here come the guns

Currently, I only own three, but I would like more. Guns are what we give up fireworks for. We trade in our BB guns for .22 caliber rifles, and bigger and better as it goes. We carry the .22 caliber pistol out of the dudes dad's nightstand and shoot at Killdeer at the Lagoon. Dude loads his Dad's gun and puts it back.

Today, the US Supreme Court reversed its path and enumerated rights never before enumerated. Yes, George Bush and succeeding administrations can conduct legal warrant-less eavesdropping of your PC and telecom communications but YOU, YOU CAN KEEP A GUN IN YOUR HOME!

I was going to, anyway.

Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable

I have it on good authority that these are some of the best audio "dedicated link" cables available. (I know this is more interesting to a majority of males and less so to our better half, but maybe just stay with me. It gets better.) Though this appears to be an ordinary data cable, like the one that runs from the cable company modem to your PC, it is thicker than your average data cable and has an artful exterior patterned in shades of dark and pale blue. And, it's only $499.99? (That's a full $1.00 off the MFRP, bucko.)
This product offering is such a joke in terms of price/value that it soon lead to internet ridicule. Some of the best you'll ever read is at amazon.com.

Here's what Denon, makers of the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable said:

Get the purest digital audio you've ever experienced from multi-channel DVD and CD playback through your Denon home theater receiver with the AK-DL1 dedicated cable. Made of high-purity copper wire, it's designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration and helps stabilize the digital transmission from occurrences of jitter and ripple. A tin-bearing copper alloy is used for the cable's shield while the insulation is made of a fluoropolymer material with superior heat resistance, weather resistance, and anti-aging properties. The connector features a rounded plug lever to prevent bending or breaking and direction marks to indicate correct direction for connecting cable.

Then check out a sample of reviews (want to read them all?):)

A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the "directional markings" on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews.

I recently bought a few of these cables and began using them. The first thing I noticed was how much fluffier and better the cable was than normal cables. Upon breaking a piece off and loading it into my pipe, the cable had a strong skunky smell. When I finally lit the cable, It hit me with an intense wave, which immediately affected my auditory senses... Everything sounded much fuller and much more interesting. I would recommend this cable for smokers everywhere....

My wife and I have been trying to conceive for almost a decade. We've tried every form of therapy, artificial insemination, and some other, more questionable methods. Then I saw this product. The Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. I just KNEW that it was the answer to our prayers. When they arrived my wife gave me the look of a defeated woman with nothing but a feigned hope. But I had faith!
That night we wrapped ourselves in the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable and tried one last time for a child. Nine months later our daughter was born. Thank you SO MUCH Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable.

Read More

janeane, janeane

Just take in how comedienne Jane Ann (Janeane) Garofalo looks at me, Douglas Teever in this artist's rendition of our metro-buco lifestyle ("metropolitan bucolic"). It's a look of rapture. She is literally ensconced in the transformative moment; like a cucumber in a vinegar and garlic bath, soon to emerge a pickle. Whoops, that thought makes me want a Weinerschnitzel Chicago style hot dog and a Keystone Light. I can farm tomorrow.

fast eddie

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.


But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

Back when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Dr. Barack could have taken positions on politically uncomfortable issues. But Fast Eddie Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times. From time to time, he threw his voting power under the truck.

Dr. Barack said he could no more disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than disown his own grandmother. Then the political costs of Rev. Wright escalated and Fast Eddie Obama threw Wright under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have been a workhorse senator. But primary candidates don’t do tough votes, so Fast Eddie Obama threw the workhorse duties under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don’t go in for unscripted free-range conversations. Fast Eddie Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.

And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.

The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.

I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

jeez ... who farted?

Was it you? John McCain, Barack Obama. Me?
I think it was McCain. And I think it was a sub-specie of a Navy specialty, the plaintive 'songbird'. Among the ranks of the most silent but deadliest SBD's. Or it could have been a "Carrier" where an intense burst is necessary to get the thing aloft. Or maybe even, in honor of his forefathers, an "Admiral". Like a canon and capable of great destruction to life and property.
Of course, it could have been Obama. Producing perhaps a succession of soft peddle SBD's that work best in a comfortably sturdy leather chair or airline cabin seat. The persuasive, yet alluring, "is there a female in the room" squeaker burst. Or, considering he is a smoker and correspondingly a cougher, the wild and uncontrollable "cigarette fart", sometimes masked by the din of the cough.

Maybe it was just the dog (and I don't mean Hillary).

Who fed it those damn Doritos anyway?

any other illness

The Vodka Chronicles
By MAUREEN DOWD
John McCain’s saucy mother says her boy was always a scamp and a hell-raiser. And one of the senator’s great charms is that he wore those appellations proudly.
So it was quite disheartening to see a McCain spokeswoman telling The Associated Press, in a story about how Cindy McCain helped her husband’s political career bloom with her multimillion-dollar fortune from the family beer business, that the senator is a virtual teetotaler.
“Senator McCain rarely, if ever, drinks alcohol,” Jill Hazelbaker averred.
McCain’s pals know him as a man who enjoys libations of vodka with little green cocktail olives. Over the years, at dinners with reporters, [...] he had the habit of ordering one double vodka and sipping it slowly. And there was that famous Hillary-McCain Estonian drink-off in 2004, when Hillary instigated a vodka shot contest and McCain agreed with alacrity (even though he later offered a sketchy denial).
Maybe now that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee, his campaign wants to put his vices in a vise and sanitize the wild side of the man whose nicknames in high school were “Punk,” “Nasty” and “McNasty.”
Next they’ll deny he likes to gamble in Vegas (“I’ll put $50,000 on Bomb Iran, with 3-to-1 odds”), socialize with liberals and lash out at people who annoy him. (As a toddler, he had “tiny” rages. “I would go off in a mad frenzy and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious,” he wrote. His parents would drop him into a bathtub of icy water.)
If his campaign is bowdlerizing, let’s hope it stops before he’s a bland McNice.
Americans, after all, don’t trust candidates without any vices. They got turned off by the picture-perfect Mitt Romney, whose khakis were never wrinkled and whose hair stayed eerily in place even while he was jogging in a campaign commercial.
Do we really need McCain obfuscating on drinking, and Obama putting up a smoke screen on smoking? Ever since Chicago reporters followed the up-and-coming Obama and saw him flicking his ashes and butts out the windows of moving vehicles, the senator has had a testy relationship with the press about his addictions to cigarettes and littering. (Obama, wrote one reporter on his blog, was “one of those reprehensible nicotine addicts who seems to believe that the world is his ashtray.”)
When Chris Matthews tried to pin down Obama on when he’d had his last cigarette, he radiated guilt, even though he dryly noted that “having your wife say on ‘60 Minutes’ that if you see Barack with a cigarette, let me know’ was a heck of a deterrent.
“I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it and then was able to get back on,” the candidate admitted. “But it is a struggle like everything else.”
In his book and last week’s bio-tour, McCain painted himself as a cool bad boy. He was a girl-loving, authority-defying, plane-crashing Top Gun.
In his memoir, Obama played up his vices to depict himself as a cool bad boy, too, recalling that he had smoked pot and done “a little blow.”

But now the two men are sticking to the straight and narrow. Everyone may imagine that Obama and his press corps spend all their time quaffing Champagne and celebrating the astonishment of his very being. But the candidate is boringly abstemious — and reporters traveling with him find him aloof. On a 2005 trip to Russia, he priggishly requested that his vodka shot glass be filled with water.

So our choice is between a boozer or a pothead. Not really a difficult decision. As Hootenanny Editor in Chief, I'll take one of each.

gonzo

she's lost control

I haven't had a cigarette since November 2007 or a bong hit since January 2008 but I'm about to score some Mexican so I have something to do on evenings and weekends now that gasoline has hit $4.00 a gallon.
This shit-storm is out of hand. Does it really matter who the next President is? Can't see it. Pull the troops out of Iraq and leave Iran alone. No effect.
We're screwed. Get used to it. She's lost control. Go to the links on your right, check out Joy Division. Think I'll go get some Panda Express. It's within walking distance. Which is now about 5 miles ...

Rosebud

As the price of gasoline and diesel continue their stratospheric rise rural Rosebudians revolt and attack US Government Predator Drone overflights. Subsisting on wild potatoes and cattail roots, skin colored with chokecherries and river mud, overflight pictures capture an attack in progress by three Rosebud natives in South Dakota on Thursday, May 29. Long deprived of their traditional libations of Budweiser and Thunderbird Fortified White Port, Rosebud natives are brewing a powerful concoction based on prairie cactus and alkali. The resulting substance is a psychotropic stimulant with hallucinogenic properties. The body paint seems to be a bizarre response to subtle aftereffects of the "drug".
Gasoline and diesel prices are the primary catalyst, reports Gibson Parker, US Department of Agriculture spokesman.

"Before, when gas was reasonably priced, many of these folk traveled by auto to nearby markets in Martin and Kadoka. Now, with prices nearing all time highs, many can't afford either groceries or liquor, including discount beers like Keystone and Busch. Many have reverted to pre-alcohol and high fat, high carb diets to uncultivated dirt crops like wild potatoes, turnips and bush berries. This diet seems to have led to a 'Lord of the Flies' approach to community interaction."

The apparent outbreak of ineffective violence has lead Democratic Candidate Barack Obama to cancel a Sunday campaign event in Martin. The Clinton campaign insists a reservation visit will go forward and former President Bill Clinton has pledged his intention to don full body paint and loincloth and to entertain the advances of any tribal leader offering relations with female tribal members, painted black or red. Candidate Hilary Clinton will remain in Rapid City during the ordeal.
Federal officials, it has been noted, will continue overflights. Lieutenant General Ron Facemeyer, USAF, has pledged to avoid unnecessary bombing or firing on painted natives until after the South Dakota primary. "Then, all bets are off." Facemeyer stated.

laveen

I rolled into Laveen Thursday night with Noel, Raoul and a nameless Nicarauguan chick who smiled a lot and got my toilets so clean your could have made Gazpacho in them and eaten it straight off the floor. But they had already packed the spoons. And I was low on peppers.
Today, I made a quick check of the Gila River Indian Reservation. Clearly, they ain't gettin' no casino money and trash pickup seems to have been left to the wind and elements. The roads are littered with couches and old washing machines but once you get down to the Gila River and PIR (Phoenix International Raceway) things pick up quite nicely with some incredible adobe houses tucked back into the foothills.
Little later tonight I think I'll head up 51 and grab me a Mexican watermelon and some home-made tamales. Then head down to the Spur Lounge on Baseline to check on the local fillies. It just got hot today, so I expect I'll see a tank-top or two. Maybe bring one of them pork rinds home with me and cavort a bit.

for mom on mother's day

Why Mother's Day?
By Garrison Keillor
The last time I witnessed a woman becoming a mother, it wasn't anything like the frilly sentiments of Mother's Day. She lay on her back, perspiring heavily and yelling, "Oh my God, why did you do this to me? I'll never forgive you in a hundred years. I hope you hurt like this someday. Give me another epidural, you sadists. And get this thing out of me!" and looking up at me as if she were burning at the stake and I had lit the fire. And when the Infant appeared and was placed on the Madonna's chest, she said, "What in the world am I supposed to do with that?"
It begins in innocence. Music is playing, the night smells of lilacs, she asks if he would like to come in for a minute, and he does, and little does she know what cataclysm awaits her inside: the loss of individuality as she joins the Holy Order of Maternity.
Mothers were, at one time, young women with Possibilities who might have taken a different route and become glamorous and powerful figures in Size 2 dresses and instead found themselves cleaning up excrement and jiggling colicky babies to get them to stop screaming. They hardly ever get to London anymore or have time to read James Joyce. They sit down to dinner with adults and feel brain-dead. A bouquet of flowers hardly seems compensation enough. How about a million dollars and a house in the south of France?
My mother appears in a photograph of five young women in white summer dresses walking hand-in-hand, grinning, on a country lane near Cottage Grove, Minn., in 1932 when she was 17, not long before she met my father, and they all look so fresh and happy, as if in a careless paradise all their own. She is willowy, shy and beautiful and she might've modeled evening gowns at Dayton's Sky Room and maybe been spotted by a Hollywood scout and wound up in pictures, playing the village girl who charms the world-weary tycoon stranded in Littleville by the blizzard. Instead, she became a suburban pioneer, making a home in a muddy cornfield, putting up the stewed tomatoes and canned beans every fall, raising six children, slogging through bouts of mumps and flu, whomping up big Christmases, fishing the laundry out of the washing machine and putting it through the wringer and hanging it on the line. Is that what the smiling girl of 1932 had in mind?
The cruel injustice of motherhood is that, out of devotion to her brood, she sacrifices so much of her own life that her children grow up to find her a little boring in comparison to the maiden aunt who is a little rebellious and more fun to be around, whereas Mom is just the lady who runs the vacuum. As Erma Bombeck said, the kids walk in and ask her, "Is anybody home?"
But she loves you. You could come home with snakes tattooed on your face and she still would see the good in you. Most great men were mama's boys. She encouraged them long before anybody else could see any talent there.
Your mother is on top of the situation. Your father has a hard time remembering your birthday or even your Christian name, but your mother knows you by scent, thanks to years of doing your laundry. She knows when you're in trouble. And you will get into deep trouble someday. Count on it. Someone will file a lawsuit against you and subpoena your e-mail and it will all come flooding out, your dark secrets, your nefarious dealings, and your friends will cross the street to avoid you and your brothers and sisters will fade into the woodwork, but your mother will still love you. Like an old lioness, she'll come running even if you're 2,000 miles away.
That is why you pay homage to the old lady on Mother's Day. You entered this cold world causing her more pain than she thought possible and now she won't ever give up on you. Those old ladies you see being wheeled onto airliners are the mothers of children facing imminent indictment for terrible things. Mama will be in the courtroom for you, baby. She will look the jury in the eye and her look may get you acquitted.
Buy her something nice, like a set of gold ingots. Or a black car with a chauffeur. She's your mama. At least you could write her a note.

© 2008 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, INC.

radiohead

last flowers until the hospital

run with kittens

blue flame

the kooks

raccoon dogs

The Raccoon Dog is a member of the canid group (which is Latin for Doggus Fakeus or “fake dog” or "fuckin' dog" family in the US which includes dogs, some wolves, metro-coyotes, rabies-free foxes and edible tree squirrels) and is indigenous to east Asia, the Dolomines and the US central west. It is not a true dog. It will not come when it’s called.
The raccoon dog is named for its superficial resemblance to the raccoon. When they live in the arctic their fur changes color to white so it can blend in with its surroundings. US dwellers develop a distinct “mossy oak” camouflage coat. Or appear to be wearing Carhartt gear. The rest of the time, they resemble raccoons.
Raccoon Dogs are native or have been introduced to Korea, Malaysia Japan and southwestern South Dakota and a small ranch near Valentine NE. Average adult head and body length is about 2 ft and weight ranges from 9 to 22 lbs. Average litters are large, up to 15 or more pups. Longevity is 3–4 years in the wild and up to 11 years in captivity. They are found in both plains and mountainous regions and are especially common in woodlands and peasant villages in the northeast quadrant of Pennington County in South Dakota.
Native raccoon dog populations have declined in recent years due to hunting, fur trade and fur trapping, urbanization, an increase of animals associated with human civilization such as bars and laundromats, and diseases that may be transmitted between them like cirrhosis and AIDS.
Like many other canids, they are omnivorous. However, their diets are atypically diverse, consisting of invertebrates, Big Mac cheeseburgers, spotted lake frogs, lizards, rodents and birds along with steamed kale, black eyed peas with seeds, berries and California cherrie tomatoes and fast-food salads with bacon bits and "Paul Newman's Own" salad dressing. Those living near the ocean will also eat crabs and scavenged marine life. Those living near stockponds relish turtles and bullheads. Rare Pennington County raccoon dogs subsist almost entire on beer, French fries and peanut butter (chunky style).
Raccoon dogs are not generally known as heavy drinkers though the Baltic dogs often indulge in their favorite grain or potato-based vodka. Their binges are community based and quite insular often relegated to a small island, peninsula or gorge. US raccoon dogs are more public. Their drinking, often not much more than beer, often results in either a riot, a gradual realization of tomorrow's tasks or the harmless slaughter of other small animals with a high powered center-fire rifle and spotlight.
Raccoon Dogs are secretive (Masons) and not very aggressive (Mormons); like Masons they prefer to hide or scream rather than fight, and play dead to avoid animals that will eat them. Like Mormons they become physically and sexually mature after one year and live in "compounds". Both groups will eat food from your fridge. Neither will ever clean your bathroom.
The Raccoon Dog is the only fake dog to go into torpor through the cold months. This is thought to be a result of the annual Canadian "skunk" harvest. Canadian skunk has replaced Thai as the weed of choiceand even Asian raccoon dogs are sensing the trend. On another note, the raccoon dog is also unusual in that its curved claws enable it to climb trees; the only other canid with this ability is the gray fox. It does not bark and it turns its tail into an inverted U to express dominance. The Raccoon Dog's teeth are small for a canid but can kill a child or a cat just like that.

ghosts

Says Reznor:

This music arrived unexpectedly as the result of an experiment. The rules were as follows: 10 weeks, no clear agenda, no overthinking, everything driven by impulse. Whatever happens during that time gets released as... something.

The team: Atticus Ross, Alan Moulder and myself with some help from Alessandro Cortini, Adrian Belew and Brian Viglione. Rob Sheridan collaborated with Artist in Residence (A+R) to create the accompanying visual and physical aesthetic.

We began improvising and let the music decide the direction. Eyes were closed, hands played instruments and it began. Within a matter of days it became clear we were on to something, and a lot of material began appearing. What we thought could be a five song EP became much more. I invited some friends over to join in and we all enjoyed the process of collaborating on this.

The end result is a wildly varied body of music that we're able to present to the world in ways the confines of a major record label would never have allowed - from a 100% DRM-free, high-quality download, to the most luxurious physical package we've ever created.

fightin' five year olds

20

hootenanny tv

Animation:

workin' out

Picked up this new-fangled work out bike from the Gilbert Sports Authority. It's got a built in neck brace. There are two more at the store so if you want one I can get you one and ship it to you. Let me know.

my bro in china

Travel dispatches. I didn't know it until I got the first email, but elder brother is in China. He has been writing via a wireless device. Here are the results:

Friday, April 4, 2008.
This is cool! I am standing on the Great Wall of China, built over a thousand and more years up through the 1600s. In a break from meetings in Beijing, Frank and I have escaped the city for a couple of hours to come see the part of the Wall at Badaling. It is amazingly steep, with steps that vary between an inch and twenty inches in height; I have no idea how I am going to get back down.

We arrived yesterday afternoon at the new international terminal built for the 2008 Olympics; it just opened last week. Once you get through immigration, you have to take a train to reach baggage claim, which seems like it is 2 or 3 miles away. Otherwise it was easy to navigate. Our taxi driver did not know how to get to the hotel; fortunately, I had the telephone number and he called to find out we were literally a block away.

After a short rest at the hotel, we met one of our contacts and were taken to dinner at a restaurant serving Szechuan food. It was VERY spicy. Frank had to order rice to cool his mouth down. I drank LOTS of beer. But the food was incredibly delicious. We started with a tea-smoked deep fried fish, woodear mushrooms stewed with Szechuan chilis and a silken poached chicken with a burning hot chili sauce. The others were impressed with my ability to use chopsticks (being the only "foreigner" at the table).

After the "cold" (actually, they were room temperature) dishes, we moved on to a crispy shredded beef dish with shredded chilis and scallions, a thinly sliced beef and chili dish cooked in a chili oil by dropping heated stones into the oil and a fish dish cooked the same way with Szechuan peppercorns. We also had a superb dish of tofu in a minced pork and chili sauce. We topped it all off with a bowl of dan dan noodles, noodles served in a chili and sesame sauce. I don't know how Frank managed to eat rice with all that. Ricardo and & Celeste will remember the extra spicy minced chicken dish we had at Telephone Thai a couple of weeks ago and understand when I say that none of the dishes we had were less spicy than that chicken dish at Telephone Thai. My mouth was burning last night, but all I can think of today is how I would like to repeat that dinner tonight.

Well, more to come later. I've got to figure out how to climb back down steps that are 20 inches high, without falling down the mountainside. If you'd rather not hear about my wandering about, let me know and I'll leave you off further emails.

Best regards,
Mark

Saturday, April 5, 2008
And the whole story at the Great Wall involves a camel: Should Have Been Obvious principle #1 - riding a camel is not a good idea. SHBO principle #2 - even a two-humped camel (and possibly, especially a two-humped camel). SHBO principle #3 - especially if you don't really fit between the humps. SHBO principle #4 - and don't even think how you're going to get off the creature. Well, at least I gathered a small crowd and they all thought it was pretty funny, even if I was having a pretty hard time seeing the humor of it. Facts to pay attention to: camels are taller than they seem; humps are not solid; a stepladder is an unwieldy and somewhat impractical means to get on and off a camel. I thought they knelt down for you, but apparently not this fellow. Pictures were taken but whether I'll show them to anybody has yet to be decided. At least I made it down those steep steps of the Great Wall before tackling the Camel and the Stepladder.

Later that day:
Well, one of them, at least (there are a number of them). I made it down those steps at the Great Wall in good enough time that we had time to stop at the Yongle emperor's tomb on our way back to Beijing.

On a side note, I am not sure I will survive the traffic here. I have yet to see any rules being followed. You just creep your way across an intersection with traffic coming at you from all directions. Everybody honks and nobody stops for anything. Thank God we have a driver or I would have been dead long ago. I see police everywhere but they don't seem to have much impact. It's exciting and frightening at the same time to see a huge bus come within an inch of your window, honking continuously, trying to force your driver to give him the right of way.

Back to the tomb of the Yongle emperor. The buildings are magnificent and situated in quiet parkland at the foot of a mountain. All quiet, no honking, no exhaust fumes. The smog is unbelievable here; the only difference I remember in Mexico City where it was awful is that it was blackish brown there, while it is a ghostly gray here. But it is everywhere like a smelly fog; it will be hard to complain about Houston.

But now, back to Beijing and more business, with another dinner tonight. Blair, you gave me your cold AGAIN. I will remember this! Thank goodness I brought cold medication with me.

Best regards,
Mark

Another fantastic dinner, this one of small dishes in a restaurant with the menu entirely and only in Chinese, even the numbers. Thank goodness it was on neither my shoulders nor Frank's either to order or to decipher the payment required.

We went with a charming gentleman and his beautiful wife, who speaks good English and is head of the technical division of a state-owned company that sells drilling rigs all over the world. They were a delight to be with and decided to take us to a small restaurant on Houhai lake in the Yangfang hutong district where the Chinese leadership lives. Hutongs are the walled courtyard homes of old Beijing where the princes and other relatives of the emperor lived along winding alleyways and of course this district on the lakeside is one of the more popular, with courtyard homes selling in the tens of millions of dollars.

The taxi let us out at the opposite end of the lake so we had an interesting walk along the lakeside, which is fronted by one neonlit bar after another, each with its touts standing I'm front making every effort to get you to stop at their establishment. One even had a sign out front that began in English, "Hey, handsome boy and beautiful girl . . . ". That was all I could read as we passed by. It was a beautiful night with all of the lights around the lake, and the walk was pleasant, but I had definitely worked up an appetite by the time we finally reached the restaurant 45 minutes after the cab dropped us off.

Well, I must prepare for my next engagement, so will continue later.

Best regards,
Mark