644-ish and runs about 5,500 miles, that's definitely the product of someone who had confidence in their ideas and the product of people who definitely did not have the Internet to screw around on all the live long day.

But something like that really is 'great' in every sense of the word. Now, compare the ways that you throw the word 'great' around every day and tell me if you think that you're really using it in the most appropriate sense. Your kid gets a 'B+' on his test and you say, "That's great!" Then you look at the Great Wall of China and you think, "That's great! What'd he do? Study for an hour and get a B+? That's not great! That's not great at all! Hey! Get back in here! That wasn't so great after all! Get out in the yard and build me a wall so I can't see that annoying neighbor anymore and then we'll talk a little greatness for ya there, all right?" It's either that or you start calling it "The Holy Effing Crap It's A Really Long Wall In China" and let all of the B+ slackers continue to refer to themselves as "great". Your choice.

And back to the Great Big Lie of a Wall. Haven't you always heard that it's the only man-made structure that's visible from space? It's not. Nope. It's a lie. I'm just not sure what the lie is about. Sometimes, apparently, you can't see the thing at all. In fact, in 2004 the first astronaut from China claimed he couldn't see the Great Wall at all! (Yes, 2004. It took them until 2004 to get one of their guys to sit on someone else's space craft and end up on the space station. How is that possible? All they had to do was sit there! If someone else is building your spacecraft, why would it take you until 2004 before you sat down and rode on it? It's not like it's hard to do. I'm sitting on a chair made by someone else right now! It was not a problem for me to do this! What's up with the Chinese that it took them forever to figure that out about their space travel? I don't know either, but I do know that I digress. Where was I?....Oh, yeah. All the lying. Carry on.)

After all of the non-seeing by the first Chinese astronaut, NASA piped up and said that there were a lot of different things that you could see from space and that the Great Wall was just one of them! You can see pyramids, you can see the Great Wall, you can see Houston. Wait. Houston? How'd that get in there? Oh, right. NASA. Wow. Talk about 'one of these things is not like the others.' So it wasn't the only thing you could see from space, but you could see it. (Thanks for nothing, China.) So that should clear up Lie Number One. The Great Wall? Only kind of great in that regard.

But if you're talking in regards to the length of the Great Wall, it's definitely great. 5,500 miles! Granted, it was constructed during two separate dynasties (and if you're thinking that the two dynasties are Dynasty and Falcon Crest, well, you'd be wrong) so it's not exactly the most linear structure that you'll ever see. It's not even the most unbroken structure that you'll ever see. I have the feeling that it's a wonder they got it to function as much like a wall as they did given the seemingly un-wall-like structure of the thing. Behold!

What the hell is that? It's a mess! That was supposed to keep others out of China? I don't think it did. It seems clear to me that whoever was in charge of this was simply trying to keep folks busy. There's no other reason for a "wall" to look like a Spirograph drawing gone horribly awry. And what's with that little part up there coming down from Russia and heading into Mongolia? It's not like you can't just walk your army right around the end of that sucker! What good could that possibly have done?

Perhaps the fact that the Great Wall of China is completely higgledy-piggledy is the reason that they just now, just the other day, found more wall! How do you lose a wall?! Especially a wall that is allegedly so freaking great?! I really don't get that. But here's the deal: It would seem that parts of the wall (and, judging from the graphic above, there are plenty of those) can't be seen any more. They're just not there. Apparently sandstorms cover up a bunch of the wall in places. Sandstorms? Wait a minute.

This is where none of this begins to make sense to me. You mean to say that this massive wall which goes in every direction known to mankind, all of a sudden just stops in various places and folks just assumed that was it? They were at the end? Nothing more to see? Went home? If the wall suddenly stopped, what were you thinking had happened? Why wouldn't you dig for the rest of it right then? It didn't get up and walk away on it's own (it's not that great!). Thus, that only leaves one other place for it to be, right? You'd think so! I'd think so! I guess those who are in charge of all of the length determining of the Great Wall did not think so and just got around to finding more!

And we're not talking a couple of feet or anything. We're talking hundreds of miles! How do you not know that there is a couple of hundred miles of something right in front of you? The wall just stopped and those folks just left it at that and called it a day, eh? So, so very odd. The folks over there at Reuters "...researchers spent over two years surveying the wall, using GPS positioning systems, infrared technology and other mapping techniques, to create the most comprehensive picture to date." Huh. "Shovel" seems to be noticeably absent from their list of wall finding devices there. And even though they just found more wall, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (Known in anagram world as "SACH") still says that "Around 2,000 km, almost one third, of the original wall has vanished altogether." Hey. Wait a minute.

How can they even say that? They just found hundreds of miles of wall! But yet they're certain that some parts are just gone for good?! What makes those parts that aren't there any different from the parts that they just found that you didn't think were there either? Because they both sound pretty similar to me. Both are in China. Both are parts of a wall. Both were missing. One still is. (And here is where the similarities pretty much stop. Once you lose one of the things you were comparing, it's really hard to continue that comparison sans one wall, you know?)

But they're still mapping over there and I'm guessing they're going to find more wall. According to a one Chen Jun, who is the president of the National Geomatics Center, "This is significant because the Great Wall is like a name card for the Chinese people. People who have never come to China all know the Great Wall." Yeah, well, we thought we knew the Great Wall. But now we find out it was all a lie! And that wasn't the only one either! It's all wrong! Lies, I tell you! Lies!

They'll find more next week. I'm sure of it. Oh, and by the way, higgeldy-piggeldy means 'a real mess'.

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