Sleep, Must Sleeeeeeeep….

Did I say I’d be back blogging on Sunday? I meant I’d be back on Saturday night and would spend almost all of Sunday sleeping.

By the way, adding to my distinction as the only person at the original Woodstock who couldn’t find anyone willing to get him high, I am now the only tourist to Bangkok who couldn’t find the red light district. Or, possibly I found it and am too naive to have recognized it. In any case, frankly, I’m just as glad…

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Small Bangkoks Loosely joined

I’m a mess at the moment. I’m post-jetlagged the way post-modern is post modern. I am deconstructed, non-totalized and without grounding.

In the most quotidian terms: I’m in a combination laundry and internet cafe in Bangkok. I was going to be spending a “leisurely” 1.5 days seeing the city, but that got pared down to .5 when a family emergency cropped up. (Hint: Email from a relative entitled “Everyone is all right” means most definitely that at least one person is not all right.)

I got to this cafe by leaping out of a tricycle taxi at a red light after remembering that tourists shouldn’t take up any offers to be transported somewhere. And there was this cafe: 5 machines, air conditioning enough to cool my sweat but not to stop it, and actually not any laundry in evidence. I’m 75% through a can of Singha beer which may be the best thing I have ever tasted. Also, I haven’t eaten in many many hours. Got a little buzz on, actually. Whoops, 90% through.

100% through. Ok, Halley, yes, we love one another. The whole blogging linkified group of us. And I’m not saying that just because AKMA wrote positively about my book. although I certainly would have said so if it would have gotten him to write positively about my book. It’s true. But let’s just acknowledge it in a manly way and move on.

Speaking of manly moving on’s, my next stop is Bangkok’s red light district. You know me: an insatiable swinger. Oh yes. Then, Saturday night, I’ll be home for a week before heading back to China for two weeks. So. no blogging until Sunday. Try to carry on without me…

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Driving from the Phuket Airport

Notice: Reading the following constitutes accepting the PEULA (Poetic End User License Agreement) that reads in its entirety: “We must forgive one another’s bad poetry.”
While driving from the Phuket airport in Thailand, having not slept in way too long.:

That the dirt is orange
That the hillside retains the shape
    of the shovels that cut into it
The the trees foliate only one branch deep
That the green covers the hills like tastebuds
That the clearings are ringed by trees
    like stayed dancers ready to step forward
That there is color where there oughtn’t be.
Is any of this the difference
that brings the foreign so close?

I’ve seen so little of Thailand so far, but I love it already.

PS: Basically the same presentation at yesterday’s in Beijing, but this time the audience laughed all the way through. Go figure. (No translators this time.)

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Suppose they gave a speech…

…and no one laughed? I just spoke to 1,200 IT and business managers in Beijing at a bigtime IBM event here. I ranted, I chanted, I preached, I testified. No visible response. Of course, I did all this mediated by simultaneous translators. Afterwards my hosts assured me that the presentation was in fact well received. The evidence? No one left. Apparently Chinese audiences aren’t shy about heading for the safety of the hallways when they don’t like a speaker.

But of course, it isn’t all about me. The important question is what sense this Chinese audience is making of the Net revolution. Hard to tell when you can’t speak their language. But IBM certainly is stressing the effect e-ness will have on the way business is conducted. (The only English word used in their overview pump-up-the-crowd video was “linux,” complete with animated penguin.) And, they apparently like Cluetrain enough to invite one of its authors here.

I have to run to catch a plane. Tomorrow it’s another IBM conference, in Thailand.

Can I please sleep soon? Thank you.

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More Small Pieces stuff

Jonathan Peterson says some nice things about the kids’ version of Small Pieces.

And there’s an interview with me at FrontWheelDrive that Tom was good enough to blog.

There’s also a notice/review at TechDirections.

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Small Reviews Loosely Joined

Small Pieces gets a thoughtful, positive, brief review at frontwheeldrive.com.

By the way, I’ve been hearing from a bunch of you that you like the (free) children’s version of my book. thanks! Spread the word…

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China Notes

I’ll admit it. I was cranky last night. That 23-hour plane ride seems to
have soured me just a tad. That and the fact that between my vegetarianism
and half-hearted Passover observance, I basically couldn’t eat anything
except the mints. So, please forgive my lack of graciousness. The hotel is
in fact fabulous. Sumptuous. The people are courteous and seemingly
friendly. (I always assume hotel staffers are in fact highly resentful of
their “guests.”) Yes, it’s faux Western, and hearing Chopin and Mozart in
the lobby still does strike me as just plain weird, but most American
hotels are faux luxurious, imitating a British version of upper class life
as surely as Ralph Lauren clothing does.

This morning I got to walk around Beijing for a couple of hours. I can’t
tell you why I feel so at home here. Now I have to head in to a rehearsal
of my speech tomorrow. I’ve already flagged about five slides that could be
culturally obnoxious – a 9/11 reference, some mocking of kenmore.com, the
casual use of a ying-yang symbol, etc. The real worries are the ones that
you never thought might poke ’em in the eye. And for sure none of the jokes
will work.

Gotta go.

Found Paste

I’m back in the Internet cafe again. By accident, I typed ^V and found
the following bit of text pasted into my text:

Nothing much in mind, a question which part of Eu you are
from, and preferation in the way you wrote, and yes, a question which
course you majored in PHd. I only wrote, because I had these in my
mind.a

By thy copies and pastes shall ye know them. Sort of.

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From Beijing

After 23 hours on planes, I am in Beijing. Sort of. I’m in the ultra-swank, ultra-faux-Western China World Hotel. Actually, I’m in the itnernet cafe next door. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see something other than bellboys in their ‘Thirties bellboy caps and computer screens (“How a bellboy got into my computer screen I’ll never know”). But probably not: tomorrow is rehearsal day in the ultra-modern conference hall. Off in the distance some red neon beckons. Sigh. (I’ve been here once before and I’m coming back in the middle of April for an actual tourist visit with my 11-year-old son. More later.)

So what can I tell you about Beijing? Clean internet cafe. It costs either 8 or 80 yuan per hour – roughly a buck or ten bucks. Good connection. Gator pops up every time you log in anywhere, offering to remember your password (yeah, right, in a public cafe) and sending reports on your demographically-crucial browsing activity back to the mothership…just in case no one at the cafe is tracking your browsing paths.

I don’t expect to be blogging regularly over the next week. We’ll see how it goes. But here’s one from the plane:

Voice of Authority

“Private Forecast Rosy: State urge to clear barriers hindering sector”

This is the headline of The Business Weekly (which is confusingly subtitled: “China Daily”). I’m reading it on the plane ride from LA to Beijing, after having flown Boston to LA. While the flight attendants — all women, all young — have a basic command of English, I’ve been nodding vigorously and smiling like a baboon in response to every question. I’ve even given up on “tsieh tsieh” since rather than being a charmingly inept attempt to be polite in Chinese, it’s apparently coming across as an American speaking gibberish.

Here’s the lead of the article:

The private sector in China should have a bright future despite the barriers and hurdles bedeviling it, economists have claimed.

The article refers to a July 2001 speech by Jiang Zemin encouraging “eligible private entrepreneurs” to join the Party. It also says that all sectors due to be opened to foreign investment after China’s admission to the World Trade Organization will first be opened to domestic private investors. And, it says, the private sector was 13% of China’s GDP in 1999.

This is rhetoric I don’t understand, a code I can’t crack. I’ve gotten as far as it translating into: “Private sector good.” Does the rest of it mean that it’s good so long as it’s part and parcel of the ruling party? Probably. Does the comment about opening sectors first to domestic investors indicate a throttling back or a racing forward? Or something else? I read it, grinning like a baboon.

What’s most remarkable to me is how similar this totalitarian language is to the verbiage found in the typical quarterly report from any corporation.

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