Ok, I'm getting fired up for football season.

Compared to Mizzou's lame "Don't Bet On It" promo, this is a summer blockbuster.

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First there were concerns about about the effect of Beijing's smog on endurance athletes. Now, an algae bloom is imperiling Olympic sailing events. Any day now I'm expecting reports that the northern snakehead has infested the Olympic pools.

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I heard this story on All Things Considered yesterday and thought of our botanist in West Virginia.

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I just finished The Cheese Monkeys and thoroughly enjoyed it. Though the ending isn't as satisfying the end ofThen We Came To The End, The Cheese Monkeys was funny enough to have me laughing out loud on the subway.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is also an enjoyable bit of reading. I didn't realize that there had recently been a movie made from the book.

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Last week:

"Hey hellx, stop by sometime. I have a bottle of vodka for you."

Sunday:

"Oh, yeah, you need to come by and pick up that bottle of vodka. Well, really it's more like half a bottle of vodka."

Tuesday:

"Here you go."

(She hands me a three-quarter empty bottle of White Nights Vodka, the official vodka or Mr. Guapo and Dr. No. It's perfect for my White Trash Russian: milk, chocolate syrup and vodka.)

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...when you see homeless people carrying their stuff in Ikea bags.

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At the grocery store, I always opt for plastic instead of paper. About a month ago we received a couple of reusable shopping bags. I've taken them to Hy-Vee a few times, and they work quite well. They're durable, easy to carry, and they hold a lot of food. I haven't been out to the landfill to see the wonderful effect my not using plastic has on our planet, but I have noticed a bit of a trash crisis in my home: If I'm not getting plastic grocery bags, what am I supposed to line my trash cans with? I guess I could buy some trash bags the next time I'm at the store, but that would cancel out the environmental gains of not getting the plastic grocery bags.

Any suggestions?

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Brooklyn dwarf pimps teenage runaway.

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We need your help. We moved from one of the most expensive rental cities in the world to the most expensive rental city in the world. Living here is going to be great, but we're going to have to suck it in and spend a bigger chunk of our meal ticket than we ever have before.

Which gives the real estate search that much more... excitement? Is that the word for the churning feeling down in my gullet? It's like a contact sport. Like American Gladiators. With a whole army of Nitros coming down and you, and all you've got for a defense is your frightened smile.

We begin our journey on a sweltering hot Saturday afternoon, when the humidity level hasn't quite reached 100%, meaning there's still some air floating around in that watery stuff that here tthey call an atmosphere. We're looking in Kennedy Town, on the western end of the island, where it's affordable because the subway hasn't quite made it out this far yet, and where there's a nice mix of both Western and Chinese.

Building names here, by the way, are awesome. A buddy of ours used to live in Joyful Mansion. All but one of these places had regular old Chinese names. If they mean anything I remain clueless of it.

We begin at Wing Tai, located on the steps between Kennedy Town and mountain-dwelling Hong Kong University. And I mean steps:

I'm gonna have great calves.

It's an old building on the outside:

"Hey, 1965 called. It wants its metallic green paint back."

But totally redone on the inside:

The real estate agent, Frankie, in the kitchen.

How can you tell? Wonder of wonders, an oven:

Now we're cookin'.

People don't bake here. It's a fact of life. "This for foreign people," Frankie says. I know she doesn't mean it, but "foreign people" just sounds so alien.

The Wing Tai apartment is 750 square feet, or roughly the same size as our Brooklyn pad, and it has two small bedrooms:

...with a nice view of the buildings along the stairs:

Even the bathroom is nice. You can't see it, but there's also an electric blue modern light spilling from underneath the sink:

In a place where a toilet is sometimes just a hole in the floor, a nice bathroom matters.

How much for this lovely place? HK$18,000 a month. With a conversion rate of 7.9 Hongkie dollars to one U.S. dollar, that puts the monthly at $2,280 a month. You know, it doesn't matter how many times I see that price, or see even higher prices, that's still a sphincter a-tightening that I feel.

So, what if I want to spend less? Far, far less? Well, down the street there's Ying Gia Garden, so named because there's a frond-and-concrete garden separating its two main buildings:

The photos don't do it justice, and I don't mean that in a good way. I guess I didn't snap a photo of the kitchen, but it was cramped and kinda sad. And no oven.

The floor! It blinds me!

The bathroom gives the best sense of the kind of place it is. Ok, there's a toilet, which is nice. But no bathtub, and it's clearly seen better days:

For 619 square feet, we would pay Hk$14,500, or roughly $1,700. Not bad. Apartment? Not good.

So we go on to the next place, Ying Fung Garden. It's near the water but on a busy, industrial street, and across the street is a dirt-covered parking lot. The building is in the Urals Classic style, perfect for your comrade who thanks to his excellent job at the Propaganda Ministry gets to take home an extra helping of Borscht on Fridays. I'm not hopeful:

In Soviet Russia, building enter YOU!

But inside? If outside and the neighborhood are 1960s Soviet Union, inside is 1994-era, I-just-stole-a-brand-new-Frigidaire-off-the-back-of-the-truck new capitalist Russia:

Can you trust a dining room table you can see through?

Being on the 15th floor, it's well above the street noise. And hey, about that view:

Whoa.

I was so captivated by the view that it took me a while to notice that all those ships out in Hong Kong Harbor are warships!

We're being invaded!

Chinese? American, to my surprise. The U.S. Navy was in town after a bit of a political kerfluffle. I saw the sailor boys later that day in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong's swing Western party district.

More views:

The bathroom features the kind of decor you usually associate with people in movies who have bad taste:

I know Dr. No will love this.

Plus, new kitchen. With oven!

Counter space is for losers.

This place is 650 square feet, which is decent but not great. And only one bedroom. Not good at all for a couple that's expecting lots of guests. (Price: HK$20,000. Yowch!).

So Frankie takes me downstairs, to the 11 floor, where there's a two bedroom. Now, remember how I described the 15th floor place as new-capitalism Russia? This place is from a year later, when Russia was teetering under the excesses of cocaine-fueled robber barons:

Boris Yeltsin slumped here.

Modern kitchen? Check? Breakfast bar? Check. Enough throw pillows to fight off all those Navy boys out there? Check.

Where throw pillows go to breed.

Here are three more photos. Tell me what's wrong with this whole sitch:

Nice, glassy bathroom.

Nice, glassy main bedroom.

Nice, glassy guest bedroom

If you guessed, "hey, the whole place is made out of glass!" then yeah, pat yourself on the back you observant galoot you. That's a bathroom built for exhibition. Plus, if you come to visit the Guapos and while there decide to get busy with your honey, you will have an audience.

Frankie pointed out there are blinds you can pull down. And she said we could lose furniture we don't like. So with two bedrooms and a slightly lower HK$19,000 a month, maybe not bad. Especially since the 11th floor view isn't all that different from the place on the 15th floor:

Ah, commerce.

So the final place is on the other side of Kennedy Town, at the very end, on Davis St., across the street from a major set of high rises call the Merton. Lots of Westerners live there, so this block has three -- count 'em, three -- bars. Bars as a concept are pretty Western, I've concluded, unless you include karaoke places as bars, which no good soul should.

Like Ying Gia Garden, this place is disappointingly decrepit. You climb up three sets of dingy stairs to get to:

No oven.

Did I mention no oven?

Bathroom is oldish, and no tub:

No bath for you.

Only one bedroom. There's a view, but you gotta strain to see it:

Hi there, ocean.

So why even mention it? Well, for starters, it's huuuuge:

Echoechoechoecho...

That's 900 square feet of absolutely nothing, folks. And the price: HK$15,000 a month. Now we're talking.

What do y'all think? It doesn't really matter because Dr. No will damn well make the decision by her damn self, thankyouverymuch.

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I'm not going to pretend, Cavendish banana. Sure, we had some good times. Scratch that. Great times. Even though I didn't know until the end that your first name was "Cavendish," and did you get you ass kicked in school for that? Still. You can be excellent when mashed, I admit. Your genetic vulnerabilities never really bothered me. And you remain an excellent source of potassium.

But I've moved on. People change. People growth. And Cav, I've outgrown you.

The Manzano banana, also known as the apple banana, is the Musaceae for me. The way you peel right away, in two easy pulls? You had me at hello.

Then there's your firm starchiness. Cav, you're so soft sometimes, so pliant. Not Manzano. Manzano doesn't always yield right away. Manzano fights. Manzano doesn't just give. Manzano takes, too.

And finally, the taste. Oh, the taste. You're sweet, Cav, and there'll always be a place in my heart for your sugary goodness. But Manzano gives me more. There's sweet. Yes, there's that. But there's also tang, a hint of citrus, a hint of bite. A complexity -- nay, a passion -- that your one dimension lacks, Cav. No offense.

Maybe we can hang sometimes still, Cav. You know. Be friends. And maybe more than that, occasionally, in a moment of weakness, or perhaps the munchies. But I've found my peelable fruit for life. And it's not you.

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White Owl's wedding announcement was in the Star today. He's 61, she's 22. I'm sure they would have registered at The Phil Zone, if The Phil Zone was still open.

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The movie channel relentlessly plays K-19: The Widowmaker. Try as I might, I can't sit through a full viewing.

That is all I have to report tonight. G'night.

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Hong Kong apartments don't have stoves. Most come with hot plates. These aren't your tame, GE-branded, pokey-gettin'-hot hot plates. These bastards cook.

My hot plate is a white square piece of of dark hard plastic and some powerful green-gray alloy, about the size and shape of a bathroom scale. It comes with six buttons: "hot pot, "soup," "porridge," "braise," "stir fry" and "roast." I'm not sure what difference the first three make. No matter the setting, it can boil water in a minute and a half.

Today, as usual, I made instant noodles, seafood-flavored, with seaweed and sesame oil, with some frozen dumplings sprinkled in. It doesn't matter how well I dry the thing before I cook -- it hisses and steams, and -- is it my imagine? -- shakes and sparks a bit. I dry the counter around it and make sure the power cord is nowhere near heat. And I hope it's enough.

I live... dangerously.

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I've never been much of an NBA fan. In fact, my worst sporting event experience ever was a post-Magic Lakers vs. a pre-LeBron Cavaliers preseason game. It was terrible. But back in the days of Lakers vs. Celtics, I went with the Lakers. I probably never watched any LA-Boston games, but like Cowboys-Steelers, Coke-Pepsi and Tastes Great-Less Filling, you had to pick a side. Of course, that all changed this year with Paul Pierce leading the Celtics to the NBA title over Kobe, Not-Kobe, Not-Kobe, Not-Kobe and Not-Kobe. I suppose KU fans have been able to get a little extra mileage out of this t-shirt.

Oh, by the way, Scot Pollard was on the Celtics roster, too.

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Glamour has a news blog.

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Here's a nice essay about why you shouldn't buy skin cleansing products that list "polypropylene". Until I read The World Without Us, I used Neutrogena's Body Scrub. Now I use the polypropylene free Neutrogena Body Wash with a luffa.

I'd always assumed a luffa was a sea creature or somehting, but I just learned that it comes from a vine. Huh...since I probably learned what a luffa was around age 10, that represents a quarter century of mistaken thinking that has just been blown away.

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Another reason to be rich...

This may be one of the coolest apartment remodels in history. Be sure to click through the image gallery linked in the left column.

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After seeing an invoice for the filming of a performance of Armitage Gone! Dance in January, I was reminded that Armitage Gone! Dance had a really cool performance at the World Science Festival a couple of weeks ago.

Armitage Gone! Dance was founded by Karole Armitage whose biography egregiously fails to mention that she's from Lawrence. You're probably already familiar with Karole's best known piece of choreography.

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While I was away informing the world about the wonders of my educational approaches at the Society for Economic Botany annual meetings last week, it rained hard at home. In the end, we had four and a half feet of water in the basement (the washing machine floats!), the raised beds floated a block downstream until they hit a fence, and slug saved everything of value in the basement, (not that there wasn't plenty of muddy ooze to contend with when I returned home). Photos and link to ariel photos over on Sparkling Squirrel.

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It looks like Lake Delton in the Wisconsin Dells is gone.

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If my blood used copper instead of iron to carry oxygen to my cells, then I'd have cool blue blood like the horseshoe crab.

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Wow. Talk about a Tower of Babel...

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It's called Sham Shui Po. It's on the Kowloon peninsula, on the other side of the harbor from the main Hong Kong Island, where the big city and business district are based. Hong Kong Island is where expats and Chinese professionals live. Kowloon is where everybody else lives. And by "everybody else," I mean "a shitload of Chinese people." It's basically Beijing, but with less chance of being dragged away to detention at night.

Above: View from my window.

When I told coworkers where I was leaving, the reactions ranged from "you're living where?" to "we put you up there?" to "have you met any Triads?" to just plain bemusement. Some context, here: my coworkers recommended a few places, but we wanted a kitchen, a three-month lease and a cheap price, since the company is picking up only one of those months. Dr. No seemingly found it all online at the hotel I'm in now -- in Sham Shui Po.

Some context: Hong Kong is about as safe as you can get, and that "Triad" comment was a co-worker making fun of me. There are no Triads. Heck, there's barely any graffiti.

What we do have is smell. You get off the MTR and you get an immediate odor mixing diesel, sewage, barbecue shops, snack booths, bakeries, open-air fish and fruit markets and just plain grime. One of the strongest smells is durian. It looks like this:

Satan's apples

And it smells like this:

[insert photo of whatever place dirty asses go to die]

There are Western products but no Western grocery stores, unless you count the 7-Elevens, which you shouldn't. That's not to say there isn't tasty food. This guy puts together a mean pork-and-rice takeout:

The air adds flavor

There also also snack stalls that sell little shrimp dumplings called shumai, fried Chinese ham, sausages, and spicy tentacled things:

Lunch!

Sham Shui Po is considered an urban renewal district because a) the people are poor, and b) all the buildings are rotting:

More window

From the street

People here use bamboo instead of tree wood or steel for scaffolding because it's cheap, light, strong and renewable. There's so much construction that Sham Shui Po looks like a bamboo forest in some places:

Say it with bamboo.

Like parts of Brooklyn, Sham Shui Po gets the second-class treatment. Shut down the No. 6 train for any length of time and the Upper East Side of Manhattan freaks out. But shut down the F and R, completely sealing off downtown Manhattan from Brooklyn? No problem! Same dynamic here. Since I got here, the escalator up from the subway has been broken. In a place where it's 90 degrees and 70% humidity, that means something:

Luckily, dragons fly

The neighborhood is most famous for its electronics market. There's a big enclosed one I haven't visited yet where vendors sell cellphones, chips, cables, disk drives, and anything else with voltage. One co-worker calls it "where cellphones go to die." The market is memorialized by a sculpture in the center:

Where cellphones go to die.

At night, it gets all lit up. The grocery stories close around 8 p.m., so I didn't get to go food shopping until this past weekend. But the streets stay vibrant throughout the night, with masses of men huddled around boxes of electronics and watches, the snack people trying to drag you over to eat their tentacles, and lots of old people sitting on the sidewalk watching the neighborhood go by. No Hellx-style wine bars, but I like it.

I like the night life.

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The NYT has a couple interesting graphics related to this story about how high gas prices are hitting rural Americans the hardest. Looking at the maps, even though we're the ur-rural state, Kansans spend a lower percentage of their income on gas than its neighbors.

In terms of median income, Kansas and Missouri are pretty similar except for a patch of dense poverty in the Missouri Ozarks that doesn't have an analogous area in Kansas. While gas prices in Kansas are a little lower than the national average, Missouri has the lowest gas prices in the nation across the board.

A similar situation occurs along the Texas/Oklahoma border. In terms of demographics, the counties on the border look similar, but the Texas counties spend less on gas. What accounts for thsi variance?

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On Memorial Day I was walking a dog that I was dog sitting when I ran into the daughter of the owner of a wine bar in the neighborhood called Vin Rouge. I asked how things were going and she said, "horrible...we just hired this guy who lasted all of two shifts, so we're looking for more help again."

I was like, "well, you know I wouldn't mind making a little extra cash." The next day I got a call from her mom saying, "I'd love to have you work for me. Can you start on Monday?" So last Monday, I started slinging wine.

It's located, as the Eater description of it says, "further south on Fifth Ave than any wine bar has ever been seen before." Even though it's still a good twenty-five to thirty blocks from Sunset Park, a surprisingly large number of Sunset Parkers come through the door because we're the closest place to get a glass of wine that's not Night Train.

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TNR has an interesting article on Jim Webb. My initial reaction to the ticket: that would be the weirdest looking ticket ever. My revised opinion: hmmm...that wouldn't be bad. Plus, he was on "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me" yesterday.

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It's a hot day in New York, literally and figuratively. The temperature is in the nineties today for the Puerto Rican parade. So, naturally, I'm out riding my bicycle.

Today I was riding up the West Side bike path admiring the woman in front of me on bicycle who was only wearing shorts, flip flops and a string bikini top, when a bee hit me in the face and got trapped between my glasses and my eye. Naturally, much flailing ensued and eventually I knocked my glasses right off my face.

As I circled around to pick them up off the ground, I noticed the flower bed that the bee had flown out off. My response: "Flowers! This is New York City, there shouldn't be any stinking flowers!"

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"OK, well, the cheering is dying down now and I think we have a new candidate and we have a new favorite vegetable which is asparagus. Let's go back to the station..."

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But according to this AP story, it has nothing to do with the fact that Mr. Guapo is now on the scene.

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The first same-sex marriages in Greece were recently performed, but not all Lesbians are happy about that fact.

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Here is a transcript of President Bush's speech during the KU basketball team's visit to the White House.

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Fatima Bhutto

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Vanity Fair's profile of Bill Clinton is an interesting read, but one that I'm that I'm taking with a grain of salt. Once you've made it through the story, read Clinton's 2,500 word response to it.

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With the vote in Puerto Rico and the meeting of the Democratic Party's Rules and Bylaws Committee this weekend, the Democratic Party has found its presidential nominee:

Now, there can be no doubt, the people have spoken and you have chosen your candidate. And it's important where we have won. We are winning these votes in swing states and among the very swing voters that Democrats must win to take back the White House and put this country back on the path to prosperity. Together, we've won the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arkansas, West Virginia, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, and, yes, Michigan and Florida.

And I hope by my second term, regardless of what the people of Puerto Rico decide about the status option you prefer, you too will be able to vote for the next president of the United States.

If Hillary doesn't win the nomination, it's because the nomination was stolen from her and HIllary supporters are ratcheting up the rhetoric to that effect.

Many supporters of Clinton are feminists fighting to put a woman in the White House. There is, however, a feminist critique of Hllary Clinton. From a sexual power point of view, it can be argued that she helped enable the sexual mistreatment of women. My question for you: is this website run by a right-wing nutjob or a feminist whacko?

Okay, back to reality...

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...I turned on the TV and saw Memphis getting its ass handed to it by a Chinese team. OK, so this team was without Chris Douglas-Roberts, Derrick Rose and Joey Dorsey. But the fact that someone had a 15 point lead on Memphis, in June, really got my attention.

It's humid here, and oh my are the rooms small.

Also, it's hard to think of basketball players in terms of centimeters and kilograms.

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