JonahWeiland.com

Hey folks, just a note that I’ve upgraded this here WordPress blog to version 1.5.2. If you run a WordPress blog and are running and older version, you should upgrade immediately. There are a number of exploits out there for older versions of WordPress and this upgrade is an important security update. One of my clients had his blog hacked today. Luckily nothing bad happened tot the server or the data. We caught the guy quickly and were able to shut down the site before any lasting damage was incurred.

If you should see anything strange around these parts (aside from me), please drop me an e-mail.

So, there’s a bunch of fires burning in the Southern California area right now. This is just one of the annual events we have here. Thankfully, most of the time it’s just a bunch of brush burning and maybe one or two structures burned, but sometimes they can get quite out of hand. The fires raging in So. Cal. haven’t burned a lot of homes yet, but it’s moving fast and is threatening to make some people take a serious look at their homeowers insurance policies tonight.

The picture above was taken by my friend Jacob near his home in Topanga Canyon with smokey skies behind the sign. At the moment the fire isn’t too near him, but it is moving towards that part of the valley. That’s when it can get quite scary because there’s plenty of brush there and fires tend to be attracted to the expensive Malibu section of Los Angeles, which is on the other side of Topanga. Jacob’s been taking pictures of the fire from a vantage point near his home. You can see the gallery here. In those pictures you can see the communities of Woodland Hills, West Hills and a bit of Hidden Hills in the section closest to the camera, with Chatsworth far off in the background. Simi Valley is behind those mountains.

OK, I’ve got a very serious question for all of you out there. I’m serious. I want answers. I want opinions. I’m seriously not fishing for a high number of comments on this post or anything, I actually want to know the answer to the following question.

Is the Prodigy song “Smack My Bitch Up” one of the greatest songs recorded since the 1960s?

If I were to make a Top 10 list of my favorite songs (list making not being something I do regularly), it would easily be in the Top 10, and probably in the Top 5 (with #1 taken by Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition). “Smack My Bitch Up” would be up there.

This is one of those “don’t listen to in the car unless you want to get a speeding ticket type songs.” I love this song. The highs of the opening, the cool down with the exotic operatic singer, and just great sounds. It’s an emotional song that brings about a response through music, not the four words that brought the song lots of attention (for those unfamiliar with the song– and I know there are some of you out there who haven’t heard it– the lyrics consists of only four words: smack my bitch up).

This last Friday I attended Vanguard in Hollywood and saw Carl Cox (a physically bigger techno DJ I’ve never seen) spin till 4:00 in the morning. He put on a great set. It was about 5 minutes before he was to go on stage, so I walked out to the middle of the dance floor to see how he was going to open the sucker. See, right before the new DJ takes the stage you have a high probability of something cool or interesting happen. What Carl did was start his set simply with “Smack My Bitch Up.” Now, I’ve heard this song played in small dance clubs before, but never in a warehouse style building with a fantastic sound system, plus 1000 of your closest friends.

The moment that first beat was heard, the number of people on the dance floor swelled. It seemed like everyone was running into the building to hear this song. And man were people excited. Hopping all over the place like mad fuck fiends. Fists pumped in the air towards the DJ. All while Carl remixed the song live for a good 10 minutes or so. It really was quite fantastic. And hearing that song, that loud, with that much base and all those crazy mother fuckers, well, that’s the goodness.

As of that opening, big fan of Carl. Big Fan!

So, what’s the answer to the question is Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” one of the greatest songs written since the 1960s?

For those of you who might care– but especially for those of you who don’t give a shit– my current song of serious addiction (i.e. I can’t stop listening to it and, when listened to while in the car, it makes me drive fast) is “Feels Just Like It Should” by Jamiroquai from his most recent album, “Dynamite.” If you work inside an office it’s reccomended you go purchase the song from the iTunes music store, turn up the volume on your computer (sub woofer to full) and show your office mates a real good time by bringing some funk and soul into their lives today.

If you won’t do it, give me a call and I’ll bring my iPod and an amplifier to your office. There will be a minimum $2 charge per mile one way, minimum 15 mile purchase. My current service area includes the counties of Los Angeles, Ventura and Orange in Southern California.

As some of you may know– especially if you’re a member of America West’s e-mail bulletins– the airlines America West and US Air are merging. Now, I’m not here to talk about what this means to the airline industry because, well, I have no fucking clue what it means.

No, what I’m here to talk about is corporate insanity. If I recall correctly, back in the ’90s US Air was known as US Airways. At some point in the late ’90s the company hired a name foundry to “rebrand and rename” their company, a popular business practice during the .com boom days. So, US Airways paid a substantial sum of money (I believe it was half a million) to the name foundry to help them find a new name for the company. What did they come up with? US Air.

Oh, like I couldn’t have thought of that. And I would have only charged $8 bucks, a blow job and a six-pack of Newcastle.

At any rate, with US Air and America West merging entities, a new name was in order once again. The new company name? Like you couldn’t guess it– US Airways.

I think I now have to refuse to fly that airline, just based on their sheer lack of originality.

If they had named it US Mother Fucking Airways, well, you could count on myself and Mr. Huntington as passengers, at the very least.

I’m sure with this posting my site will instantly be blocked by the Chinese authorities, if it hasn’t already.

My cousin Joel sent me this article about new, more repressive restrictions on Web surfing in China. Apparently the Chinese government today announced that only “healthy and civilized news and information that is beneficial to the improvement of the quality of the nation, beneficial to its economic development and conducive to social progress” would be allowed. People are already calling the new censoring system “The Great Firewall.”

For those of who read my Chinese travel journals, you already know I found access to portions of the Internet while in Beijing to be sketchy. My sister and I had a discussion over dinner our first night about some movie, so we wanted to check the Internet Movie Database when we got back to the room. That site was completely blocked by Chinese censors. As was Yahoo!’s news page, MSNBC.com, FoxNews.com and many others. I even found access to my own e-mail server somewhat sketchy at times. CBR was spared the censorship, I’m happy to report.

Now, I’m wondering if there will be less restrictions on connections in hotels for business travelers? I found no problems logging onto AIM or ICQ while I was there. That gives you quite a bit of access to the outside world.

I also wonder how, if at all, this will affect Hong Kong and the New Territories. As far as I understand, the Chinese government is relatively hands off when it comes to Hong Kong. Let’s hope it remains that way.

Finally, I present the last chapter in my China travel journal. I’ve also posted the final eight photos from my trip in the gallery here. There’s some nice pictures of buildings in Hong Kong at night, plus one of some street performer dressed up as Spider-Man for no good reason. Hong Kong can be a very weird place.

Saturday in China was mostly a travel day. We woke up super early, 6:00 AM, to get to the Airport by 7:00 for our 9:00 flight back to Hong Kong. Our hotel said Chinese immigration could take some time, so it was really smart to get there early. Our driver got us to the airport at 7:00 AM sharp and the hotel was right– Chinese immigration was a slow and tedious process that took place in a rather hot room filled with hundreds and hundreds of people. It actually reminded me of the security queues at LAX– complete chaos and poorly managed. Lines going in all sorts of directions, criss-crossing each other. It took about an hour to get through and we still had an hour to kill, so Sharon and I used up the last of our Chinese currency by buying some noodle soup at a restaurant in the airport.

The flight back to Hong Kong was uneventful and pretty much the same as when we went to Beijing. Once again “The Sounds of Silence” played as we sat on the tarmac in Beijing and Hong Kong. The flight back to Hong Kong was far more turbulent than going there, bad enough that I’d look back to Sharon in the aisle behind me to check on her every once in a while. Sharon doesn’t do well with the flying, so I wanted to make sure she was cool. She was cool. Not the worst turbulence I’ve ever been through, but wild enough that it couldn’t be ignored.

The movie on the flight back to Hong Kong was some Chinese action film. There was no English subtitling or audio track, so I had no idea what was going on, other than it seemed there were a lot of guns pointed at a lot of women’s heads throughout the film.

Once we landed in Hong Kong we made our way through Hong Kong immigration, caught the Airport Express back to Hong Kong Island, picked up a cab at Central and made our way back to Parkview where Jimmy was waiting for us around 2:30. We hung around the house, packed up for our return home Sunday afternoon, and really didn’t do anything until dinner that night.

There was one final thing I wanted to get done before leaving Hong Kong. Carrie bought Jimmy a really cool wallet at Shanghai Tang’s, an upscale clothing store in Hong Kong (they have a store now in New York City and Oahu, apparently), and I really wanted to check out the store. So, we left the apartment around 6:30 and took a cab down to Central, then walked around for a while trying to find Shanghai Tang. My faith in Jimmy’s ability as White Super Action Tour Guide was starting to fade as it appeared we were just going in circles, but soon enough we found the store and my faith was restored. We walked around for a bit, checked out the merch and I finally decided I’d buy the wallet myself. The wallet pictured to the right is the one I got, but the star is red, not blue. Also, the price in Hong Kong is about $20 cheaper than on their Web site. In fact, pretty much everything in the store itself is 25% or more cheaper than on the Web site. I saw some tee-shirts in the store I liked, but I have a problem spending $35 on tee-shirts.

After I made my purchase we started our walk towards Lan Kwai Fong for some food and booze. About 10 minutes after leaving Shanghai Tang’s I realized I left my umbrella there. Oh well, it was a cheap piece of shit anyway and I didn’t want to make the walk back. Plus, it wasn’t raining so I wasn’t going to worry about it.

On the way to Lan Kwai Fong we stopped at some street markets and tiny stores along the way, seeing if there were any other bargains we might be able to find. At some point during our shopping Sharon lost her umbrella, too. The Weiland’s were not doing well keeping track of our umbrellas.

By the time we got to Lan Kwai Fong, we were all starving. Lan Kwai Fong is the big pub area of Hong Kong, with about two square blocks of bar after bar. Most of the places just server booze, no food, so we ended up at the Hong Kong Brew Haus, something of a hybrid between a German bar and an American sports bar. It’s one of those places where they serve you peanuts in the shell to nosh on and you simply throw the peanut shells on the floor. The reason why I mention this is that these were the smallest peanuts in the shell I’ve ever had. Clearly these weren’t Georgia Peanuts. We had some burgers and brew and just relaxed for a couple of hours, chatting about the trip to Beijing.

Around 9:00 that night we made our way back to Parkview to meet Carrie at the karaoke bar they’ve got there. Usually on Saturday nights the place is packed with people singing karaoke, but this night the only karaoke being sung was in the private rooms. One of the private rooms had what looked like a rather intense game of poker going on, which I would have loved to get in on. So, no karaoke, but a nice time to just sit and relax with a drink in hand. Carrie’s friend Brenda joined us, but by 11:00, Sharon and I started to crash. Remember, we got up around 5:30 in the morning on Saturday. We said goodbye to everyone, and called it a night. I was actually quite glad to be sleeping on the Aero Bed again, instead of that hard hotel bed in Beijing.

That’s really the end of my story. Sunday we simply woke up early, packed, made our final trip to the ParkNShop grocery store next door and left for home. Nothing terribly exciting to report about our trip home, other than jet lag on the way home from Asia is far worse than going there.

The trip itself was an amazing one and I already miss Hong Kong. It’s such an easy town to get around in and there’s still much for me to explore there. I’d go back any day.

Beijing I’d like to go back to at some point, but only five or ten years from now. I’d really like to see how different that city is once they’ve finished with their improvements.

There are a number of things I miss from China already:

• I miss the excellent public transportation. It was nice not having to drive for a while.
• I miss Wrigley’s Extra Lemon-Pear gum. I bought a bunch of it on my way back at the ParkNShop grocery store, but I’ve not been able to find it here. It appears to be a Hong Kong only item. I know, Lemon-Pear doesn’t sound good, but it really is.
• I miss Bueno chocolate bars. Carrie introduced them to us. A chocolate bar with a light and fluffy crunch to it. I bought a whole bunch for my Dad as he’s a major chocoholic.
• I miss fresh squeezed grapefruit juice. Carrie raved about how good the grapefruit juice is in China compared to the States. She’s absolutely right. So much better, so much fresher.
• I miss spinach bagels. Haven’t found them yet in the States.
• I miss how nice the people were in Hong Kong. Los Angeles is a great city, but it’s not exactly the friendliest one in the world. In Hong Kong the service was pretty much spectacular everywhere we went and the people were always helpful.
• I miss the cheap stuffs! If I go back to Hong Kong– now that I know where some of the good shopping is and how to go about haggling– I’d totally buy more stuff there. Being able to plan ahead is key with the shopping in Hong Kong. We were always somewhat rushed when we shopped, but you really should take your time when searching for bargains.

I’m sure there’s much more, but that’s what popped into my head right now.

As I write this, it’s now almost two weeks that I’ve been back and I’ve just now finished this travel journal. In total it’s just 38 pages long in Times New Roman font at 12 pixels. That’s 22,528 words. 96,447 characters (no spaces). 1709 lines. That’s a lot of writing. Hopefully some of you enjoyed it. I’m afraid to go back to the early chapters, where I know I didn’t edit them very well.