Imagethief

Tag: Whatever

  • What’s on TV?

    Imagethief has a theory that at any given time, any given American cable TV system will be broadcasting an episode of “Seinfeld.” Admittedly, I tend to cruise the channels late, but that’s what I see.

    Recent travels have given me an opportunity to surf not only the channels on offer at my mom’s house in Palo Alto, but also those at my in-laws’ apartment in Singapore, and on my own system here in Beijing. (I’ve recently been watching more Chinese television, as my wife and I let the satellite package expire through a combination of disappointment with the offering and garden-variety laziness.) From what I can see, every culture has it’s “Seinfelds”, those shows or genres that are always on some channel somewhere, day or night. For what it’s worth, here’s what I observe:

    Seinfeld's Law: Shows being broadcast at any given moment.
    Seinfeld’s Law: Shows being broadcast at any given moment.

    Make of that what you will.

    I’ve also observed that the available amount of quality programming on offer does not increase in proportion to the number of available channels. There is, in fact, a sharply diminishing return. This appears to be some kind of power-law relationship, and whoever works out the actual math will, I am sure, earn themselves a Nobel Prize.

  • We’re back, plus the great Christmas pox of ’09

    On Sunday Imagethief arrived in Beijing from two well-earned holiday weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area. Flying with Zachary), now 22 months, is always an adventure. He’s a well traveled kid, but a well-traveled two year old is like a well-traveled troglodyte. Even at their best, social habits are wanting. I’m not especially superstitious, but I knew we were headed for trouble on the return flight when, at about the International Date Line, the woman seated across the aisle from me said, “He seems very well behaved.” Thus jinxed, the last three hours consisted of full-on, bawling meltdown as we became one of those families that other people on airplanes dream of pushing out an open door 35,000 feet above the trackless, ice-clad wastes of Siberia. During one particularly tantrumy spell I even dreamed of pushing myself out.

    The definition of “hell on earth” is touching down in Beijing during the blizzard of the century after a twelve-hour flight in steerage with a sleepless toddler who is entering the hallucinatory/psychotic stage of fatigue. Beijing’s taxi drivers had collectively decided to wait the whole deep-freeze out, so the taxi queues looked like round-the-block Depression-era breadlines with luggage carts. This is when something unprecedented happened: We were invited to the front of a queue by Chinese people. Say what you will about Beijing, but it’s a great town to have a kid in, even if that kid is in twelve-gauge, double-barrel meltdown.

    The drive home took another hour as we slo-mo fishtailed our way along the No. 2 airport express way, which resembled a snowed-in version of Iraq’s famous “highway of death” from the first Gulf War. Nevertheless, we made it home just as the last of the twilight slid away. Three boiled dumplings later, the kid went to bed. As I lowered him into his crib, he flashed me a huge and utterly sincere grin (as opposed to his normal, cheesy and exaggerated one), as if to say, “Father, from the bottom of my heart bless you for putting my tired ass to bed.” The last time I was that happy to go to bed myself I had just watched the sun rise after a poor-man’s bender of Red Horse ’40s and Taco Bell while still in college. This I do not recommend for anyone over the age of 22.

    I’d been counting down to this Christmas holiday since roughly August, when I went on blog hiatus and commenced five months of particularly grueling work. In my head, I constructed all these fantasies of two weeks of complete indolence and gluttony. These plans were duly torpedoed by my son, who had diarrhea on the plane. This turned out to be caused by a stomach flu that infected me, both my parents and my sister-in-law. After spending our third day in Palo Alto sponging up toddler-vomit (from the rug, the hallway, the dog) and with me paralyzed with fever on the couch, we took Patient Zero (formerly Zachary) to a local clinic in Palo Alto. There the doctor said there was nothing much to do but wait it out, and asked us if we’d had direct contact with his vomit or feces. I had a flashback to changing runny, poop-sodden diapers in the matchbox-bathroom of United steerage three days before. In such a confined space perhaps Iron Man or a trained doctor in one of those plague movie bunny suits could have avoided direct contact with fecal matter. I, however, could not. (Also, thanks to the American health system, I still have no idea how much I’m being charged for this consult.)

    The upshot was that I spent the whole first week of the holiday with no appetite whatsoever, which means I probably gained a little less holiday weight than usual. But I also had to apologize to everyone else who was laid up, including my mother, who spent an un-festive Christmas day in bed with a fever (on top of wrestling with an automotive soap opera too complicated and depressing to recount here). My sister-in-law paid us back, however, as she and my brother traded their infant daughter’s cold for our stomach flu. Zachary had the pleasure of being sick in both directions, but with completely different secretions. You gotta love parenthood.

    Nevertheless, Imagethief made the best of his vacation under the circumstances. With an heroic effort in week two, I’m pretty sure that I compensated for most of the first week’s caloric deficit. You can accomplish splendid things with egg nog if you put your mind to it. Plus, Elliott Ng of CNReviews, whom I also saw recently in Beijing, was kind enough to treat me to a burrito the size of a Pres-To-Log over an extensive conversation about China blogging. That alone probably put a pound back on.

    This brings me to two announcements. First: The great Imagethief blog hiatus is officially over. I’m not sure what kind of pace I’ll maintain, but I intend to get back to regular blogging and it won’t be hard to top the average of two posts a month since last August. Thanks to any remaining readers who have stuck around for five months of relative inactivity. Your Imagethief decoder rings are in the mail.

    Second: One reason why I have the time to blog again is that I have started a six-month sabbatical from work in order to return to my languishing Chinese studies. In fact, it’s only a partial sabbatical as I will still be working a couple of days a week so I don’t have to dip into my savings and can keep my family’s visas and health insurance in good order (the insurance thing is looking pretty key after Christmas). But three days a week will be spent with my tutor and my nose in the textbooks and Chinese newspapers. A hat tip to my employers, who have been spectacularly cooperative about the whole thing. This is pretty experimental, and we’ll see how it all goes, but I’m excited.

    Finally, I’d like to wish all readers a belated by sincere happy new year. Here’s hoping 2010 is better than 2009, and that the teens are an improvement on the naughties.

    On Sunday Imagethief arrived in Beijing from two well-earned holiday weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area. Flying with Zachary), now 22 months, is always an adventure. He’s a well traveled kid, but a well-traveled two year old is like a well-traveled troglodyte. Even at their best, social habits are wanting. I’m not especially superstitious, but I knew we were headed for trouble on the return flight when, at about the International Date Line, the woman seated across the aisle from me said, “He seems very well behaved.” Thus jinxed, the last three hours consisted of full-on, bawling meltdown as we became one of those families that other people on airplanes dream of pushing out an open door 35,000 feet above the trackless, ice-clad wastes of Siberia. During one particularly tantrumy spell I even dreamed of pushing myself out.

    The definition of “hell on earth” is touching down in Beijing during the blizzard of the century after a twelve-hour flight in steerage with a sleepless toddler who is entering the hallucinatory/psychotic stage of fatigue. Beijing’s taxi drivers had collectively decided to wait the whole deep-freeze out, so the taxi queues looked like round-the-block Depression-era breadlines with luggage carts. This is when something unprecedented happened: We were invited to the front of a queue by Chinese people. Say what you will about Beijing, but it’s a great town to have a kid in, even if that kid is in twelve-gauge, double-barrel meltdown.

    The drive home took another hour as we slo-mo fishtailed our way along the No. 2 airport express way, which resembled a snowed-in version of Iraq’s famous “highway of death” from the first Gulf War. Nevertheless, we made it home just as the last of the twilight slid away. Three boiled dumplings later, the kid went to bed. As I lowered him into his crib, he flashed me a huge and utterly sincere grin (as opposed to his normal, cheesy and exaggerated one), as if to say, “Father, from the bottom of my heart bless you for putting my tired ass to bed.” The last time I was that happy to go to bed myself I had just watched the sun rise after a poor-man’s bender of Red Horse ’40s and Taco Bell while still in college. This I do not recommend for anyone over the age of 22.

    I’d been counting down to this Christmas holiday since roughly August, when I went on blog hiatus and commenced five months of particularly grueling work. In my head, I constructed all these fantasies of two weeks of complete indolence and gluttony. These plans were duly torpedoed by my son, who had diarrhea on the plane. This turned out to be caused by a stomach flu that infected me, both my parents and my sister-in-law. After spending our third day in Palo Alto sponging up toddler-vomit (from the rug, the hallway, the dog) and with me paralyzed with fever on the couch, we took Patient Zero (formerly Zachary) to a local clinic in Palo Alto. There the doctor said there was nothing much to do but wait it out, and asked us if we’d had direct contact with his vomit or feces. I had a flashback to changing runny, poop-sodden diapers in the matchbox-bathroom of United steerage three days before. In such a confined space perhaps Iron Man or a trained doctor in one of those plague movie bunny suits could have avoided direct contact with fecal matter. I, however, could not. (Also, thanks to the American health system, I still have no idea how much I’m being charged for this consult.)

    The upshot was that I spent the whole first week of the holiday with no appetite whatsoever, which means I probably gained a little less holiday weight than usual. But I also had to apologize to everyone else who was laid up, including my mother, who spent an un-festive Christmas day in bed with a fever (on top of wrestling with an automotive soap opera too complicated and depressing to recount here). My sister-in-law paid us back, however, as she and my brother traded their infant daughter’s cold for our stomach flu. Zachary had the pleasure of being sick in both directions, but with completely different secretions. You gotta love parenthood.

    Nevertheless, Imagethief made the best of his vacation under the circumstances. With an heroic effort in week two, I’m pretty sure that I compensated for most of the first week’s caloric deficit. You can accomplish splendid things with egg nog if you put your mind to it. Plus, Elliott Ng of CNReviews, whom I also saw recently in Beijing, was kind enough to treat me to a burrito the size of a Pres-To-Log over an extensive conversation about China blogging. That alone probably put a pound back on.

    This brings me to two announcements. First: The great Imagethief blog hiatus is officially over. I’m not sure what kind of pace I’ll maintain, but I intend to get back to regular blogging and it won’t be hard to top the average of two posts a month since last August. Thanks to any remaining readers who have stuck around for five months of relative inactivity. Your Imagethief decoder rings are in the mail.

    Second: One reason why I have the time to blog again is that I have started a six-month sabbatical from work in order to return to my languishing Chinese studies. In fact, it’s only a partial sabbatical as I will still be working a couple of days a week so I don’t have to dip into my savings and can keep my family’s visas and health insurance in good order (the insurance thing is looking pretty key after Christmas). But three days a week will be spent with my tutor and my nose in the textbooks and Chinese newspapers. A hat tip to my employers, who have been spectacularly cooperative about the whole thing. This is pretty experimental, and we’ll see how it all goes, but I’m excited.

    Finally, I’d like to wish all readers a belated by sincere happy new year. Here’s hoping 2010 is better than 2009, and that the teens are an improvement on the naughties.

    Mophead

    Happy new year from patient zero!

  • I hate Secret Santa

    Imagethief likes the holiday season. He is not one of those December curmudgeons who bah-humbugs his way through Christmas. Give me trees, tinsel, candy canes and a big dinner with my friends. My dad used to roast a goose for Christmas. How traditional is that? And we’re Jewish.

    There is, however, one Christmas tradition that I dread every year, and that never gets any easier to deal with. That is the office “secret Santa” program.

    Anyone who works in a large office probably endures something similar. The way it works in our office is that the office assistant walks around with a box from which you draw the name of a colleague. You then have to buy that person a gift for under 50RMB. The gifts are all presented at a Christmas party at which Santa Clause, played by the white guy who most recently joined the company, calls each person up one-by-one to receive his or her anonymous gift. I did the Santa gig myself my first Christmas with the company, three years ago, and spent a miserable, hot, itchy two hours in the Santa suit pulling artificial whiskers out of my mouth while my colleagues, sat on my lap one by one. Someone else will be pulling those same spit-encrusted whiskers out of his mouth this year.

    I would play Santa every year if I could only get out of the gift-giving, though.

    The problem is that we are a fairly big company and I inevitably draw the name of someone I don’t know. This is a pain because if it’s a friend you have two decent options: either you have some idea of their tastes and you can get something you will be reasonably sure they will like; or you can get them a gag gift and be confident they won’t take the wrong way.

    But I never, ever draw the name of someone I know well. I always get the shy, new, Chinese girl who doesn’t talk and whom nobody knows. I have a 100% perfect track record of this. And I know most of the people in the company (although given that I just spent ten months in Shanghai there is a slightly higher proportion of unfamiliar faces than normal). It’s like they’re rigging the draw on me.

    In fact, I learned this year that some of my colleagues were re-drawing until they picked the name of someone they knew. I had no idea such a thing was allowed or I would have gamed my own draw. Some people in are office are easy to buy for, such as the company driver (baijiu). But, no, I had to play by the rules and ended up with a new girl who works way at the other end of the office and who has a spartan desk that reveals nothing about her life, loves, hopes, pets, celebrity crushes, get-even list, or anything else that might be remotely useful in picking a gift.

    Not that with 50RMB to spend I could get all that creative. Our offices are in Oriental Plaza, which features a mall where the list of things that can be purchased for under RMB50 is this long:

    • Dumplings.

    Trust me: You don’t want to leave a box of gift wrapped dumplings under the tree for too long, unless you want to deck the halls with vomit on Christmas morning.

    Thus inspired, I invariably procrastinate my purchase until the last possible minute and then end up in one of two places: Watsons or the “Ole!” supermarket. There I end up contemplating the usual range of naff or inappropriate possibilities. Doraemon shampoo? Nahh, toiletries are too personal. Who knows what fragrance this girl likes? Condoms? I don’t want to be hacked to death by her family And anyway, the Japanese ones are RMB75 and thus over the budget. Muesli? Nail polish? Stationery? A fake Rolex? (You have to go outside to buy this.) None of it seems very exciting. And the western get-out-of-Christmas-jail-free card, the gift certificate, doesn’t really seem to exist here.

    I actually thought about breaking the rules this year and spending semi-lavishly just for the hell of it. Why not buy her a real Swatch or Casio watch? Or an iPod Nano? Or a sexy mobile phone? That would rock the party. But it might also kindle jealousy, dangerous recriminations or the (wrong) assumption that a certain Santa was on the make. The program might be “anonymous”, but even a fairly retarded detective could identify the offending Santa by simple elimination. This is especially true as secret Santas tend to out themselves at the party unless they are particularly ashamed of their gifts.

    Faced with these undesirable options I elect to punt: I buy candy. At least, my theory goes, she can share it with her teammates if she doesn’t like it. Having become acquainted with the strange, Chinese fascination for a certain kind of imported candy, and mind controlled by the miles of it on display, I made the inevitable choice. Ironically, even though I have a world-beating sweet tooth inherited from my English, goose-roasting father, I hate this particular candy. How pathetic is that? I  bought this poor girl whom I don’t even know candy that I can’t stand because I was too creatively bankrupt to come up with a better choice. Merry freakin’ Christmas.

    To make this situation extra tragic, I have one-and-a-half boxes of this same candy sitting at home. They were brought over to my house by one of my colleagues when I had a team dinner recently. But these were in a distinctively shaped package, and I didn’t want to give the same configuration, lest my naked re-gifting ploy be spotted. Those candies are destined for my ahyi. She’s from Anhui. She’ll eat anything. Or, more likely, huishou it for cash.

    So bought an RMB45 box of candy I already had and put in a gift bag that cost another RMB20, thus putting me over the limit but, I figure, allowing me to squeak by on a technicality as the bag isn’t technically the gift. I probably should have given her an envelope with cash in it.

    I console myself with the thought that most of my colleagues, Chinese and foreign, aren’t much better at this than me. While buying my “gift” today I bumped into another colleague who was on the same mission. She, however, opted for default choice two, different famous candy brand. A couple of years ago one colleague of mine was so unimpressed with her secret Santa gift –which I won’t describe here for fear of driving someone to suicide– that she “forgot” it in the back of a taxi on the way home from the party. It wasn’t even worth passing to her ahyi. It was that bad.

    At least I have this burdensome task dealt with for another year. But I’ll be on a plane back from a meeting in Japan during this year’s Christmas party. That’s a shame because, secret Santa aside, I genuinely enjoy the Christmas party. But at least I won’t be there to see the look of numb indifference on my colleague’s face when she becomes the 20th person that evening to receive a box of the same candy.

    Ho, ho, ho.

    Note: Slightly edited from the original to add some deniability.

  • Why aren’t you drinking the Wang Lao Ji?

    Imagethief spent a busy two days helping some representatives of a European country manage a last minute press conference. This was a sudden request that had resulted in 36 hours of breakneck work involving much frantic communication, central European languages, weird time differences and assorted ministers, agencies and secret handshakes. Ultimately all went well, but it was a weary team that schlepped its way back to the office.

    Upon getting back, I headed for the pantry to get a Diet Coke. Once upon a time I used to drink a can of real Coke a day, but I also used to be 20 kilos heavier. I have a wicked sweet tooth inherited from my father, an Englishman (no further explanation should be required), and kicking soft drinks was a big part of my weight loss program. But we keep a fridge full of the stuff in the office and for the past few months I had increasingly fallen under the seductive thrall of the Diet Coke. Wicked sweet with no caloric guilt!

    One-a-day Diet Cokes got to be such a habit that a couple of weeks ago I decided to give up on it for a while, lest I become a poster boy for the as-yet unknown effects of excessive aspartame consumption (are those antennae on your head, or are you just happy to see me?). But after today’s frantic activities, and the hot taxi ride back, I caved. As I was pulling a can from the fridge in the pantry our assistant finance manager flounced in, all floral sun dress and bright eyes, and said to me, “Why aren’t you drinking the Wang Lao Ji?”

    I really had no answer for that. I had noticed that little cartons of Wang Lao Ji had started appearing in the fridge a week or two before. They looked a bit incongruous next to the Coke and Fanta Orange that are the mainstays of our beverage selection. Wang Lao Ji is a Chinese soft drink based upon a herbal tea. It’s advertised on busses across the nation and  recognizable by its distinctive red and yellow logo. Like any Chinese food or drink with a tenuous connection to the world of Chinese herbology, it is ascribed mythical powers as a tonic, including the ability to forestall diseases you’ve never heard of and increase various vital essences. Most of this is marketing courtesy of the manufacturer, a large Guangdong-based beverage and pharmaceutical company. On a more practical level, the Black China Hand has cited Wang Lao Ji as a hangover cure.

    Despite all this, I was stumped as to how to answer my colleague’s innocent question. She rushed to take advantage of my speechlessness. “It’s very good for…I don’t know how to say it in English…It can help you to jiang huo.”

    I didn’t know what “jiang huo” was, but it didn’t sound like something I should be doing in the office. I wasn’t even sure what about my appearance suggested that I needed to jiang huo. Either way, whatever jiang huo was, it was clear that she didn’t think a Diet Coke was going to help me achieve it.

    “It’s a Chinese medicine thing,” she added helpfully. “Sometimes, you know, you eat things that make your body too hot.”

    Got it. It’s a cooling food. Jiang huo (降火) means “reduce heat”. In fact, I’ve had some exposure to this. My Singaporean mother-in-law is big on cooling, home-made liangcha(cold herbal tea). In sweaty Singapore that’s not hard buy into. But to the Chinese and their overseas kin, “heaty” foods and “cooling” ones aren’t just about spiciness or physical temperature. It’s a metaphysical concept that relates to proper balance, energy and health. Certain times and physical conditions demand certain kinds of foods. Too much heaty or cooling food can cause problems. Too much durian (a classic heaty food)? Guaranteed pimples. Of course it might also be that durians are loaded with oil. But anyone who has eaten durians would agree that “heaty” is not a bad classification for the sulfurous fruit. Herbal teas, along with bamboo shoots, crab meat, water chestnuts, egg whites, pears etc. are cooling. I gather it’s best to aim for a kind of lukewarm average over time. Balance is everything, right?

    So I cracked open a carton of Wang Lao Ji and gave it a slurp.

    The mystery cooling ingredient is sugar. Despite its olde-style patent medicine labeling and health tonic claims, Wang Lao Ji is well placed in a fridge full of soft drinks. There might the barest, most elusive hint of herbal flavor lingering somewhere behind the cloying sweetness, but you have to breathe in over the liquid like a wine connoisseur to detect it. Everything else is syrup. It’s definitely not my mother-in-law’s bitter, bracing, home-brewed liangcha. I can also report that the little cartons of Wang Lao Ji will burp sticky liquid out of the straw and all over your suit at the slightest provocation.

    So it’s back to the Diet Coke for me. It might do much for my balance or help me jiang huo, but nor will it put me on the express train to diabetes.

    However I can believe that Wang Lao Ji makes a good hangover cure. After all, is there anything heatier than a hangover? For that reason alone it might be worth keeping a carton or two in fridge, wedged between the sour plum juice and the hair of the dog that bit you.

    wang-lao-ji

  • Apartmental, a part mental

    As regular readers will know, Imagethief has been on cross-assignment to his company’s Shanghai office in recent weeks. The company is, meanwhile, attempting to persuade me to consider semi-permanent reassignment to Shanghai. I have not yet made a decision about this (and if my landlord in Beijing is reading this, we’ll talk).

    In general, I really like the company I work for. They’ve taken good care of me, provided training, put up with my idiosyncrasies, and were patient with me while I spent my early months wrapping my head around the cataclysmic, nationwide fun-house that is the Chinese media. Because of that I was willing to listen to when they suggested that relocation to Shanghai might be good for my professional development.

    They say that whichever Chinese city you come to first is the one you build an attachment to. I suppose this argument might break down if your first port of call was Linfen. But I came to Beijing by choice, and I’ve certainly become affectionate for the city. Beijing, for all its impersonal ministries and immense boulevards, has an intimacy and a grungy, eccentric streak that really appeals to me. In a little under three years, I’ve really come to think of Beijing as home.

    It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been surrounded by old Beijing-hands who are naturally contemptuous of Shanghai (Schwankert, I’m talking about you), or that I’ve been writing about the city’s eccentricities for That’s Beijing semi-regularly. So I came to Shanghai with the casual, Shanghai? Pfeh! disdain of the confirmed Beijinger.

    Imagine my surprise at discovering that Shanghai is really not bad at all. It has a very different feel than Beijing, for sure. As David Wolf said to me over lunch Friday, in explaining the difference, “Beijing was created to be an imperial capital. It has always been a Chinese city. Shanghai was created to be a treaty port, and foreigners have always been a part of its identity.” He also advised me to make regular trips back to Beijing for sanity checks. Fair enough. But I’ve quite enjoyed the time I’ve been spending in Shanghai, and the city has its own personality and charm, if that is the word to use. My office and apartment are both in a very pleasant part of town, which does help.

    Speaking of my apartment, however, I have some complaints.

    The company provided the apartment for me to use during my cross-assignment. A previous expatriate employee of ours had lived in it for about four months and had then left China. The week before my Christmas break I had quick look in the apartment to see if it was habitable. It was, depending upon your point of view, a relatively high-end local apartment, or a relatively low-end international apartment. Perhaps the latter, given that it had international cable TV channels. It had plenty of room for me and occasional visits from Mrs. Imagethief. My conclusion was that it was generally fine, although I would have to bring some bedding from Singapore. I told our Shanghai office manager she didn’t need to have an ahyi work it over before my return. That was an inexcusable, rookie error. What can I say? It was night, I was rushed. My due diligence was not superb.

    I returned from my Christmas vacation in the US on Saturday, January 6th. On the 7th I flew to Shanghai and went straight to the apartment. There, alone with a suitcase in the dark of a Shanghai winter evening, jetlagged into irascibility, the flimsiness of my earlier appraisal became clear. As did the bachelor existence of the previous occupant. I had not bothered to open the refrigerator during my brief, pre-Christmas visit. Monumental mistake. The entire contents consisted of two rotting, three-week old pieces of meat and a box of Ferrero Rocher candies now infused with the smell of decaying flesh. The rest of the food supply was two things of instant noodles and a huge pile of little sugar sachets stolen from every restaurant and bar in the French Concession.

    Three years ago when I first moved to China and did my Wordlink Education language program, they put me up in a very similar two-bedroom apartment. It was fine, but made no provision for the fact that some people might like to cook and eat at home. The total kitchen implements consisted of a frying pan, a chopper, a cutting board, two bowls, two Chinese soup spoons (the boat-shaped ceramic ones that are hard to use for sugaring coffee) and some chopsticks. I had to go down to the CRC supermarket in Wudaokou’s Huaqing Jiayuan apartments and buy a saucepan, fork, knife, round-bottomed pan, plastic colander and a plate. (And I only got this far after several tragic days of trying to eat salad with chopsticks. Oil-slicked cherry tomatoes are a bitch to eat with chopsticks, no matter how dexterous you are.)

    Buying forks and can-openers when you’re in the heady rush of fresh-arrival and wide-eyed, goldang, lookit that! culture-shock is fine. It’s all part of the adventure. And I was surrounded by threadbare college students, so living like one was a blast of juvenile nostalgia. I went through a somewhat more substantial stocking of my own apartment in Beijing some months later, culminating in the shipping of my accumulated household worth of stuff from Singapore when my move to China become final.

    You forget when you’ve lived in a house or apartment for a while just how much stuff accumulates. Some of it is junk, but some of it is really useful. The great thing about my apartment in Beijing is that it has everything I need (and plenty that I don’t): Dishes, utensils, tools, cables, connectors, bric-a-brac, Q-Tips, spare Kleenex, nail clippers, scissors, scotch tape, shoe polish, laundry detergent, a sewing kit, and so on off into infinity. The apartment in Shanghai had a wok, four bowls, four plates, Chinese spoons, chopsticks, a chopper and cutting boards. It also had, inexplicably, an upright piano. I don’t play piano.

    Barring the piano, this was so close to the contents of my Wudaokou apartment that for a moment I thought I had slipped back in time.

    And here is where I get cranky. I am now thirty-nine and a (semi) respected China business professional. I have lived here for three years. My wife and pets are here. I have a network. I can get around in Chinese. I did not want to have to relive my starving student days by buying a fucking can opener. I believe that if you are trying to woo someone into uprooting themselves from city A and shipping their wife, worldly possessions and fuzzy kitty cats to city B, you need to do everything possible to make that person think city B is paradise on earth. Three months in a luxurious service apartment refreshingly free of carrion and stocked to the gills with conveniences seems like a good place to start. Once they sign on the dotted line you can always pull a bait-and-switch. But remember, it’s bait first then switch.

    I also had to come to grips with the legendary consequences of the south-of-the -Yangtze government heating edict. This is one of those remnants of central planning that make China fascinating at an academic level and a pain in the ass at a practical one. My apartment in Beijing seals like a spaceship (although, like a spaceship, you can also run out of air and die if you don’t ventilate it from time to time). I don’t even need to turn the marvelous central-heat on. The apartment stores solar energy.

    My temporary Shanghai apartment, however, leaks like a straw hat and is apparently heated by a small man from Guangxi who rubs sticks together somewhere in the duct-work above the ceilings. At least that’s what it sounds like. He needs to rub the sticks together for four or five hours before they generate enough heat so that my breath doesn’t fog in the living room. I needed to sort out the arcane timing system which is based on oracle bones and bedsprings. Apparently I am supposed to set the timer to turn the heat on about one hour after I leave the house in the morning. That will ensure that the apartment is damply tepid about the time I get home, rather than arctic. I think the answer is a vastly larger television that would generate supplemental heat, but for some reason the company isn’t buying my arguments.

    I can’t imagine why not.

  • Fly the feces-free skies of China Southern

    Few things have provided more grist for Imagethief’s gripemill than Chinese airlines. A simple search of this website for various permutations of China+Airline+Travel will make that abundantly clear. In part this hostility is unfair. Chinese airlines are every bit as good as American carriers –although I have heaped scorn on those as well– and in some ways they are distinctly better. For instance, I would recommend Chinese carriers to anyone with a fetish for being waited upon by attractive Asian women as opposed to a fetish for being snarled at by hostile, matronly Americans. Not that no one has that particular fetish, its just that its somewhat more eccentric and self-destructive, like a fetish for self-mutilation, blender worship or Paris Hilton.

    And of course, Chinese carriers are every bit as successful as their American counterparts, which is to say they are losing money hand over fist. That’s why I was constipated to readin a Reuters news story (quoting Xinhua) about some of the money-saving steps recently suggested by China Southern Airlines:

    A Chinese airline has calculated that it takes a litre of fuel to flush the toilet at 30,000 feet and is urging passengers to go to the bathroom before they board.

    As Chinese airlines come under increasing pressure to cut fuel expenditures, China Southern’s latest strategy is to encourage passengers “to spend their pennies before boarding the aircraft”, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

    “The energy used in one flush is enough for an economical car to run at least 10 kilometres,” Captain Liu Zhiyuan, who flies regularly between Hangzhou and Beijing, was quoted as saying.

    Citing a survey by the company’s logistics department, Liu said carrying one kilogram of items such as blankets and pillows by air for one hour uses 0.2 kg of fuel.

    “This means the blankets and pillows on board the aircraft eat up 60 tonnes of fuel every day. If each seat is loaded with three 450-gram magazines, another 60 tonnes will be consumed,” Liu explained.

    Well, having taken many flights on China Southern over the past few years, I can tell you that many passengers already consider flushing optional, so it’s debatable how much value such a program might have. I also think that the focus on flushing perhaps ignores the root of the problem, which is that according to this article, airplane toilets are some of the least energy efficient devices on the planet, on a part with M1-Abrams tanks and arc lights. Airplane manufacturers may want to get cracking on this (so to speak). After all, if my home toilet required a liter of kerosene for every flush, I’d just use half the kerosene to burn our daily household quota of excreta in our apartment building’s courtyard (everyone loves a bonfire) and sell the rest on the aviation fuel black market for cold, hard cashola.

    But as the article makes clear, cracking down (again, so to speak) on online flushing is really only part of the solution. The real triumph would be to encourage people not to carry any bodily wastes on board the airplane at all. In fact, I think the “pillows and magazines” in this article are really offered as a gentle metaphor for the collection of excreta sloshing around inside of each of us. After all, to the airline, the accumulated fecal matter fermenting in your bowel is just another form of carry-on luggage, and one that they have no control over. And nothing chafes an airline more than the thought that you might be gaming their system. Turds are just the beginning. Next thing you know people will be wrapping their duty free purchases in condoms and swallowing them to evade carry on limits.

    Let’s look at this scientifically. Doing some quick research, I note from a highly credible source, the movie Beverly Hills Cop, that the gut of the average American fifty-year-old contains about five pounds (2.25 kilos) of undigested red meat. Chinese are not Americans, but they are eating an increasing amount of red meat so let’s use American fifty-year-olds as proxies for the entire Chinese population and go with that number. It’s this spirit of daring scientific inquiry that led to such breakthroughs as cold fusion and Dr. Hang Woo-suk’s cloning program at Seoul National University. Going further I also note that China Southern is one of the airlines that has ordered A380s, which can carry up to 500 passengers. After performing some complex and rigorous calculations far beyond the reach of lesser cortexes, I discover that a single planeload may be hauling around up to 2500 pounds (1,136 kilos) of turds.

    Shocking. If the fuel consumption figures in the article above are accurate, that means that China Southern’s A380s could burn up to 227 extra liters of fuel an hour just dragging around surplus shit. On a twelve-hour long-haul to San Francisco that could mean almost 3000 extra liters of fuel consumed in the name of turd-haulage. Add on another three flushes (conservatively) per person on that same flight and you are looking at another 1500 liters of fuel consumed, for a total of 4500 kilos of fossil fuels –1.5% of the aircraft’stotal fuel capacity– flushed away in the name of airborne waste management. My god, people, haven’t you heard of global warming?

    Looked at this way, you can see that China Southern might be onto something. In fact, they might taking too conservative an approach to managing this situation. In the interest of safeguarding this planet that we all share, Imagethief proposes that, like hair gel and toothpaste in the US, human fecal matter be banned from all Chinese flights. Passengers should be required to consume a heavy dose of laxatives the day before flying and to purge thoroughly before boarding. Enema lounges could be installed in all Chinese airports, helping passengers to unburden themselves their ungreen load before boarding. I find a pre-flight high colonic highly refreshing myself, and imagine that it could become quite the fad. Naturally, pre-boarding security questions should be amended:

    • Did you pack your bags yourself?
    • Has anyone else handled your luggage since you packed it?
    • Did you have a nice, big shit this morning?

    With a few simple steps like this we can help China Southern to claw its way into profitability and reduce the global warming threat posed by air transportation. China could establish itself as environmental leader and revolutionize the entire approach to air travel. Dependency upon oil imports would also be reduced. Just think: if every airline in the world was to implement a program like this, we would live on greener, cleaner, more peaceful planet. Considering the benefits, an enema at a Chinese airport seems like a small price to pay.

    Note: Thanks to Gordon at The Horse’s Mouth for sending this article to me. Dude, when are you coming back to China? This country needs you.

    Related: Shanghai closed flights into and out of Pudong for several hours yesterday due to “air traffic volume”. Foreign flight crews ascribed the delays to military exercises. Anyone who travels in China regularly knows that the all-too-common flight delays and cancellations often get dubious official explanations, and the military’s fiat over Chinese airspace is widely and credibly blamed. In this case it seems likely. No one closes an airport to all traffic because of congestion. You might divert some traffic or delay some flights, but close the airport? The flagship airport at your glamourous international business city? The military explanation sounds a lot more credible in that case. Or some other similarly conspiratorial explanation. At any rate, you coudn’t get much more bush-league, especially considering the government’s usual appalling communication, which extends to what looks to me like a complete absence of any press coverage of the incident.

  • Just walking my pony, officer

    Imagethief has been watching with come concern the Beijing city government’s drive tocrack down on “stray dogs”. In the expansive interpretation of the authorities this means any unlicensed dog, any dog that contravenes the city’s 35cm height limit, or any dog that has the misfortune to be dog  >n+1 in the household, where n is any other dog that the owners like better.

    Mind you, this has zero personal implications for me. Being as I live in a two-bedroom apartment on the 17th floor and not, for instance, a ranch house on two wooded acres, I keep cats. It’s not that I don’t like dogs, it’s just that I’m not Parisian or Chinese and thus not compelled to keep an enormous dog in a tiny apartment that barely has room for me, Mrs. Imagethief, two ungrateful cats and some houseplants. Not only is space at a premium, but we also like to travel. The good thing about cats is they are similar to houseplants in many ways. They have about the same intelligence –although they barf more– and if well fed and watered they can be left on their own for a few days. If the cleaner drops by every now and then to make sure they are still fed and watered and no dried cat barf is bonding permanently with the carpet fibers, then all is good. If I could freeze-dry a dog temporarily while traveling, say in one of those 2001: A Space Odyssey-style tinsel-lined refrigerators, I might reconsider dog ownership in Beijing. But, you know, there’s always a chance the computer could turn evil and the dog might never wake up, in which case you’d have to dispose of an enormous, freeze-dried dog carcass. Although in a city where dog meat commands a premium, this might not be as hard as it sounds.

    The challenges or apartment dog ownership don’t seem to be stopping my neighbors, however, despite a lack of dog freeze-drying apparatus. Although they appear to be normal, law-abiding citizens, it turns out that a vast number of them are apparently trafficking in contraband dogs. How else to explain the profusion of manifestly illegal golden retrievers and the one rottweiler (yes, rottweiler) that are often being exercised in the courtyard. If there was a reward, I’d turn the lot of them in and pocket the cash.

    What has changed noticeably in the couple of weeks since the “strike hard at stray dogs” campaign began is that my neighbors have  become much more furtive about walking the larger dogs. Whereas before you could pretty much count on a gamboling retriever or two (retrievers love to gambol) on any weekend afternoon, people are now hustling their dogs out under cover of darkness and walking them in discreet loops near the walls where they are less visible. This is a particular challenge for my rottweiler-owning neighbors. It turns out that a rottweiler is a hard animal to smuggle, especially if it is hyperactively sociable and prone to mob anyone who gives it a glance. Might as well throw a saddle blanket over it and claim to be walking your pony. Your hell-pony with especially large, sharp teeth, that is.

    Truthfully, I think the dog campaign is misdirected. I can understand the licensing requirement, and even a drive to limit households to one dog. True, it cuts against the libertarian grain but, um, this is China. But I think the size thing is not on. After all, if a citizen wants to keep an inappropriately large wolf-beast in his miniscule shoebox of an apartment, that’s his problem. Well, and the dog’s, I guess. I don’t hear of many dog attacks in Beijing, and people don’t seem to be dropping dead of rabies in the city limits. I am far more likely to put a shoe in human feces deposited by one of the zillions ofkaidangku-wearing babies than I am in dog-shit. (Saw one child busy leaving a load on Tian’anmen Square during the National Day flag lowering ceremony. Surely crapping in the sight-line of the Great Helmsman has to break some kind of taboo. But the cops were too busy hustling away black-market ice-cream sellers to care.)

    Anyway, I think the whole dog campaign is misdirected. From a quality-of-life perspective Beijing would be a much more pleasant city if the authorities made 35cm the minimumheight requirement for dogs. Think of the many benefits: People would think twice before keeping more than one dog. Sure you can put a dozen chow-chows in a siheyuan, but try putting a dozen Rhodesian ridge-backs in and see how long the furniture stays in one piece. Also, large dogs often have a more pleasant temperament I find. At the end of a long day, as I stagger home after 12 hours in the PR salt mines, the last thing I need is Fufu the Pekingese following me through the courtyard going yapyapyapyapyapyapyap! Listen: I am an avowed animal lover. I dote on my idiotic cats and to this day I am awash with guilt for every mean-spirited thing I did to any animal, no matter how lowly, as a misguided youth. (Well, except for the Flintstones-sized Roachasauruses we used to get in my house in Singapore. I’d kill them all if I could.) But more than once I have been sorely tempted to draw back my right foot and go for distance and hang time, like Hall of Fame punter Ray Guy. Plus, the nice thing about large dogs is that if the apocalypse comes they can be trained to guard or hunt, or provide meat for days. Imagine the whole family fighting over a Chihuahua haunch. Embarrassing.

    But my influence over municipal policy is, alas, limited. Therefore it looks like all my neighbors will be walking their dogs under cover of night for some time to come. If I were them I might try draping the animals in camouflage nets to break up their outlines. Not only will that make them harder to spot, but any city management flunky who sees an enormous, shapeless, drooling green blob charging toward him will probably hightail it out of dodge and never come back.

    Barely a nibble.
    Barely a nibble.

  • That western ghost festival

    Imagethief would like to wish all readers a happy Halloween.

    I’m a big fan of Halloween, and not just because I have wretched sweet tooth and rosy memories of childhood evenings spent sifting through pillowcases full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Pixie Sticks, Sugar Daddies, Candy Corns and those goddamn inedible wax lips that I always got at least one set of. Those were the days. The unintelligible sugar-high days, that is.

    For some bullshit reason, when a ten-year-old in a ridiculous costume knocks on your door begging for candy it’s considered “cute” but when a 39 year-old man does it people get all freaky and weird. As far as I’m concerned this is just one more sign of our society’s ruinous youth fetish, and is blatantly unfair. The only solution seems to be to have a child (which we’re trying to do), wait a tasteful few years (I think people might get suspicious if you show up with a basinet and claim the candy is for an infant that is still breast feeding) take the little rugrat out trick-or-treating and then ration the candy out over days “to make it last” while secretly skimming from the top. I’m pretty sure this is what my father did, and it would go a long way toward explaining some of my issues.

    I also enjoy dressing in costumes. Especially ones that I can be seen in public in. I was a Jawa back in the Star Wars says. And Han Solo one year. And Luke Skywalker of course. And when I was in grad-school in the early nineties and had really long hair I event went in drag as Princess Leia. I actually made the cinnamon buns with my own hair, although they were a bit on the small side. More cupcake sized than the enormous dish antennae that Carrie Fisher wore. Thinking back on it, Star Wars seems to have been involved with most of my Halloween costumes over the years, which, I suppose, reveals my inner nerdly qualities. But at my age I’ve come to terms with that.

    I also like fire, which is a big part of Halloween. After all, you’re either lighting candles in pumpkins or –once you enter high school– blowing them up. Both can be festive and cheery. Although, by the shaving-cream and toilet-paper drenched standards of my high school, I was pretty tame on the prank front. I was really in the whole thing to dress up like somebody from Star Wars and get a bunch of free candy.

    Adults, of course, love Halloween as much as kids. But they all use at as excuses to go to fetish parties. Having grown up in San Francisco’s Castro district (which may explain the whole Princess Leia thing) I’m not much into fetish parties. Not because I have anything against fetishes, mind you. I like black vinyl, thigh high bitch boots and fishnet stockings as much as the next guy. It’s cool when girls wear them too. Rather, it’s that I feel I’ve seen most of it before.

    This year I didn’t go to any parties and I didn’t collect any candy, although I am sure you can trick or treat in the villas. Even in Beijing it’s probably courting trouble to be a trick-or-treating 39 year-old in drag. And god knows what the police report would say. If I were the cops I’d just have me write a self criticism and call it a day rather than try to send that one up through the chain of command. “We have arrested a middle-aged foreigner dressed like a teenage fantasy space princess and begging for sweets in expensive neighborhoods. Hello? Hello, sir?”

    I did carve a pumpkin this year, the first I have done in a long time. On our way back from Sunday brunch at The Orchard my friends and I stopped at a large wet market. Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t cultivate an ideal assortment of carving pumpkins, being more prone to see large gourds as food. I can understand this. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup and pumpkin brushed with olive oil and then roasted are all really good. Still, sometimes you need a carving pumpkin. And it should be big, bright orange and able to stand upright on its own. Not small and green or weirdly misshapen in a way that would require you to brace it somehow and thus constitute a fire hazard were the cat to brush against it and tip it over.

    Fortunately we did manage to locate a couple of satisfactory specimens and haggled our way to an only slightly outrageous price. Our driver said it was still better than what we would have paid in the city, so we felt pretty good. My wife speaks better Chinese than me and she’s much more attuned to what’s being said in crowds around us. As we were trudging out of the wet market with large pumpkins under our arms, she overheard one woman say to another, “Oh yes, that western ghost festival is coming soon!”

    That western ghost festival. I quite like the sound of that. In fact it was nice reminder that there is something to Halloween besides all the dressing like Luke Skywalker, amassing sugary swag and going to fetish parties. So in observance of that western ghost festival I have carved my Jack-o’-lantern and placed it in the window of my apartment where everyone across the street can see it. Tonight I’ll light it one more time and enjoy the nostalgia that the smell of slightly singed pumpkin always brings. And, if no one is looking, I might just take out that old Princess Leia costume as well. After all, I might be too old to beg for candy. But you’re never too old for drag.

    leia
    Say, who’s the cute one on the right? The staff of KSFS Radio, ca. 1993. Can you guess Leia is me?

  • Adventures in mucilage

    Every now and then, just when I think I’ve got this living in China thing totally handled, something spins out of control in a way that reminds me to maintain a little humility. On Friday that moment came when I went to bank to change a bunch of US dollars to Singapore dollars prior to wiring it back to my Singapore account. I took my service number and waited in a drone-like trance for it to come up at the one window that seemed to be actually turning over customers. Three windows were open, but two of them were stuck in all day perma-transactions. You know the ones. Your number is 8,902. The open window is now calling 8,887 and the granny at the counter to the left was served with number 14 –apparently earlier that month– and is still there hashing out the paperwork to wire 1000 RMB in plitchkas –or whatever the currency is– to Guineau Bissau where her grandson is studying muskrat husbandry. Someday, when her grandson is the muskrat king (麝鼠王 if you were wondering – I had to look it up) of all China, her investment will pay off handsomely.

    Muskrat husbandry in Guinea Bissau was sounding pretty good about the moment the teller gave me a quizzical look and said, “There are no US dollars in this account”. Yes, Imagethief had waited in line for half an hour with his wife’s passbook. At least she didn’t say, “You don’t look like Lee Yu Foong” (玉凤; it’s clearly a girl’s name) and put security on me with their sinister, candy-stripe electro-batons.

    But it got worse today when I went to the post office to mail my US tax return (late, I know, but I don’t owe so they don’t care) and some paperwork for my dive certification agency. At the counter where one buys postage, which is separate from the counter where one does everything else, I was told that I would have to insert my various envelopes into other envelopes that I would have to purchase. it seems that the Chinese postal service is intolerant of nonstandard envelopes, which is to say any non-Chinese envelope. No big deal; it was only 5 mao (six cents) for the envelopes, although it did leave me wondering as to the fate of two shockingly nonstandard envelopes I had mailed internationally the week before. We’ll find out, I guess.

    It turned out that neither Chinese envelope was big enough to accommodate the foreign envelope it was meant for. Both were close, but not quite there. I could have gone back to the counter and traded up to two larger envelopes, but at this point I was having second thoughts about sending my tax forms to Uncle Sam in a cryptically marked Chinese envelope. US tax envelopes use all manner of complex bar codes, stickers and machine-readable type to make sure they are routed to the clerk most likely to select you for auditing on the basis of some minor, personal quibble, like a wife with a Chinese name. Why interfere with that? So I decided to mail my tax forms from Singapore in two weeks. They’re already five months late, so two more weeks probably won’t make a big difference in the size of the stick that gets jammed up my ass. And Singapore’s postal service is both reliable and tolerant of registered mail using nonstandard envelopes.

    That left the larger envelope free for the dive paperwork. It just fit inside. I addressed the new envelope and took it up to the counter to send. As I was handing it to the clerk I noticed that I had forgot to seal it. And it was here that my entire errand unravelled.

    I should have just licked the envelope. Licked it and handed it to the clerk with a big, sweet grin. But, I thought, I don’t really want to lick this Chinese envelope, and I certainly don’t want to lick it and hand it back to this poor girl all damp with my drool and laowai tongue mites. Yes, I know this is a country where hocking a glistening, irridescent loogey is a crowd-pleasing national art form, but I’m American, dammit, and I keep my phlegm below the epiglottis except on the rarest of occasions.

    Seeing me looking for a moistened sponge or glue, the clerk directed me to a table by the wall. There was a grey washcloth in a dish, the sanitary status of which I daresay made my mouth look like the inside of a freshly used autoclave. Fortunately, the washcloth had dried out. There was also a little device for applying mucilage to envelopes. I swiped the flap of the envelope along one of the wheels of the mucilage machine and pressed it shut.

    Chinese mucilage does not stick. Not even a little. Whether this is because of deficient mucilage technology or in order to make it possible for the PSB to open envelopes without steaming them, I do not know. It’s tacky, but it doesn’t stick. I noticed a little slot in the machine that looked like it was for swiping the edge of a sealed envelope through. Perhaps, I thought, this heats the mucilage or applies even pressure, or magic postal pixie-dust, or whatever else is necessary to make the goddamn mucilage stick. So I swiped the envelope through it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. This applied another layer of mucilage to the outside of the envelope. I now had an unsealed envelope coated with tacky mucilage and fingers that looked like I had just crammed them up the nose of a three-year old.

    So I gave up. I figured I was only 5 mao down, and I simply wasn’t going to go through the whole process again. I’ll mail the works from Singapore.

    It is widely said that the Chinese think all Jews are smart. I may be the man who does more to undermine that remarkably durable impression than any other.

  • Dear lord, why not Paul Hogan?

    Or Yahoo Serious, for that matter?

    I was raised never to speak ill of the dead. Unfortunately that lesson, like so many others, didn’t really stick. So I thought I’d take a moment to reflect upon the early passing of Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin. I realize this is neither a China nor, strictly speaking, a PR story. But I do scuba dive a lot –and in some particularly risky circumstances– and I am always interested in situations where people meet a nasty end while in the ocean. I am also interested in how Irwin’s death is being described in the media.

    I was never a big Crocodile Hunter fan. I am a product of the Marlin Perkins era; an age of more restrained approaches to nature documentaries. (Ironically, Perkins’ show, The Wild Kingdom, was sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, an insurance company. Perhaps they were onto something.) Irwin’s shtick, on the other hand, seemed to consist of a lot of molesting of animals and insightful commentary along the lines of, “Wow, look at that [insert dangerous wild creature here]! He’s a whopper! Crikey! I’m just gonna grab his tail. If he gets those fangs into me, I’m a goner. Look at that! You’re alright, fella, you’re alright.”

    It’s like knowledge pouring into my head. If they’d known I’d someday be able to get that kind of information from the Discovery Channel, my parents probably wouldn’t have bothered spending all that money on my biology degree.

    My personal disregard for Irwin’s pedagogical style aside, any early death is a tragedy. Irwin leaves behind a young daughter and a toddler son who will only ever know his father through reruns (and who, you may recall, was once dangled perilously close to the snapping jaws of death in what, after his execrable “movie”, was Irwins’ biggest PR blunder). But my real interest in Irwin’s demise isn’t the circumstances per se, although they are somewhat unusual. Rather, it is that Irwin’s passing is being described as shocking, both by a random sample of Australians interviewed by CNN yesterday (indeed, the headline on the CNN web video story is “Australians Shocked“) and, most notably by Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, who said…

    …he was “shocked and distressed at Steve Irwin’s sudden, untimely and freakish death,” according to AP. “It’s a huge loss to Australia.”

    Untimely, yes. Shocking or freakish? No.

    Well, maybe it’s statistically freakish. From reports last night, I gather that there are approximately three confirmed stingray deaths in Australia since World War II. But it’s still not shocking. If Steve Irwin had died leading a hostage rescue mission on a plane full of tourists being held at gunpoint at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, or in a botched stage dive during a drag revue in Zagreb, that would have been shocking. Being killed by a wild animal was, well, predictable. Just like Roy Horn being mauled by a white tiger and Layne Staley dying of a drug overdose were predictable (my brother, gifted with a sense for such things, once described the then still performing Staley as, “clinging to life by his fingertips”). As Time noted of Irwin:

    He leapt fearlessly on to the backs of man-eating crocodiles, wrestled Komodo Dragons and deftly juggled snakes as they sought to plunge their venomous fangs into his arm or face, all the while keeping up a lively commentary for the cameras of his multimillion-dollar documentary operation. Scratched, bitten and bruised, he would display his wounds like trophies, casually using gaffer tape to bind up a severe bite from a large saltwater crocodile that he had been wrestling in a mangrove swamp.

    Yep, sounds like a man who stood a much higher chance of being killed by a wild animal than by, say, a Pushtun militia during a botched heroin deal on the Khyber Pass. Admittedly the animal involved was a bit of a surprise, but to be killed by a large stingray is not beyond the pale in the way that being killed by a hummingbird or a tree shrew might be. Big stingrays can be two meters across and have tail spines like those nasty, cheap serrated steak knives. The ocean is strange and wonderful, if slightly dangerous. Almost everything in it is pointy, venomous or both. In Southeast Asia people are periodically impaled by pointy, leaping trumpetfish or longtoms. That’s life. Or death, as the case might be.

    In fact, it’s not unusual for adventurers to be killed while adventuring. And, presumably, the rush of cheating death, or at least pushing the limits, is part of the motivation. Cave diver Sheck Exley died while trying to set a scuba depth record. Climber George Mallory died while trying to summit Everest (or Qomolongma if you’re not into colonial names). Test pilot Scott Crossfield died in an air crash. And the Crocodile Hunter died screwing with wild animals. He did, as they say, know the risks. And it’s a good bet his insurance company did too.

    So, RIP, Steve Irwin. I’m sure generations of children will see you in reruns. Unless, of course, the world simply shifts its attention to Austin Stevens, Jeff Corwin or the dangrously named “Shark Gordon”.