Monthly Archives: May 2011

Lo and Behold! Good FINALLY Came Out of My iPhone!

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There were times when I couldn’t own a *gasp* iPhone *sigh* in China… Up until 2010 there wasn’t an Apple store in Shanghai, and even when the first one opened in Pudong, they were selling everything but the much coveted smartphone; plus neither of the mobile carriers (there is only two in the country… bizzare) was offering iPhone packages, which has always been a deal breaker for me personally - owning an iPhone just to use it as a phone seems like a waste of money. It has to come with a plan which enables constant use of all its resources, or there’s barely any point to it.

And then one day… It was on sale AND China Unicom signed a deal with Apple to start offering packages. Needless to say, I was nearly falling over myself on my way to the store, thinking nothing but “gimmie, gimmie, gimmie it now! got to have iPhone pronto!” Ah! The day I first held it in my hands… Nothing short of magical… Like being at last allowed to engage in the act of love after years of foreplay…

Now, these packages from China Unicom are sort of backwards. In the US, you pay less for the phone provided you sign with AT&T or Verizon, but here you actually pay roughly $1,080 upfront (for the 32GB iPhone4) and then you get a discount on the plan of your choice. Works out fine in the end – I am signed for a package which costs $60 a month, and I only pay $15 - included minutes/texts/data are plenty, I haven’t actually managed to use all of them up once, and I am downloading stuff day in and day out :)

What was it that I wanted to say? Oh yes, the good that came out of it! Come to think of it, it’s not just this one time - the gadget delights me daily. When I wake up, CNN tells me what the world has been up to while I was sleeping; on my way to the office I usually check who UN officials are condemning that day for disregard of human rights and I get to take pictures like this when I walk around town -

This precious baby is named Dodo - she likes to hang out near the coffee shop I go to in the morning.

Yesterday though I went above and beyond. By sheer accident, as I was in the process of re-organizing my screens, I came across Nike Training Club App, which has been hidden in one of the folders for months. I had a couple lazy minutes to spare and ended up watching a few of the exercise videos, no harm intended. Then I watched a few more… ”Damn, those chicks look good!” – I thought, as I’m sure everyone who has downloaded that app does. “Why don’t I try me some of that? Looks easy enough. Oh wait, medicine ball, what the hell is a medicine ball?” Google. ”Ohhh, that’s what that is, fine, I can buy that. Dumbbells. Done. Can buy a few of those too. Jump rope. No sweat. Now, where do I get all this stuff?“

Taobao!

Taobao is an evil land – they sell everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. If you can’t find something there – it doesn’t exist. When I shop online, I kinda have the attention span of a goldfish – I get too excited because I want everything and before I know it I’ve ordered the stuff that I didn’t even intend to buy to begin with. Like yesterday – what started off as a very specific quest for medicine ball/dumbbells/jump rope turned into… an indoor cycling bike! I did not buy anything else, just the bike. What I was thinking I do not know, but I am excited! They should deliver it tomorrow and man, am I gonna bike my bootie off! Now I just need to find a place for it, preferrably one I can see my TV from and I’ll be all set for my perfect hips & thighs chase!

See, iPhones are useful after all! I just need to make sure I keep at it and don’t turn the bike into a hanger. Oh, this reminds me, still haven’t ordered the medicine ball/dumbbells/jump rope! Off I go, perhaps this time I’ll buy a treadmill instead…

Turns Out He Was Mortal

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I could not possibly have timed my reading of Noam Chomsky‘s Hegemony or Survival better – just a couple of days after I absorbed the book’s last paragraph Da Demon Osama was no more… By far the most global of the series of recent events that captivated the world’s attention – I sure haven’t seen The New York Times use that fat a font on their front page – not for the mind-boggling Japanese disaster, not for the Middle Eastern contortions of the past few months.

Image via popartmachine.com

So. He was killable after all…

I do not ordinarily enjoy media giants the size of NYT in large doses, even less when they are reporting on an event of such significance that it dominates the headlines for days or weeks in a row – I find it gives me this feeling, how do I put it… like I’m chewing an old gum. So I try to deviate, moving from one country’s media to another, seeking perspectives of various flavors, to keep my taste buds entertained or something along that line. Well, yesterday it sucked me in.

I am pretty confident I went through nearly all the articles The NYT has put out thus far, some maybe even twice – it became hard to tell after a while – they all blurred into one giant word jumble with a huge neon sign atop of it: “WE DID IT! WE DID IT! WE GOT THE DAMN BASTARD!” Well, I mean, it’s GOT to become a public holiday now, no?!

Ok, all sarcasm aside, I can very well see how for so many people in the US May 2nd, 2011 will forever be the day justice has finally been served. The joy and the flag waving are understandable, after all, the guy was a germ, no question about it. There is just this one thing – after reading his obituary, I couldn’t help but think that the Bin Ladenism may have been conceived in something that has very legitimate ground. And I suspect that this residue would not be there, had I not literally just finished reading the Hegemony…

Take this bit of the obituary, for instance:

“Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard.

‘It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,’ he told CNN in the 1997 interview. ‘If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.’”

Well, I’ll be damned if that does not echo Chomsky’s message. The book itself is a rather detailed account of how the last 50 years of US foreign policy breastfed the hatred and resentment that is felt towards the Hegemon across the globe. And it’s scary. Even more scary because, sadly, it is not untrue. We have long now been living in the world of a Sole Ruler, who stomps his feet in tantrums when he pleases, and continents shake. Osama’s thought ran along similar lines: “The United States, he told an interviewer later, “has started to look at itself as a master of this world and established what it calls the new world order.”

In all this hype it almost seems as though this death will alter the course of history. It won’t. He was just a person, one person, a skinny 50-something-year-old Arab. The atrocities he guided others to commit were not inspired by him – they were inspired by generations of wars, poverty, humiliation and the suffocating fumes of hopelessness induced by The Powerful among us.

Shame really. But until the flash light of the world only shines for a handful of countries, Osamas will continue breeding in the darkness. Ridding the world of them can only be achieved once we’ve cleaned up our own act. And truthfully, that is NOT the direction we are headed now…