After 46 rounds of sheer awesomeness it is time for things to get real. With the help of my favourite website in the history of the universe (for this week), WhatIfSports.com it is time for a showdown.
For those of you unfamiliar with this site let me fill you in on a few things. First off, it is AWESOME. Secondly, it is a fantasy sports simulator where you can choose any two sports teams of all time and have them have a showdown. Naturally, I spent a lot of time simulating various hockey games (note: the ‘76 Habs win the most). Thirdly, you can draft your own dream team, which naturally we did to simulate our NOlympic teams. Fourthly, this site is AWESOME.
Well after exactly three years at Getting Glenergized and a few short, neglected months at Backpackers Soul, the time has come to bid adieu. As of this post both sites are officially closed. Before you start to plan their respective eulogies, know that their hearts will go on in a new cyber-location. As of right now I’d like to officially announce the formation of my new on-line opinion platform, the easy to remember Glen Thoughts.
This is certainly an interesting time to be in this country right here, and right now. What with the 20th Anniversary of a certain incident at a certain square that may or may not have involved a lot of tanks coming up. Couple that with sabre-rattling in North Korea, rapid development all over the place, and of course those pesky people in the Himalayas that always want human rights, Asia seems to be the place to be right now, and the bloggosphere is keeping it well documented. While I may have been slack at posting on this (and my other) blog, there is no shortage of information out there about Asia. Here are some of my recent favourites that I have read:
Someone I know quite well in real life, Elvina, makes a great post Identity Crisis, which talks all about the challenges of being a Chinese-American while living in China. Needless to say, it’s full of all sorts of problems that we may not have expected to begin with.
In that post, Elvina mentions friends complex’s having over-zealous guards. Well if you read that friend, Don’s, post you will see just how intense the guards can be there. He talks of having a church gathering at his place, and havint the guards come it to see if there were any Chinese people there. This may seem like a strange question, but it has some deep seeded questions about freedom and “foreigner rules” in China. Check out Just Checking Who is Home… on The Arizona Anachronism for more info on that one.
Keeping with people I know, my friend Ryan, also known as thehumanaught, a B-List celebrity in the English language China blogging community, makes a great post about Living Without Trust, where he talks about how difficult it is to find trust in this country. A few months ago, his dog was killed as a result of dog food that went bad, and his new dog got sick, only to have the doctor run a series of expensive tests, when a simple internet search showed that it was nothing to worry about. A frightening read that makes you appreciate some of the wonders of the West.
As I have mentioned a few times, I am also writing for a blog (ran by the same Ryan as above), called Lost Lao Wai. Earlier this week, I read a fanatastic post about a Chinese family and their dirty little secret, liking Japanese food. This is very topical, given the outcry that has came out surrounding the new fim, Nanjing, Nanjing! Read Itadakimasu! by Quincy on Lost Lao Wai.
Now of course, not everythign great is writen by myself, or my friends, there is a lot of other stuff out there. Michael Rines, at the New York Times, did an excellent article called “To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It“, about the destruction of Kashgar’s ancient city. China is starting the demolition of 2/3 of the ancient city, in order to improve it for tourists. As a recent tourist of the region, I am a little torn on that one. On one hand, I hate to see something with so much character destroyed, but on the other hand, I would hate for people to continue living in such sub-standard living. Also, I deeply dislike the thought of having a culture and region get turned into an attraction, but yet I just went there and loved every minute of it…
In an equally debatable post on a vastly different topic, John Pomfret of the Washington Post, makes a great blog entry about the PRC and their strange relationship with everyone’s favourite Hermit Kingdom titled “Why China Won’t Do More With North Korea“. It raises some very interesting perspectives that I certainly had not thought about. It examines China’s economic, cultural, and geo-political interests in keeping the Korean Penninsula divided, and it really is a fascinating read that could serve to explain some of the complexities of the Korean issue.
Lastly, I should mention that I have continued to post on Lost Lao Wai, which you can see all of here. Some of these may end up reposted here, but I would encourage people to read them where they are, as the comments are part of the fun (especially for The Bargaining Debate).
Anyway, with that I should be off. I hope that you take the time to enjoy the posts I have highlighted for you, since this is certainly an interesting time to be in this strange, strange continent.
My apologies for not being the best, and certainly not the most diverse blogger of late. But it turns out that running a second blog, posting for another one, the Great Firewall of China, and you know, real life, are rather large drains on a person.
Another reason for my detachment from this bit of space has been my newest distraction, a wonderful website called Wolfram Alpha. This website if part of a very ambitious project to make the sum of human knowledge immediately computable. Sort of like Wikipedia for the math geek, which makes it very clearly in my territory.
This site has dozens of features, all you have to do is type in any of their many types of inputs, including (but certainly not limited to) measurements, musical notes, geography, colours, anagrams, dietary reference, and of course good old fashion mathematical functions.
After putting in some different inputs I learned the following things about myself:
-My height, 5′10″, is approximately equal to 0.97 fathoms, the length of DNA strands of the human genome, and the distance that light can travel in 5.9 nanoseconds.
-My birthday, December 30, 1982, is day number 2 455 334 on the Julian Calendar, it had 9 hours and 18 minutes of daylight in New York, and is 9643 days ago…I know, I don’t look a day over 8000, but that’s besides the point.
- Currently AIG has a stock value of $1.70 while Freddie Mac has one of $0.79. In the past five years they have had a return of -97.64% and -98.64%, respectively. Economic, what now?
- Swine Flu has 12 107 cases with 87 deaths worldwide
-My first name is ranked 502nd in the United States, with most people who share my name in their 40s and 50s, also there are an estimated 93 538 people who share the name in the US. Making my name 1 out of 2502. Not quite making me the 1 in a million that I had hoped.
-My last name, by contrast, would be ranked 191st if used as a first name, with 267 546 people in the US expected to have that as a first name. That’s right my last name is almost three times more common as a first name than my own first name. Can’t say that I’m the slightest bit surprised by that fact.
- In world rankings, Canada is ranked 2nd in land mass, 36th in population, 224th in population density, 136th in population growth, 8th in life expentancy, 23rd in median age, 9th in GDP, and the top three languages are English, French, and Plautdietsch. I have no idea what that third one is.
-Toronto (the closest major city to my hometown) and Suzhou (where I’m living now) are 11 460 km apart, with Toronto having an elevation of 85m higher.
-The title of this blog, is sadly not a recognized word, when I entered glen_______ into the crossword feature, I got no recognizable words.
- When asked “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?”, it said “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind (according to Bob Dylan)”. Hard to argue with that one.
- However, it does not know the answer to “How do they get the caramel in the Caramilk bar?” or “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”. I guess the developers need to word on that one.
While they need to get to work on answering those last two questions, there is still a lot of fun to be had, and a lot of useless junk to learn. Go ahead and give it a try!
You may be asking yourself, “How are you posting then?”, and if you weren’t, then, surely you need to do a bit of thinking. Well after ranting about it on twitter my friend Ryan (aka thehumanaught) turned me onto a service called Hotspot Shield. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it is a VPN (Virtual Private Network) which are designed to both keep your network secure, but also to circumvent any firewalls, including the most comprehensive in the world, The Great Firewall of China, which periodically bans like (like YouTube and blogger, and all sorts of other fun stuff).
Hotspot Shield is a free service, and so far, so good. I can access my blog (obviously) and other sites which were previously blocked. It is a free service, so it occasionally throws up ads as either pop-ups or at the top of a window, but it is far from disruptive. If that bothers you too much, there are several more that you can find and pay for.
Either way, I would highly recommend you make use of one of these services….which I realize, that if you are in China then you can’t access such a thing, but it could be coming back on later. This is especially important given that a few weeks from now is a certain anniversary of a certain event at a certain square, where nothing important happened…
So expect further delays for anyone trying to access any amount of truth within this interesting nation.
As of yesterday, the incredibly popular site, YouTube, has been banned here in the PRC. This comes just over a year after it was last banned during the protests leading up to the Olympics. The statement from the government is: “China’s internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security”.
This adds to the many popular sites that I am currently unable to access. Apparently the iTunes music store (which I don’t use anyway) doesn’t work over here, neither does Daily Motion (a competitor to YouTube), and any blogs on wordpress, as well as many other sites somehow related to the two naughty “T” words (T1bet and Ta1wan…if you didn’t get it those 1s are supposed to be “i”s). Also, the Chinese version of Skype (called Tom-Skype) filters out the use of a certain four letter “f” word, and reportedly tracks any mention of certain “hot words”.
Somehow though, blogger accounts (like this one), pirated music sites, and Chinese video sharing sites (like Youku and Tudou) work just fine.
Apparently one of my friends tried to make a status update on Facebook relating to YouTube not working and it was erased…I highly doubt that is a coincidence. While Facebook is not officially blocked, it can sometimes be “down” or slow for no apparent reason.
While I am not going to comment on the moral grounds for such decisions, I will say this. They sure are frustrating for people like me. I depend on the internet for contact with the outside world as best I can, but situations like this can be more than aggravating.
So if any of you out there my apologies if I haven’t kept up-to-date with your blog, or watched the latest Diet Coke and Mentos video, hopefully you’ll understand.
They say that breaking up is hard to do, and well they sure are right.
With a heavy heart, I would like to inform you that this blog is breaking up. I know that this may come as a surprise to a lot of you on the outside, but trust me, it has been a long time coming. The differences between this blog’s rant and rave, nerdy opinions style, and the more personalized travel focus and description of my adventures, has just become too much to bear. As such, from here on out, those two sides shall never meet again.
The opinionated side of the blog won the real estate in the settlement, as such Getting Glenergized will remain focused on my personalized opinions and pursuit of life’s nerdy passions, with particular focus on politics, music, sports, and wrestling. While my travel adventures have fittingly moved to a new location, called Reflections of a Backpacker’s Soul. The new site has already imported any old travel stories, and has been setting up a nice bit of space. Both sides agree to stay friends, and are going to provide links and feeds to one another, to show no ill will.
More than anything, neither side wants to put you, our readers, in the middle, so please try to make time for both blogs. We understand that you may have less time for either of us, and we don’t want to get too needy, but we do love keeping you around, so please stick stay in touch, we’d hate to loose you.
Greetings one and all, today is a very very special day for me, and more importantly, this blog which I am currently writing on, and you are currently reading from. Two years ago on this very day, I typed some very fateful words, which would impact my life from then on:
“Friday, October 27, 2006…a day which will live in infamy. I have officially joined the blogosphere. I don’t so much have a concept, theme, or general idea as to what to have here but rest assured it should be filled with awesomeness.”
That’s right today is my anniversary of beginning to blog!!! Just as I did one year ago, I will once more go through my myriad of categories that I blog about (or blogegories as I like to call them), where I’ll highlight one or two of my personal favourite posts on the matter.
The objective of this is to:
a) Get people new to this blog get an idea of what they are in for with my highly distractable nature and desire to write about just about anything.
b) Introduce a bit more of myself to people who I have recently met in this crazy place called the “Real World”.
c) Help long time followers get refreshed on any of my older posts.
d) Give me a post to make without having to generate any original concepts.
e) Give my blog a new outfit for its birthday, hope you like it!!!
So whichever reason you are reading this…enjoy!!!
About G: This topic was reserved for stuff that is about me as a person, including my “Glen Facts” and “Insights into my Twisted Mind” which have been mostly discontinued. My favourite post in this category remains “My 2006 (12/19/06)“, which chronicled a roller-coaster of a year for me. Since then, my self-centered posts have diminished, possibly because I think that this one would be hard to top. Cruising on the Information Superhighway:This is a category reserved for information about the information superhighway, also known as the “Internet” to some. Since this has not been a huge focus of mine, this is a relatively small category. The last post that I have made on this topic was back in January, and is perhaps the best of the bunch, “The First 20th Century War (01/26/08)” where I look at the war declared by most of the internet on the Church of Scientology that was taking place at the start of this year. While not much has come of it in recent months, I do genuinely believe that there will be some interesting long-term consequences of this “war”.
Glen News: Yet another Glen-centered category, which does not get posted too often anymore. While this seemed to dominate my early posting habits, that really has diminished of late. Probably the most relevant is “News on the Glen Front (02/12/08)” where I explain exactly how I came to be living in China in the first place. Happy [Insert Holiday Here]: I hate to cop out here, but I think that I have two favourite posts in this category, and well, it’s my blog, so you’re going to damn well like my choices!!! The first one to share is my “Christmas Shopping List (12/04/07)”, where I outline my plans for the gifts I plan to give different individuals, a few of which actually happened! The other, is a much older post where I look back at the progress that still needs to be made in honour of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in “What Would He Say Now? (1/15/07)“. Hockey and Other Sports:My most plentiful category on this blog!!! This is one that tends to get posted in furies, especially during playoff, or trade deadline time. As the title suggests, most of my posts have been about hockey, but there remains the occasional post about other sports…but again, mostly hockey. I think that my favourite hockey posts where the two part posts “Eastern Conference No-Star Team (01/13/08)” and “Western Conference No-Star Team (01/14/08)”, as due to a well placed link they are among my most viewed posts here. Hoorah.
Muzzak: Another tag that seems to come in spurts, is music. While I Have had lots of fun writing my two “Thumbs Up and Down” posts so far, and my “Empowering Break-up” playlist remains my most viewed post, I am going to have to give my favourite one of these to “Lovers Music (02/14/08)”, must be the romantic in me.
Random Tales: Like “About G” and “Glen News” these posts have fallen behind after a rapid beginning. Partly because I have been able to fit any stories into different categories, and partly because I have other things to talk about I suppose. If I had to choose two favourites it would be a pair of posts from my first time in China, where I get myself into two very different situations “The Universality of Kindness (4/15/07)” and “Fall Behind, Left Behind (04/23/08)”.
Rants: Last year, this was my biggest category, but now it’s far lower on the rank. I suppose that is very telling. In retrospection, I think that my favourite post on this was one that I made just before my Anniversary post last year, so it missed the cut due to its recent nature, “The Outing of Albus (10/24/08)”, where I look at Rowling’s revelation that Dumbeldore is gay, and how offensive that is, but not necessarily for the same reason that you would think.
Rasslin’: My guiltiest of guilty pleasures, the world of professional wrestling. Posting in this topic usually gets pretty intense around Wrestlemania time, but shows up at other random times. While I have a great deal of fun preparing to write any of my Wrestlemania predictions, or hype posts, the ones that took the most out of me where the pair of posts I made about Chris Benoit. “Shock and Horror (06/27/08)” immedietly after the horryifing incident and “The Benoit Diaries (12/18/2007)” almost six months later. Since writing that last post I have watched a Chris Benoit match, and it made me feel quite uncomfortable. Being a fan of someone who is a known murder is a tough thing to have to deal with, and I don’t know if I ever will be able to. Real Politiking: Now here is one that has been getting a lot of posting recently, with two North American elections taking place. While I received some great comments for my “Outsider’s Perspective” back in September in the build up to the Canadian election, I think that I got the most enjoyment writing “Finally (06/04/08)” and could celebrate Barrack Obama being declared the Democratic Nominee for President. In a year’s time I know that I am going to celebrate my post celebrating his presidency…
Remixes and Collaborations: The posts where I get a little help from my friends (shades of John Lennon). There have been several other contributors to this blog, but I think that I have to give the nod to “Finals Prediction (05/26/08)”, since yes, Jeff went 14-1 in the playoffs last year with many bonus points for correct series length, blah, blah blah.
Teachin and Learnin’: Posts about my job tend to come few and far between, but when they come they are usually posts that I put a lot of thought into. Few had more thought last year than “Reflecting on my Vocation (01/20/08)”, which was a speech that I made to my school last year and referenced Napolean Dynamite and talked about the Ninja Turtles. You know that makes you want to click on that link…
Travelling Tales: This is one category which I expect to see lots of new posts coming in the new year, given that I live far, far away from home. One to get you set up for the posts to come would be “Logging My Journey (08/24/08)”, where I love blog my very long flight across the Pacific Ocean to get to China. Tree Hugging Hippie Crap: One of the smallest, but most important categories here on this blog. I feel that every post that I make in this category is somehow important. While it was ignored, I had a good time writing (and get a chuckle everytiem I re-read) my “Open Letter to the Minister of the Environment (12/09/07)”. Needless to say Mr. Baird has yet to reply.
Vegan Talk: Like the above category, it is small but well intentioned. If anyone really wants to get why I am a vegan, I would suggest that they give “It Ain’t Easy Being Green – Take 1 – Pacifism (9/17/07)”, a gander and perhaps any of the others that peak your interest.
Videos: Just a label for any posts that contain videos, with this one being my favourite, and the best of the bunch…
As if anything could be better than that….
Why I Love…: A recurring theme that gets its own label. This has a wide range from an album, to a politician, to an author, to a movie franchise, but “Why I Love Bloggin’ (4/16/07)“, holds a special insight into why I keep doing this.
Yeah I haven’t done this in a while, I guess I’ve been distracted with hockey/school/life…anyway, here are the results from my latest bit of YouTube screening for your benefit…
So I haven’t done one of my random YouTube-Trollings-for-Blog-Content-so-you-can-Save-Time-and-I-Don’t-Have-to-Think-Up-New-Content style posts in a while, but my lord, there is a lot of great stuff on this thing called the internet.
I’m going to start out with one of the best goals of this century, scored by Future-Superstar-of-Tomorrow, Jonathan Toewvs of the Chicago Blackhawks. I’m sorry for the annoying commentators, but just revel in the awesomeness that is this goal.
On the spirit of such awesomeness, here is the video by Will.I.am, with Barack Obama, for “Yes, we can”. Man it’s inspirational…
On the other end, we have Hilary Clinton, saying “Shame on you”, I guess she’s going for a different kind of inspiration to get people to vote for her, the kind that you get when your mother is nagging and guilting you and you have no choice but to do what she says…I guess that could work…
For the record, Hilary says that she doesn’t support NAFTA, yet she claims to be part of the other Clinton administration, which you know, signed the thing into being…interesting…my last political video comes from the site “Barely Political”, promoting their YouTube Channel, I must say “I’m not paying shit for this” is possibly the funniest line I’ve heard in a while…
Why does this make me believe in reincarnation? See, I’m fairly certain that Nazis, rapists, and people who don’t recycle will get reborn as honey bees that anger these hell-spawn wasps who extract their karmic vengeance by ripping them in half en mass. The last thought running through their brains as they watch their torsos fly away, is knowing that their freakin’ children will be fed to baby Hell-spawns, who will grow up and rip you apart in your next life…that’ll teach them for not sorting their garbage.
