Goodbi Straight Histories of Lincoln
Looks Like Abe Was Gay...Honest

Check out this book review from the Advocate. Very convincing arguments about the sexuality of America's 16th President. Looks like the Great Emancipator continues to do just that.

Beating Jetlag:
Your Narrator's Suggestions

• Stay awake on the plane. Drink any beverage that will facilitate this process (ie, coffee, tea, cola, yerba matte, Redbull, etc.).


• Bring lots of things to do on the plane. (ie, writing projects, books and flashcards in a destination language (or why not Esperanto), music, and postcards from home--which can be a nice surprise with a non-local postmark).


• Avoid alcohol. This may cause you to break rule number one. Alcohol is generally detrimental to most states of mind anyway.

Try meditating on the plane. Wear earplugs if you want. The environment isn't ideal, but you can still try. It helps.

• Go to bed at a reasonable local hour upon arrival, even if this means consuming more caffeinated beverages. If you're not tired at what you consider a reasonable hour,


• Take Melatonin, which you can get at any health food store. Melatonin is gentler than sleeping pills.


• Get up at a reasonable hour and exercise. This somehow helps. If there's sun outside, get in it. This is like hitting the reset button on your body's internal clock. I've read that light behind the knees is especially helpful. Experiment as you like.


• Eat dark chocolate with breakfast and fly, fly, fly on the land, land, land.

I hope this helps.

Two Very Important Musical Numbers
Guqin Meets Frontbutt

Here's your narrator playing "Xiang Fei Yuan" ("The Concubine's Resentment") on the guqin on December 25, 2004 at the guqin shop in Shanghai. This was his first recital.

And direct from Ann Arbor Michigan, we've got the song with all the latest Arbor Vitae slang. If you think you can handle it, check out the hot dance hit "Front Butt".

Dateline, the Capital:
An Evening With the Cogs of Democrazy

New Urbanizing Gentrification

Only one week after leaving my cave of a media-filtered existence in Shanghai, I entered the lion's den of my nation's capital for cheap airfare and Salvadorian food... and politics. Spent a quick night just off the hill with DCist, which led me through secret histories and blogging, got me intimately reacquainted with Congressional politics, and gave me the New Urbanist's take on that swamp city.

We spent the night walking around Adams Morgan eating, drinking, and surveying the urban landscape. The way DCist tells it, DC is going through something akin to the City Beautiful movement of the first decade of the twentieth century, but rebranded for centennial. Since the market cannot swallow any more strip malls (literally every mall for every demographic has already been built), corporate America has had no choice but to move back into old territory: Downtown. First cars and white flight destroy America's urban core, and then the same game comes to reclaim it. These capitalists, they'll peel your skin off and sell it back to you.

Log Cabin Republicans and Out of Work Democrats

DC has a subdued ambiance. The Republitrons have won. The Democrats are regrouping, strategizing, and collecting unemployment checks. And going to parties with Republicans in the off hours.

At least people know how to forget politics some of the time in DC. And what do these twenty-something up-and-coming power elite in history's empire of empires do to forget politics? What any warm-blooded American would do: They consume Jello shots. Having attended one DC party, this reporter could probably learn to mingle with the Log Cabin Republicans (evil, but cute), but could never live there.

Let's hope the Left can get its game together. Maybe the next time I'm in DC, the Republicans will be on the dole.

Central Heating on a Snowy Day
And Other Observations from Virginia, USA

Most people don't know what it's like to practically go without cheese for 14 months (Asia...) and then suddenly be immersed in the cheese-loaded environment of the West. With free reign over my father's dairy-packed refrigerator, I overindulged, that American hallmark. I had returned to my old friend Gluttony's doughy embrace!

This was my first visit to Virginia since I almost moved here in 7th grade, and I got a taste of what my life would have been like. My father still worked for the same company he always has, his house was impecably clean like it always was, and he still liked cars, green energy, and conservative economics.

A Night With the Guys

A group of his colleagues from Michigan were in town. An interesting mix of carnivors--worldly locals--these guys had d grown up in the same small community as me and had branched out through the multinational corporation that tied them together. They were on the management "side" of things, but were not the type that easily reached that station. They were all very down-to-earth. One was a self-described redneck. All excited to flex their expense account muscles by gobbling as much red meat as their guts would hold.

As when I first went to Shanghai in the fall of 2004 and met my father on a business trip there, talk at dinner time centered on the global auto industry, specifically the parts supply aspects, more specifically still the production and changes of the last few years, the immediate problems, and the future. This was also a night of "Larry the Cable Guy" jokes and other forms of what my West Coast friends called "lower-chakra" humor and entertainment.

When we first arrived at the "Texas Roadhouse" beef show of an eatery, I wished I had used more foresight. As usual, I acquiesed at the first suggestion, even though I knew this roadhouse was the sort of place where the only thing I would eat were boiled vegetables and buttered mashed potatoes. Then I realized I was glad I went, if only to connect with that strange breed of men who were living the sort of "by the book" Horacio Alger stories that one doesn't usually see any more. Plus, I laughed more than I had in what felt like years. The humor was slightly red-state (though they were blue-staters), (for foreigners, red staters vote Republican, ie Bush and blue staters vote for the "left". For a nice exploration of this politico-cultural war, try reading "What's the Matter with Kansas?" by Thomas Frank)), but jokes like getting the waitstaff to give a "Texas yeehaw" to the redneck chowing down 16 ounces of American beef for his "21st birthday" (not really his birthday at all) never get old.

At this table were good, honest, hard-working Americans with no particular fears or illusions about competition and the global market. They see the Chinese making gains, they see higher-paid Germans selling parts for less than Americans, and lower-paid Mexicans getting jobs. Union shops that try to operate with the privilege that industrialized nations shared forty years ago are bound to be shut down. And this is how the rust belt grows. And how they keep their jobs.

But enough about that. Washington, D.C. was calling. And I go with open eyes...into the lion's den!

um, i'm in virginia at the public library and it's closing in 1 minute. aliveness is niceness.