So that’s why there was a film crew outside the Cobble Hill Cinemas earlier this summer…

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The adorable two-headed turtle of Brooklyn has been stolen! The most interesting fact in the story: two-headed turtles are worth about $50.

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When Mr. Guapo and Dr. No come back from Hong Kong, will it be on a slow boat from China?

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“Rapid Growth Found in Oxygen-Starved Ocean ‘Dead Zones’”

“Oh, that’s good news,” I thought, “things in dead zones are growing rapidly.” It turns out, though, that scientists aren’t finding rapid growth among things in the dead zones, but it’s the dead zones that are rapidly growing.

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People in Dallas are wondering what should be done with a traumatized elephant. Here at norlos, we know (see first comment).

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The NYT has an article about how cities are turning to streetcars to ease congestion and spur economic development. As a cyclist, I am wholeheartedly against this trend. Anything that puts long narrow grooves in the street that run parallel to a bicycle’s tires is bad news for us.

Madison has a lot of railroad tracks crossing the isthmus and I’ve seen a lot of cyclists crash and burn because they don’t take enough care to approach the tracks perpendicularly. With street car tracks I could just some idiot in a car not paying attention to me and forcing me into them.

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I meant to post this last week, when we had an actual typhoon. Well, I’m busy. Sorry.

So Hong Kong was basically a couple of fishing villages until the Brits claimed it as theirs 150 years ago as a base for selling opium. Brits are now a very small minority of the city’s population — Filipinos, Americans and probably now Indonesians outnumber them — but their influence is strong. It can be found in the extra “u”s you keep finding where they don’t belong, like in “harbour.” The Brit’s version of Scrabble must have 17 “u”s.

That brings us to “Typhoon Signal No. 8 Has Been Hoisted,” a sign you’ll find in office buildings, apartment complexes, hotels and just about anyplace else there’s people when a severe cyclone approaches.

A detour — a cyclone is a tropical storm. When it gets to hurricane strength it becomes a typhoon. The international dateline is roughly the dividing line for what makes a hurricane and hurricane and a typhoon a typhoon.

So far I’ve seen one typhoon and one strongish cyclone, and they’re kinda cool. Basically, horizontal rain. Hong Kong is usually spared direct hits because of the mountains on the south island and its position in the lee of the north. Still, they get wicked strong.

When they reach No. 8 level… well, ok, still gotta explain. Because No. 8 doesn’t mean “holy shit! Cyclone Clay got upgraded to a No. 8 from a No. 7!” The numbers don’t necessarily signify power. They used to signify direction. No. 8 meant they were coming from the southeast. It was changed a while back so that all typhoons are No. 8. Guess that cuts down on the confusion. Here are the various other symbols. Basically, most public transportation stops, the stock exchange closes, and people stay home. (Except me.)

So anyway, the “hoisted” — I love it. Random weird Britishism. Why not just have a sign that says, “No. 8 Typhoon?” Nope. Gotta have a sign with an indirect subject — who’s doing the hoisting? Where? And why?

I hope it’s someone’s job to run up the nearby mountain and hosting a flight with a big number 8 on it.

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I’m going back to Lawrence for a football game this year and it’s down to K-State or Texas. They’re both in November, so the weather could either be nice or horrible for both of them. KSU is pretty much a guaranteed win against a hated rival so that game has that going for it. It’s much less certain, however, that KU could win the UT game, but if they did it would be really cool to be there for it.

Opinions? Here’s a great video by Micah Brown, who caught the pass on the fake punt. He’s from Kearney, NE, which is where my sister was born and is the setting for Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker:

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I’d never thought about FPs much before (full disclosure: I was a fan of New Coke and the clear cola fad of the early 1990s), but the continuing persistence of our zombie post has led me to pay an inordinate amount of attention to FPs. A similar situation occurred years ago when my friend Scott and I both attended a legislative hearing where there were a lot of disabled people. Afterwards I made an inoccuous comment like, “hey did you see that last woman to testify? She may have cerebral palsy, but she’s still pretty hot.”

Reni, Scott’s wife, thought this was hilarious. Pretty soon, every time we saw a woman in a wheelchair or on crutches or whatever, Reni would turn to me and ask, “does she turn you on?” After about a year of this, everytime I saw a disabled woman I immediately evaluated her attractiveness and even developed a slight unconsummated fetish for disabled women.

Anyway, the constant return of the zombie post has led me to be extremely aware of FPs. On Friday, Marketplace had a story about a a museum of FPs in Ann Arbor. It’s the property of Arbor Strategy Group, and it costs $5,000 to just walk through the door. Which, I just decided is the going rate for a list of FPs. Apparently in 2001, Arbor Strategy purchased the collection of our dear friend Robert McMath, who was the inspiration for the zombie thread, and moved the collection from Ithaca to Ann Arbor.

If you’d like to read more about

this is where you should go.

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I just can’t bring myself to care about the John Edwards affair story. It seems like the media cares most about whether they should cover the story or not.

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The most impressive part — the surviving members of Queen playing with 50 Chinese-born Freddie Mercury lookalikes. Class.

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TNR has a graphic feature called “They Refused To Go”, a profile of the athletes who refused to compete in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The piece implies that more athletes should have refused to participate in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

While I agree China is less than perfect on human rights issues, comparing the 2008 Olympics to the Olympics hosted by Hitler is way over the top in my opinion. Despite being a democracy, the United States has had its own human rights abuses then and today.

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Short, but sweet, short.

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Our stuff arrived today, fresh across the Pacific Ocean. About 70 boxes. They got their own cargo container. What in the industry they call a TEU. The 70 boxes probably filled about a tenth of the container.

Our cargo, carefully wrapped by a staff of international moving specialists, included a glove with no mate, several $3 Brooklyn bodega umbrellas, a broken bicycle helmet and a can of foot powder.

There was also a box labeled: “Head. VHS tapes. Books.”

Inside there was, indeed, a head. The one made by the Texas Kid. The one made of an old piece of driftwood that looks like a head, if the head had been exposed to too much radiation, and which bears the original dentures of the artist. The one given to us by an old co-worker of Dr. No. The story began, “Don’t ever go to an auction drunk.”

I love the total lack of judgment. It’s literal. It’s descriptive. It’s a friggin’ head.

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There’s no way around it — this city has amazing food. Down the street there’s a place called Dumpling Yuan, which sells donkey. I haven’t tried the donkey. But eaten the pork dumplings and watched them made in the open air on a hot night. Sanitary? We all lived in Stephenson, right?

There’s a soup place near my office that, for the equivalent of about $3.50, gives you a steaming bowl of beef slices, spicy broth, noodles and pickled vegetables. It’s always crowded, the woman who hands it out is missing an eye and you end up slurping at the same small table with three total strangers, but the final product really can’t be described with mere words. My belly is currently filled with Indian food (that’s awesome here too) but just thinking about this place makes my mouth water. I’d link to a location or a review, but the name is all Chinesey and the best I can do is call it the “soup place.”

Then there’s Dr. No. Dr. No likes the Chinese chow, sure she does. But the girl can’t live on that. Not at all. See, the girl’s from Kansas.

Thursday night, we had burgers and Martinis. Friday night, we went to pretty much the only bar in our area (more on that at a later date), where she had bangers and mash. (I had the goa fish curry. It was nice.)

So today, for lunch, I thought somethng local might be in order. Maybe some char shui. Maybe some dim sum. Heck, the one-eyed soup lady’s not a bad option, either.

The girl wants bar food. Bar food.

All this is to say that hamburgers and bar food are the closest thing Americans have to a true cultural food. Perhaps Dan Ryans, the Hong Kong ethnic restaurant whose ethnicity is American, puts its best when they serve you their burger, which might be the best in town:

Oh yes. Americans: We conquered the burger. Mission accomplished.

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