On Friday Night, I got to see Louis C.K. do his stand up comedy routine at a public staging of that stand up comedy routine. It was very good. Seriously though, if that man is doing a public staging of his stand up comedy routine in your town, I recommend you go see the public staging of his stand up comedy routine.

We showed up late and had to find our seats while some opening act guy was on. No biggie. We still got to see Louis. And he delivered entertainment. I give his show a Five out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. He makes the bleak realities of modern life amusing. What impressed me most is that I’ve watched many appearances of Louis C.K. and specials and whatnot and there was not one joke in this act that I had heard before. Marq says that when he appeared on the radio the morning of the show he said he is constantly updating his material. It shows and I thank him for it. My refusal to watch any clips of him between buying the tickets and the show now seems unnecessary.

A conundrum though, I’ve always pronounced his name like “Louie” because I’m almost positive that that was how it was said back when he used to be on Conan and I know his show was called Lucky Louie. But Marq said the radio was pronouncing the “S” and I saw a commercial for upcoming film The Invention of Lying which seemed to pronounce the “S” as well. I could look it up online, I’m sure, but instead I’m just gonna write about it here. We have yet to watch his recent appearance on Conan’s new show and I am confident that it will help me to learn the correct pronunciation.

Apart from that, I’ve not much else to say. A couple more comics from the Contains2 days have been put up in the comics section and I expect that after I post this I will also take a prose story from the old days and bring it to life on this site. It also occurs to me that there are a few actual videos and animations that I should be salvaging from the Contains2 wreckage as well. The Internet currently doesn’t know how much it is missing.

I totally wore a Dead Kennedys shirt yesterday. You know, because I wasn’t thinking… Not that anyone noticed or even probably would have cared. But the coincidence is amusing to me.

Haiku!

Damn the post office!
They lost the thing I ordered.
They lost my cannon.

I have not actually ordered a cannon and it has not been lost.

Worth mentioning is that Marq and I went to see Inglourious Basterds on Monday. It was quite good. That’s all I’ve got for now.

Today I got to see ex-Beatle Paul McCartney live in concert. Of course, to be technical I was not attending the concert. Marq and I were among a throng of people outside the fenced-off perimeter of the proper concert who were listening anyway. Take that box offices.

All in all, I would say that was an excellent several hours of music listening. We found a nice place where I wasn’t too surrounded by people and we could kinda see over the fence. McCartney puts on a good show. And the thing I enjoyed most was the big bald drummer who would not look out of place on a metal band.

Marq had to leave early, so I’ll just tell him some stuff he missed:

• Songs Marq missed include (but are not limited to): Yesterday, Hey Jude, Day Tripper and Helter Skelter. And Live and Let Die had fireworks.
• Four people jumped over the fence by the road. They pretty peaked at the second attempt and got progressively worse at getting past security. The first guy just jumped and made a break for it with a security guy coming after him. The next guy used that distraction as chance to make a break for it. By the time I lost sight of him he hadn’t been spotted. I doubt he got anywhere really, but who knows? The third guy jumped over and hid behind a bush for a while until the crowd egged him on to try his luck, which caught the attention of security. He then fell into the bush because he was apparently too drunk to run for it. The last guy, apparently even drunker, would have done just as well if he’d jumped right into security’s arms.
• Someone cut the cord of that balloon and it floated away never to be heard from again.

That’s about all I can think of for now. For the most part it was just me, standing by a fence and enjoying music.

This week I tried Soy Milk. I was shopping and say that the instructions on the carton read “Shake Well and Buy Often!” I figured that making such a blatant command was such a ballsy move that I’d reward them by giving them a shot. Of the options the store had (plain, unsweetened, vanilla) I decided to go with plain (though I was confused by the idea that “plain” and “unsweetened” wouldn’t be the same thing, but I didn’t dwell on it). Well, anyway, I tried it both as a straight-from-the-carton beverage and as a poured-on-Alphabits thing. My findings indicate that I don’t plan to buy it again any time soon. I can’t say it disgusted me or anything, it was passable and if that was all I had to drink I’d get by, but it isn’t what I was used to. I don’t expect it makes sense to anyone but myself, but I found it was too “high-pitched” (or whatever the taste equivalent of that would be) for my liking. I don’t remember what brand it was, but I’m prepared to generalize and say that they’re all the same. I give it Three out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

Also this week, with Wade being back in town for the briefest of times, I got a chance to Zombies!!! The two of us played, joined by Marq. Now it’s fair to say that I have a pretty pro-zombie attitude. I’m pretty much right in this game’s target audience. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tell something is crap even when it has zombies in it. That said, this is not crap. I very much enjoyed this game. Wade got the rules out relatively succinctly for such a complex game, so it isn’t too confusing so long as you’ve got someone who knows what they’re doing (and it probably isn’t so bad for people who can, y’know, figure things out by reading instructions, but in that category I am not). The game went pretty quick, it felt, and the final run for the winning spot had Wade look like he had it in the bag, only to wind up with me then coming even closer (one move away if that zombie dog hadn’t got me!) and then Marq finally closed in and won. The rapid turnover at the end really made it quite fun. Five out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

I suppose I’ve let the site cool down enough after Marq overused it and risked causing a fire. I guess I should relate some tales of my trip to the Other Side Of The World.

I guess I’ll go chronologically. After a whole bunch of planes and the longest travel time I’ve yet experienced, I ended up in Shanghai. Terry and Buffy still had a day of teaching school left, so I got to see all the little kids they teach, which was cool. I found Shanghai to be quite humid and I totally sweat like a person smuggling nuclear cocaine into a police state. The second day there, though, it poured rain. By the end of that the shoes I’d brought were totally ruined and we had to buy me some new footwear. We also bought me some shorts to sleep in, because it had not occurred to me that what I usually sleep in might be a little not-enough for the trip. The footwear we ended up with turned out to be sandals. I generally am not a big sandal wearer, but these ones worked out pretty darn well, especially considering the amount of time we spent in the desert where full socks and shoes would probably have been way too much. Oh, we also bought a bag for me to carry around which was smaller than the big one I planned to use. Not a bad idea either.

Anyway, as I mentioned we went to the desert. The bulk of the trip was spent in the province of Xinjiang, which is the Westernmost part of China. We totally flew to a place called Urumqi and then another flight to Kashgar and that was where we began our travels.

In Kashgar we totally got to see markets and bazaars and the like. People there really want to sell you stuff. I’m a total sucker for salespeople and in most cases would probably be talked into buying stuff or feeling bad, but Terry and Buffy were much better at handling this. Plus, since I didn’t speak the language I was mostly not the target of anyone’s attempts. Also, haggling is a big thing there and I am totally not used to that. As a self-hating and money-hating person, I’m generally okay with paying ridiculously marked-up prices. It’s how I rid myself of all that currency I neither want nor deserve, y’know?

Referring to my notes, I see that on the Thirtieth of June it was that we took a camel tour. That is to say we rode out into the desert on camels. Now we didn’t ride out very far. We pretty much just went out to the first couple dunes and looked out on the rest. And the ride was shorter than advertised as well. But I was okay with it. I’d never ridden a camel before, so that was neat and I’d never seen desert sand dunes in person so that was neat (and ran my hand through the sand, as well). Though as we were out there the wind kicked up and we got lots of sand blowing into our faces. I couldn’t put my teeth together without chewing sand for hours afterwards.

Another cool plus for that part of the trip is that the three of us went on this camel tour with four other travellers all of whom seemed very nice and gave us companions for various other excursions during the remainder of our days in Xinjiang.

The next significant segment of the journey was a ride up into the mountains to see this cool mountain lake (which I’m afraid I don’t remember the name of). Though an hours-long trip through lovely mountains was there to break it up, I was particularly impressed by seeing snow after having been in the desert so soon before. I was able to appear impressive by simply knowing what a yurt was ahead of time. The way to be a successful idiot is to make it appear as though your idiocy is a ploy to cover some hidden intelligence. Though we did not sleep overnight in the yurt, we all had a good nap before we went back to our hotel.

Sometime later we left Kashgar via rail. We rode a train through the desert to Turfan. I think I slept more than usual on the train, because it was supposed to be twenty-some hours but didn’t really feel that long. We’d opted to pay for sleeper rooms so we’d have beds. Terry and Buffy told me of times they’d just got seats and had to sit there for terribly long and crowded rides. Myself only having experienced this way, I can say kinda like train travel.

Turfan is another nice little desert city. One thing I really liked was the big roads that were trellised by these grapevines to allow for shade (there’s a picture on the Wikipedia page even). While in this town we also saw a mosque with the tallest minaret in China, the remains of a fort that was probably pretty impressive back in the day what with being on this plateau thing and some little village I didn’t catch the name of which seems to have less people left than it once did. Also that village had the remains of some Buddhist temples that had been defaced when the town was invaded. Also in Turfan we used an Internet cafe which looked pretty much as one of those would be expected to look, though dim lighting and air conditioning are pretty nice in the desert. The Internet is not easy to use over there, though. Oh and we ate at a place called Best Food Burger which has my favorite name for a fast food place because of the sheer confidence it exudes.

Oh yeah, speaking of food I forgot to mention that we ate a Pakistani place back (I think) in Kashgar. It was really good and I find myself wishing such a place were around here. It’s not like my street here doesn’t have a million restaurants already. For the most part I enjoyed the Chinese food as well. We ate way more than I generally do. I know more than one meal a day is supposed to be healthy, but it takes some time for me to train myself to manage it. But as I said, I liked the food. And I didn’t seem to embarrass myself with the chopsticks either.

Okay where was I? Right, so we left Turfan and took a bus back to Urumqi. On the bus they played some Bollywood movie which didn’t look all that great but I was amused that when the main character went on a revenge driven quest to kill the criminals who, (I think) killed his wife and an elderly man (his father? his fighting master? I don’t know) he wore a leather jacket with the American Flag on it. That flag will become visual slang for “Gonna Kick Some Ass” before we even know what happened.

We were mere moments too late at Urumqi airport and we missed our flight (overzealous but obviously confused cab company owner leading us on a mad chase for one of his cabs didn’t help with that…) and we ended up spending an hour or two trying to get money off of credit cards and ended up spending the night in a hotel before we were finally able to fly back to Shanghai in the morning.

Since I had to leave the day after we got back to Shanghai (and Terry and Buffy move the day following) there isn’t much else to tell. They apparently didn’t quite feel right putting me to work on my vacation (though I’d not have minded) so I spent most of the time that remained simply relaxing. Then I got back onto a plane and eventually made it back here. I think that’s about it.

All in all I think I had a pretty awesome trip. My next travels can not come soon enough. I have a first batch of pictures up on Facebook for those who can see that. When Terry and Buffy have finally got around to making their own albums I’ll make a second with whatever pictures are left over. We certainly have enough of them.

And once again I must give a sincere Thank You to Terry and Buffy for letting me come with them on that trip. Hopefully I wasn’t much trouble to carry around. Thanks guys.