Olympic update: 169 days to go

We’ve just got word that in response to citizen protests in the outlying provinces of China, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have been cancelled. The protesters said the money should be spent on improving the lot of China’s people, and the government did an about face, essentially saying, “You know – you’re right.”

Just kidding. That’s about as likely as a Chinese New Year without fireworks.

And speaking of fireworks, today is Yuanxiaojie, or Lantern Festival, which marks the end of the Spring Festival that started with the Lunar New Year two weeks ago. The Lantern Festival falls on the first full moon of the new year, and is yet another occasion for lunatic pyromaniacal excess. With the added bonus of a golden orange full moon up above. I’d post more pictures, but I’m sure everyone is tired of them by now.

It is traditional on this day to eat a particular kind of dumpling called yuanxiao, but I went to the store a bit ago and they were all out. That’s what I get for staying at the office until almost seven. I’ll have to make do with something less traditional.

In actual Olympic news, they revealed a few weeks ago what the staff uniforms will look like.
The red ones are for staff, presumably ticketing staff included. I’m not sure why they bothered designing long sleeve versions, given the average temperature in August here. I presume these are what we’ll get, but nobody tells me anything. See also here.

And just as an aside, it seems the uniforms were presented as part of the “200 Days to Go” event. As you can see, it was quite a production.
I figure if they do something like this for every little arbitrary milestone, they’re bound to come up with something really spectacular (in the truest sense of the word) for the Opening Ceremonies, with or without prissy American consultants (if you take my meaning).

And here’s something I’ve been wanting to see for quite a while. It was inevitable, given how pervasive the mascots are. Fuwa parodies!
I came across these on a web site quite by accident. (None of the artists are credited.) There were a bunch more that I couldn’t recognize – probably Chinese celebrities. Now all we need is the Revolutionary Fuwa with Chinese Characteristics, featuring Mao, Deng, Hu, and whatever other two most fit the bill, which might be difficult because two of the mascots are supposed to be female. But that needn’t hold back a true artist. Other suggestions: Disney Fuwa, Beatle Fuwa, Looney Tunes Fuwa, Anne Geddes Baby Fuwa, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (+1) Fuwa, Aardman (Wallace and Gromit) Fuwa, Muppet Fuwa, Hello Kitty Fuwa, Harry Potter Fuwa, Hentai Fuwa – the possibilities are endless. And let’s not forget the Famous Artists Series: Fuwa done in the style of Rembrandt, da Vinci, Bosch, Monet, Picasso, Warhol, Audubon, Pollack, Mapplethorpe... Come on, you Photoshop experts, get busy! (On further thought, forget I mentioned Hentai Fuwa.)

Maybe that last picture can’t really be called a parody, and is just one of the entries from an art contest for primary school kids.

You probably can’t tell from reading, but I just paused to watch a particularly cool bunch of fireworks going off across the street. A sparkling fairy-dust trail shot up into the sky in a tight spiral to a height of 12 stories or so, then exploded into a midair pinwheel throwing off sparks in a rapid circle. There was a whole series of them, maybe a dozen from the whole box. Cool.

And now for today’s Mandarin lesson. I was telling some of my Chinese coworkers about the huge crowd of people at Ditan Park on New Year’s Day, and I asked how you say crowded in Chinese. The answer is ren duo, which means literally people many. You say ren tai duo for too crowded (people too many).

Later on, one of them taught me another way to say it: ren shan ren hai. Word for word, this means people mountain people sea. I’m not sure exactly how such an expression might have developed, as it’s pretty telegraphic, like many Chinese expressions. There are some obvious (and probably wrong) possibilities: people from mountain to sea; or just the fact that both mountains and the sea are big; or maybe something like we use in English – a mountain of people, a sea of people.

In other, completely unrelated, news, today I booked a flight to Shanghai next week to see Björk. I’ve been a big fan for many years but never seen her live, so it seems like a chance I shouldn’t pass up. Once again I find myself revisiting a place I’ve been before rather than going somewhere new, but Shanghai gets the concerts, not Chengdu. It will be a quick trip; fly there the morning of the show, stay one night, back the next day. It’s awkwardly scheduled on a Sunday night, but mei banfa (nothing can be done).

It mostly seems like this “Spring” Festival is a bit premature. Consider the ice chair pictures a couple of posts back. But this week it’s warmed up to the point where I put the long underwear in the drawer instead of wearing them as drawers (sorry). Maybe spring is coming after all.

Of acquisition and loss

Now on to the events of Saturday, 29 September. Pictures (some by D some by me) and more events added 10 November. How could I have forgotten the fireworks?

For the first time, I ended up taking a taxi to the Beijing Airport. All my previous trips the company driver was available to provide transportation. Not much to report here. The ride cost about $10, which included the toll for the expressway. Unlike my previous Shanghai trip, we got to board through a jetway directly onto the plane instead of having to take a shuttle out to the plane. And instead of going to Shanghai’s new Pudong Airport, we flew to the old one, which is called Hongqiao and is situated right in the midst of the city. It was very strange flying below the tops of buildings on the approach.

We had read about the taxi queue, so we followed the signs (no checked bags) and got into a big long line. There were about four lanes of taxis, with a uniformed person directing people to the next available one. There was also a guy who had a big car (not a standard taxi) who was trying to entice people to ride with him instead. I managed to tell our driver where we were going – it was pretty easy since our hotel was on a well-known street right across the street from a major park, and I knew the names of both in Chinese.
We stayed at the Radisson Hotel, a five-star tower that showed up in my pictures from Shanghai in August. It’s the one that looks like a UFO is landing on its roof.
There was some sort of confusion upon check-in. They seemed to think I work for Google. My reservation, which I made online a few days in advance, had got jumbled up with someone else’s. We ended getting upgraded from a standard king room to a deluxe king.
It was really nice, actually a small suite. We were on floor 18 facing towards the river, though other buildings mostly blocked the view. We could see a bit of the Pearl Tower and several other noteworthy buildings.
After getting settled, we went out to explore Nanjing Road, a famous shopping district I visited last time. We mostly just browsed, though we did see a few interesting things.
We were pestered almost constantly by people trying to sell us watches, bags, and whatnot, some of whom were very persistent. Like a store called Baleno that specialized in jeans and other casual wear for young people, but had a big display of items related to Doraemon and Astro Boy in the window, so like moths to a flame, we entered.
By the time we left, we had a sweatshirt and a T-shirt, and only a supreme exercise of will power kept the damage down to that.

Around the time it was starting to get dark, we met a friend for dinner. She took us to a nice Shanghai-style restaurant. It was on the way to dinner that D realized something was missing. She had been carrying her Zen MP3 player in her backpack, and someone had unzipped it and got away with the player. This put quite a damper on the enjoyment of the food.

Upon reflection, we have our own stupidity (or naiveté) to blame. First, there was no reason to have the Zen with us – we should have left it back at the hotel. Second, a backpack is like an invitation to a thief – easy to get into without being noticed, especially in a crowded place where there are jostling people. We’ve noticed many people who use backpacks actually sling them around the front. These are smart people. We can take some small comfort in the fact that Zen players are pretty uncommon here, so the lucky acquirer might have trouble finding accessories like a charger and USB adapter for it. They’re sure to find an odd selection of music on it.

Anyway, back to dinner. Our friend wanted to give us a good sample of Shanghai cuisine, and took us to a place called Shun Feng. It was huge, with well over a hundred tables, taking up what seemed to be an entire floor of a downtown building near the Marriott tower. Our waitress was a tiny little woman who was shorter than us even when we were sitting down, but she seemed to be in charge of that part of the place, ordering others around. Shanghai food is known for being sweet and rich, and we certainly found that to be true. We had a wide sampling of foods, meat, veggies and fish. The fish was a little spicy, and was our favorite. For dessert we had an amazing concoction of sweet black beans, glutinous rice and coconut milk which was ridiculously rich. It was either will power or sheer overstuffing that kept us from finishing it all.

Originally we had sort of planned on going to a pub or something after dinner for drinks, but after the theft, we weren’t in the mood for it, and wanted to call it an evening. But it was Saturday night in Shanghai, and it would be a shame to miss the lights along the Bund and across the Huangpu, so we made a quick little trip to the river.
Several things set this visit apart from my previous one. First, there was this:
It’s a big tourist boat with a water dragon theme, full of people cruising the river. Note the water gushing from the dragons’ mouths. Then we started hearing the sounds of explosions.
The Saturday night before a major holiday – fireworks! We hung around for the whole show, which lasted 20 minutes or so. Combined with the lights of the buildings, it was quite something.

After that, we said goodnight to our friend and took a quick taxi ride back to the hotel.
It was here that we discovered the addictive attraction of the National Geographic Channel. For China Day, they were doing a marathon of documentaries about this country. I watched one which I think must have been made at about the time when Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon came out. It was about one of the prominent wushu (martial arts) schools in China, and profiled several students from the ages of 8-18 or so. As far as I could tell from the credits, it was not an actual NG production, and while the subject matter was fascinating, I was constantly annoyed by the narrator’s consistent mispronunciation of virtually every Chinese name and word. It seems like a matter of simple respect to say people’s names right.

That was a pretty full day.

I bought that DVD fair and square!

Warning: This entry is probably only of interest to science fiction fans. I won't be offended if you skip it.

On the schedule it said that The Solitary Planet would start at 10am, but when I got to the room, the signs said 10:40. I wandered over to the Exhibition Hall to see if anything was going on. They’d had the art auction the night before, so you couldn’t even look at the pretty pictures.
As I mentioned before, the play was based on Stanlslaw Lem’s book Solaris, which has been the source of two movies as well. In this case, it was in Japanese of course, though they had English projected on the wall next to the performing area. In general, the basic themes of the novel were intact, and the main focus was on the character conflicts and questions about who was crazy and who could figure out what was going on. It’s really a worthwhile book, so I don’t want to give too much away. The setup goes like this: a psychologist is called to a distant research station in orbit above the mysterious planet called Solaris. Most of the research staff has been called back to Earth, but three remained behind, and one of them summoned the doctor. Once the psychologist arrives, he finds the station in a shambles and the three scientists behaving very strangely and not explaining anything. Then he starts to see things, namely his dead wife. She is not a hallucination; she is solid and can talk with him, though she does not seem to have much memory of the past. Each of the others has a comparable visitor. From then on out, the characters try to solve the mystery and face the demons brought up by their “guests.”
All in all it was quite well done, with a set consisting of one desk, two chairs, and a curtain for actors to go behind when they were not in the scene. A technician with a laptop provided the subtitles and music as well as controlling the lights.
The play finished a little after noon, and I rushed to a panel called “Defending Public Domain from Corporate Copyright Maximalism,” which again featured Cory Doctorow (it seemed I was following him around), along with Patrick Neilsen Hayden, Inge Heyer, and Naomi Novik. Doctorow expressed dismay at the arguments used by some of his compatriots in the electronic right arena. When they talk about information being free as a moral issue, they only confuse the matter and turn away people who might otherwise be convinced. Doctorow is against strict copyrighting on digital media because it is inherently impossible. Once information is in a digital form, whether it’s music, pictures, movies, books, or whatever, it can be copied, transformed, and distributed, and any attempted protections will only slow that process down. And any country that tries to mandate adherence to such inherently impractical restrictions will find that certain types of business move elsewhere, to countries with fewer restrictions. The American policy in this case has been to try to force other countries to accept to legal strategies that lobbyists for major media corporations have pushed through our legislative branch.

Doctorow, as part of his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been a part of some very interesting conferences. He told of meetings held by the European Union about future media regulation. On the subject of providing on-demand video, they were proposing rules, and the basic idea was that any service or feature which provides value to the consumer should have a cost associated with it. Therefore, if a viewer wants the ability to pause or fast-forward the video, the owner of the content has the right to set limits on that. So the player and the distribution technology have to be able to turn off the fast-forward function. There was also a discussion about pausing. How long should a person be able to pause a video before they have to pay for it again? How long would a person normally need to pause a video? How long would a nursing mother need to care for her child before she can get back to the watching she paid for? Do you remember the old days where if you bought a video tape or a DVD you could just watch it in whatever manner you wanted? The industry representatives were also trying to devise a payment scheme for multiple players. What about the child of divorced parents who buys a movie at mom’s house, but doesn’t finish watching it and wants to finish it over the weekend at dad’s place? Their solution? She can call the copyright restriction office of the content owner and explain the situation (just like you have to do sometimes with Windows licensing on your PC). They would then unlock the movie for her to watch on a second player.

The situation is already somewhat ridiculous. If you’re an American and you take a vacation in Europe, where you discover a European movie you like and buy it on DVD, when you take it home, you will find that even though you paid fair price for a legitimate copy, you are not allowed to watch it on your American DVD player (even if the movie is not available in the US). Does this make sense? Whom is it protecting?

My plan for the next session was one in which Silverberg was listed to participate along with several Japanese authors. I went by the slated room, but it was packed and Silverberg did not seem to be there, so I picked an alternate: “Upcoming Books from Tor.” Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Tom Doherty went through their calendar and talked about forthcoming titles, most of which seemed to be part of fantasy series.

After that, I checked out a little bit of anime at the Rocket Girls panel. It was almost all in Japanese with no interpreter nearby (or maybe there was, but I sat near the back because I intended to sneak out early). After a little introduction, they showed what seemed to be the first episode of a series. It was one of those anime shows that’s a frustrating mixture of good and stupid. In any case, the story was just a setup for the real action that was to come, and maybe someday I’ll see more of it. I certainly would give it another chance.
My final panel of the con was “Living with Another Writer” with panelists Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber. As I expected, the audience was fairly small, a dozen or so people in a large room. They talked a while about their accommodations for each other’s schedules and habits. Before they married, she had actually had a regular job where she went to an office and so on, something which he has never done (by the time he graduated from college he was making enough money as a writer that he never had to get a “day job”), and he insisted that if they were to live together, she would have to work freelance. He was much too attached to his lifestyle where he can on the spur of the moment decide to go to France for a month or whatever, without having to get the approval of her boss. She agreed and made the big jump into the uncertain waters of self-employment. They discussed their schedules (he’s a morning person, she is not), and the degree to which they pass work by each other. They also ended up talking a bit about their three cats. After the panel finished, I got a chance to chat with the two of them for a bit. Silverberg told me how the previous panel (the one where I didn’t see him and left) had actually been the most interesting one of the con, because he had a chance to interact with some Japanese writers. I got a couple of books signed (one of the Chinese ones plus a Japanese copy of Nightwings). We talked a little about China and the changes taking place here. We are all concerned about how their headlong plunge into modernization might be damaging the planet’s environment, and I related some of the statements I’ve heard from the government here indicating they are seriously trying to alleviate the negative impact.

I made one last visit to the Exhibition Hall to get a couple of pictures.
This is a glider that was built by some fans of the movie Nausicaa by Hayao Miyazaki. It’s patterned after the one-person jet wing in the movie.
This one has actually flown. I took a picture of the picture that proved it.
And the Japanese are pretty keen on robots. Here’s a demonstration of some toys.
I saw some more interesting characters on the way out.
And there you have it. One big science fiction convention. Somehow I got through the entire thing without attending a single room party, and caught neither the masquerade nor the Hugo Awards ceremony. But all in all it was fun, and I’m glad I went. Next year’s WorldCon will be in Denver right in the midst of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, so I won’t be able to go. I think 2009 will be Montreal, which could be nice, since I’ve always wanted to visit there.
Random thought: Even catgirls have to check their email from time to time.

Seattle in 2011!

I have some more photos around the city of Yokohama, but they'll have to wait for another post.

The Rapture of the Nerds

Warning: This entry is probably only of interest to science fiction fans. I won't be offended if you skip it. There's a bit of general interest stuff towards the end.

Let’s see – where was I? I worked late in my hotel room again on Friday night after a day at the WorldCon. Saturday morning I got up around 7 and started a blog entry about Shanghai, and before I knew it, it was 9 and I hadn’t even showered yet. I got ready quickly and made my way over to the convention center by way of the Starbucks which was conveniently located on the second floor of the building my hotel was in. There are two other Starbucks between there and the Pacifico, so I had plenty of choices. I grabbed a latte and muffin and continued on my way. It had rained a little earlier, but was clearing up.
My first must-see wasn’t until noon, so I popped in on a session that was mostly in Japanese. A little background to set this up. Sakyo Komatsu (the Japanese Writer Guest of Honor) had been a prominent figure for many years, and been involved with a number of movies, so when the first Star Wars movie came out, producers there looked to him to capitalize on its popularity by making a Japanese space epic. The original plan was to actually get the movie done before Star Wars was released in Japan in 1978, but planning and production drug on and on and it wasn’t until 1984 that Sayonara Jupiter came out. Technical and budgetary constraints conspired to result in a very different movie than Komatsu and his collaborators had envisioned; there seems to be some disagreement about many points, but pretty much everyone agrees that Sayonara Jupiter was not the movie it could have been. Therefore – talks of a remake, doing it right this time.

It was kind of dark in the room, but you can see Komatsu (the small old gentleman) and the director of the 1984 movie (in black with his hand in front of his face). The others at the table were involved in various capacities, including co-writing, design, and so on.

There was a very helpful Japanese woman who sat with us foreigners at one side of the room and translated at least the gist of what was being said. The moderator (in blue at the far end of the table) spoke excellent English, and occasionally would repeat for our benefit as well. It’s hard to say at this point if the remake will ever get off the ground, but it seems that it might be a worthwhile project.
Next up was a panel called “Mundane or Transcendent?” which started out as a discussion about how important scientific plausibility is in science fiction. Panelists were (left to right) Patrick Nielsen Hayden (an editor at Tor Books), Charles Stross (writer), Cory Doctorow (writer and electronic rights activist), and Robert Silverberg (you remember him, right?). This is the modern version of a discussion that’s been going on in the SF world since it began: at what point does the science in science fiction become so far-fetched that you have to call it fantasy and not science fiction at all? Which leads to the differences between SF and fantasy and so on. Silverberg’s definition has fantasy as basically the fiction of the unreal, whether it’s magic and dragons or computers and aliens, and so SF is a subset of fantasy. The preponderance of elves and magic swords in fantasy over the last few decades has led us to forget that fantasy is really much more than that. But one dividing line many agree on is that modern fantasy is at its core fiction of the past, static and fixed, while SF looks ahead (or sometimes back) to change.

I think it was in this panel that the phrase “Rapture of the Nerds” came up. It refers to a possible phenomenon also called “Singularity” which (according to writer Vernor Vinge and others) is what happens when computer technology gets to a certain point that it cannot go beyond. There are many ways of describing it, but writer Ken MacLeod came up with “Rapture of the Nerds” as a humorous synonym.
This panel was called “The Killer B’s.” This is a nickname that has appeared in the SF world due to the names of three prominent practitioners: David Brin, Gregory Benford, and Greg Bear. Brin and Benford were both in Yokohama, but Bear was not, so we got Bob Silverberg. One thing they all have in common is that they have written works connected in one way or another with Isaac Asimov. Back while Asimov was alive, Silverberg wrote novel-length versions of three of his most famous short stories; Brin, Benford, and Bear have each written a volume in a series based on Asimov’s notes for unwritten volumes in his Foundation and Robots universe. Aside from talking about the Asimov-related writing, they got into quite an animated discussion about global warming. They are all in agreement that it’s a huge problem and governments have been tragically lax about dealing with it, but disagree strongly about what should be done. Benford is involved in a plan to seed the upper atmosphere with substances that will hopefully block sunshine and slow the planet’s warming trend. Brin strongly feels that this is foolish and possibly quite dangerous. He favors the simpler tactic of “fertilizing” the desert parts of the oceans where little life currently exists, increasing both food production for people and counteracting greenhouse gases with increased CO2 absorption. Please excuse me if I don’t have these descriptions right – I didn’t take notes.
Here’s the kind of thing you see in the halls at an SF convention – with a Japanese slant.
Many Japanese women wore kimonos.
Here’s a robot flashing his private parts in public.

Next I went to see a screening of the two pilots for ArchiTECHS, which was a proposed TV series for the History Channel in which David Brin and a panel of technical and design people would each week tackle a problem and have 48 hours to come up with solutions. In the first one (which we actually saw second), a retired general asked them to redesign the Hummer, since it is getting old and obsolete, and was not designed for the kind of use it now sees in Iraq and elsewhere. The team came up with a really cool design (all practical and using current technology) that used a small diesel engine primarily as a generator and used four electric motors mounted with each wheel. The wheels used a design from the Mars rover which doesn’t involve inflated rubber. It had lots of other improvements, including a clever shield design on the underside that should help protect from explosives hidden in roadways.

The second pilot found a slightly altered team visiting the New York Fire Department and coming up with ways to help fight fires in high-rise buildings. They came up with a whole raft of things, some pretty far-fetched, some very down-to-earth.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, but apparently the History Channel didn’t find it to their liking, so it remains an interesting might-have-been. It’s apparently been shown a couple times in odd late night time slots.

After that I walked back to the hotel, and in one of the malls, there was something odd and noisy going on.
It was some sort of promotion for an energy drink, and they had erected a climbing wall and kids were trying to get to the top.
Not far from there was a familiar-looking restaurant.
After dark, the Ferris wheel displays a light show. The patterns change, making spirals and all sorts of elaborate shapes.

I got back to the hotel, checked my email (no work!) and looked over the pictures I’d taken. I had music playing, but eventually I realized that I was hearing something else from outside. I looked out my window and saw that some musicians were performing outside the train station. I grabbed the camera and went down to check it out.
First up were two guys. They were pretty good, with melodic rock that reminded me a little of The Pillows (a Japanese band that will not be familiar to most Americans). When they finished their set, another group started playing.
This is Kaede and a guitarist. She was very good, with a strong, soulful voice (though she didn’t sound like she was trying to imitate American styles). She did three or four songs, and the other band resumed.
Meanwhile, Kaede chatted with bystanders and sold a few CDs.

Japanese time machine #1

Starting music: The Allies – “Emma Peel”

Here’s an entry catching up on some Japan pictures I didn’t post in the entries about the trip. First, for people curious about cars around the world...
The Nissan March (AKA Micra in most of the rest of the world).
Toyota makes the Fielder (AKA Corolla, apparently).
A cute little delivery van.
This shot is from the Tawaramichi Kitchen District. This ordinary store is painted with a nifty trompe l’oeil design with a dinosaur – how could I not take a picture?
If you refer to my previous posts, you’ll notice that the Shiodome area features a great amount of public art. These odd spotted people-things are a recurring theme. I like their whimsical appearance, but they seem incongruous when positioned next to a lovely naturalistic statue.
There’s art inside as well. These “rocks” are suspended from the ceiling, and below them is a large matching piece on the floor.
And look: Seattle is famous for soup! All these years living there, and I never knew.
I mentioned that people gather to take pictures of Howl’s Moving Clock.
This is me and my friend Black Jack in Kyoto.
In my post about the Studio Ghibli Museum, I mentioned a Russian-titled film they were involved with. We also saw materials about it at the Anime Fair. From the little bits we saw, the entire film is done in this dreamy watercolor style. From the descriptions I’ve read, Petrov actually paints his cels with oils on glass to create his films, but to my eye they resemble watercolor paintings. I’ve edited the previous post to have more information. You can watch the Japanese trailer here. You can see why it keeps winning awards at festivals.

Ending music: T.Rex – “Jeepster”