TOP FIVE: Signs at our local Police Station

Here it is, gang, the long-awaited second installment of the Top Five.  We have to register with the po-po here, so while we were waiting for forty minutes, we took a gander at the various signs they had posted around.  We tried to take pictures but were quickly yelled at.  We also didn't have time to get the actual Chinese definitions for most of them because they accused us of loitering.  We are going to try and do that for future Top Fives.  Now, on to the list:

#5 - Hard-working Room

#4 - Mediate the Room in Dispute

#3 - Detective's Long Office of Punishment

#2 - The Populace Appraises the Box (from a suggestion box)

#1 - The Public Squadron Punishment Detects the Room

Feel free to comment on entries you think should be higher or lower than they are.  We've taken a suggestion from Nate and are currently working on the first installment of "Guess Which Story is True."  That's all for now.

Jono and Sam

NEW FEATURE: Deeweedee of the Week!

This is an experiment, so I'd appreciate feedback on whether or not people like it.  Basically, we live next door to a movie theater that routinely plays American B-(or C- or D-)movies for about $1.40, so we have taken to attending some showings.  They are all just DVDs that the theater owner bought for $0.40 and he is turning a profit by selling one ticket, but that's okay.  You can sneak beer in with a backpack so it's worth it.  My plan is to write short plot summaries followed by a list of superlatives.  Here goes:

Title: The Hive

Plot Summary: An ant colony on a small island in the Pacific begins to attack and eat humans.  Leading experts are brought in but nobody seems to be able to control the ants.  Several battles ensue, but our hero soon discovers that the ants have actually become conscious.  They can form giant arms and other diverse figures (more on that to come).  They even link together and form a living computer (with each ant acting as a binary transmitter, yes for 1 or no for 0) and try to parlay with the humans.  They want half the island for themselves, and only when that happens will they leave the humans alone.  In the end, the ants all get blown up and the world is safe once again.

Actors you may have seen in any other movie: None.

Other people in the theater: Two.

Worst special effect:  The extermination rays used by the good guys that look a little worse than the ones in Ghostbusters (1984).

Most implausible moment: An ant crawls in a guy's ear and begins biting his neurons to affect his thinking and control him.

Best line spoken by the Prime Minister of the island while slamming his fist vehemently on a table:  "We will not negotiate with ants!"

Worst line trying to establish past love connection between two characters out of the blue: "Heh, I guess we're not backpacking around Europe anymore..."

Best special effect:  The climactic scene of the movie has the main characters fighting a giant ant...

Wait for it...

Made out of ants.

If any of you have a chance to catch this one, I would definitely recommend it.

-Jono and Sam

Sing-gah-poh

First of all, a thousand apologies to all you dedicated readers out there.  We've had hell trying to get internet at our house and getting our shit together to update this thing.  We're gonna write a few entries in the next couple of days and then we hope to get back to a semi-regular schedule.

First, a few funny stories from our trip to Singapore.  First of all, it is a country where chewing gum is illegal and bringing in drugs can get you the death penalty, in case you didn't know.  A good indication of how rigid their society is: they were building a new terminal at their airport for cheap airlines and had a competition to name it, with the first prize being 5000 bucks.  After tough deliberation, they settled on Budget Terminal.  Somebody won money for coming up with that name (credit to Kelly for the story).

There are high Chinese and Indian populations on the island and they don't seem to get along very well.  The first Chinese cab driver we got in Little India said that Indian guys are like animals and to never let a girl walk around alone in that area of town.  They will grope her and molest her and all sorts of good stuff like that.  The next day, we had an Indian cab driver who told us that all the Chinese people care about is money.  'Money, money, money.  A Chinese man will kill you for money,'  he told us excitedly.  Good to see people living together harmoniously...

Also the Singaporean accent might be the silliest English accent on the planet (for a country where it's an official language).  I'll try and find a youtube video with good examples, but the title of this entry is a pretty good approximation of how they say their own nation's name.  Even Kelly agrees.

That's all for now, more updates soon...

TOP FIVE: Wine labels

Allow me to introduce a new running segment that we will feature sporadically at The DeeWeeDee Shop: Top Five. They will usually be translation errors, ranging from peoples' English names to t-shirt labels and store names. The first installment is labels from Yunnan wines that we found in Zhongdian (also known as Shangrila). Without further ado:

#5 - Occasionally drinking this wine is good to your health.

#4 - Snow area beauty naked barley red wine

#3 - Tasting best and delicious production, Elaborate brewing and classical making. The wine was made of best grapes in world, and with internal advanced techics. It is clarity and has full-bodied fruit-smell, vinosity and long aftertaste.

#2 - Constantly drinking this wine is good to your health.

#1 - It is a good wine from heaven and souls. That can read our happiness and sadness, like a bosom friend bringing up warmth. It lets the cheers burst out of our minds.

Olympic Gold

For those of you that were unaware, Chinese media coverage is generally biased, and that is especially true now that the Olympics are on. They weight the coverage towards events that Chinese do well in and the commentary is always completely one-sided. You would never, for example, see Badminton or Women's team Archery on during primetime in the US. Today, though, they reached a new level of absurdity. There are four channels in China that are airing the Olympics. This morning, at one moment, they were showing a THIRD replay of the Women's 10m Air Pistol event, which was won by a Chinese woman, on one channel, a replay of the medal ceremony on a second channel, and an interview with the gold medalist on a third channel. A full 75% of the Olympic coverage at that point in time was dedicated to an event that I had never even heard of until today.

We'll be bringing you more on the Olympics in the coming weeks; it's all pretty ridiculous on this end.

Beep Beep

Sam's stalling a bit on his latest post, so I thought I would put a couple short ones up for all the fans out there. His post will tell about the camping portion of our trip, but this is the harrowing account of our bus ride back from Lugu Lake. It's a fairly mountainous area and the roads are usually slow and windy, and this one was no exception. The constant changing of direction makes reading difficult, at least for me, and my iPod was dead after 18 days on the road, so I mostly entertained myself by staring out the window or straining to catch a bit of Tha Carter III from Sam's headphones.
This was fine for a while, but halfway through the seven hour trip a small box on the dashboard beeped for about five seconds then went off. We debated what it was (possibly a radar detector) but couldn't come to a consensus. It soon started beeping again, this time for longer. The driver looked frustrated and whacked it a couple of times to no avail before hitting a button on the side and stopping the beeping. This only appeared to be a delay switch of some kind, because the noise kept coming back, more and more frequently and for longer periods of time. The driver was content to ignore it for a few minutes, hoping it would go away, but his anger would build to the point where he would hit it again (this never did anything), mash a few other buttons and eventually submit to the only apparent solution: the delay button. This bought us only a minute or two each time. Sam and our friend Seth both had music players to drown out the beeping, and I did my best to ignore it, but a prolonged, high-pitched sound can only be ignored for so long.
After forty minutes or so of this, I went and looked at the box for some sort of power cord that could be unplugged. The driver informed me that it was impossible to unplug or turn off the device. I tried to point out that this was impossible, that anything electronic can be turned off somehow, but he was adamant. My quick investigation seemed to confirm this fact and I'd left my hammer at home, so I resigned myself to my fate. Soon after this, Sam kindly lent me his iPod to help maintain my sanity, and as the soothing bars of "Got Money" drifted to my ears, the beeping promptly stopped. I didn't understand what the driver said when I asked him what it was. I'd like to think that it had no function at all other than to drive me crazy. If so, it was well on its way to accomplishing that goal. By the time the bus stopped for construction 15 minutes later, my ears were still ringing.

The rest of the trip was blissfully beep-free.

One activity, two interpretations