Posted 10:00 AM by Gobbler
"Most arduous tasks lie ahead of us in the great work of construction." Chairman Mao Zedong, 'Opening Address at the Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China'

Do you know, Im not the only person on this fair dollop of world here that is basically called earth who thinks that Chairman Mao Zedong had the odd interesting thing to say. Take the city of Xuzhou for example, where i went last weekend. Now, apart from the places penchant for pongchong and barbecues on wastelands and so on, it has some mighty fine, curvaceous, tree covered hills. or, as they like to call them, 'mountains'. Which i feel i must dispute.

I like a good mountain. Ive been up one or two, and ive seen one or two more. But lets be clear here, lets get this down immediately. Mountains, to be mountains, have to fulfill certain criteria. They have to, for one thing, be a certain size. Cant go calling every hillock, undulation and mole-hill a 'mountain' or the whole exercise becomes a pointless farce. Otherwise one could indeed 'make a mountain out of a molehill' which, it is genrally accepted, one should not do. And so, the good powers that be decided that it had to be a certain height. The dictionary describes a mountain as a 'very high, steep hill' but that seems a tad subjective to me as it rather depentds upon what you happen to consider to be 'very high and steep'. A dutchman, for example, would probably quiver at the sight of, say, the Pyramids at Giza in eqyptian egypt, and pronounce "Mein gott, this is bonkers! A mouintain, Jurgen, a mountain! but nein, nein! the bicycle will be useless! how is this possible?" (you see, holland, where dutch people come from and usually reside, is completely flat. They do have one hillock on the border with germany but its only 12 metres high. It is a national monument. But on the whole holland is most flat and thus they all ride around on bicycles. Oh, and the dutch people are all quite mad, in case you were wondering. For example, i know two people of the dutch variety and they are called 'Grilled Tomato' and 'Sliced Cucumber'. You cant get much more loopy than that.) As i was saying, mountains have to possess a certain girth. When i was a trifle younger than i am now, someone (of sufficient importance to me to precipitate my remembering what they said,) informed me that a rocky protuberance on land had to be 1000 metres above sea level otherwise it was technically only a hill. This is the definition I am sticking to for the sake of this little blog.

While of course we are all anxious to return posthaste to our little curvaceous tree-covered mountain in Xuzhou, China, and discover what all the fuss is about, it is first important to reinforce what has been so far said. Any hill above 1000 metres is a mountain. Hollands highest point is 12 metres above sea level (this in fact isnt true but the basic point thast the place isnt bvery high holds true) and thus cannot be considered to possess mountains. In fact, when you think about it, hollands lack of mountains or even a decent hill is probably why the call it The Netherlands, where 'nether' is somewhere low (e.g. ones nether regions) so 'netherland' means low country. This netherland, though sounding rather similar, should not be confused with Neverland, either Peter Pans version or michael jacksons. But then, apparently, michael jackson is peter pan, he said so himself. The only similarities between the netherlands and neverland is that they are both full of loopy people, have a lot of freely available drugs rolling about, have a reknowned liberal policy vis a vis letting people into ones bed, and are both places that people go to have lots and lots of fun. Hang on. You see where im going with this? Maybe Michael Jackson is actually Dutch?

Anyway, to get back on course. And now lets please stay there, for heavens sake. So, how far have we got? Holland has no mountains. Right. England hasnt got any either, though its doing better than Holland. Wales doesnt have a mountain. It almost does, but apparently mount Snowdon misses the 1000 metre mark by about 8 metres, if i remember right. which in my opinion is tough luck, as it certainly looks like a mountain. You have to go to Scotland to find yourself a genuine British mountain, Ben Nevis being the big chap up there. Happily you may, on your way, also come across a fine selection of single malted beverages. It could be the perfect little holiday. A genuine mountain in the morning, perhaps a quick loch in the afternoon, and a spot of haggis in the evening; all helped along with numerous restoring tots of single malted beverages. it does sound quite splendid doesnt it?;) France has a fine selection of mountains, and so does America, united states of. And many other places, including China. But, and heres the rub, you wont find them in Xuzhou. Sure they call it a mountain, those tricksy adverts, but the fact is that is doesnt cut the mustard. The thing was something like 142 metres above sea level. thats just crap. And there it was, proclaimed in big letters on the big sign. 142 metres! hooray for our mountain. i have hereby exploded the myth of xuzhous mountains.

Of course, the next logical question to ask, and the very one that waS surely on the very edge of your lips, anxious to be voiced, is "how did these mountains, that we now unanimously recognise as nothing more than hillocks, come to be forested in such a delightful manner?" (for you see, they are delightfully forested, a lush green carpet of quality tree-age. i will admit to liking trees. but i do not hug them. i actually like to chop them down and saw them up, something for which i blame my late grandpa and more recently my uncle, who is evil). WEll, i will tell you. some years ago all the trees had been chopped down to do various things with, and xuzhous hills were as ugly warts upon the landscape. Then Mao popped over to say hello. He said something along the lines of "Hello! Yeah, i like what youve done with the place, very nice. you got a dead nice coal mine here, and i like those factories a lot. but you know, you wanna put some trees on these hills. they look crap at the moment, i should like you to cover them with trees." and they did just that, lots of nice trees, and thats why it is that way today. of course, they didnt just plant the trees, oh no. no, they built a nice pavilion on the spot where the chairman had stood with a sign saying "On this here mountain on this here spot did chairman mao once tell us to plant trees and so we did". thats how it happened.

Apart from the trees there is something else that needs to be covered, that was the original intended topic and that makes the quote at the start more relevant. Its been mentioned that lots of things are being built in china pretty quicksmart; the arduous tasks are being undertaken with great ardour, but there is something else. That is, the arduous and impossible task of stamping out human stupidity. like me for example, who should keep his gob shut more often, (i remember some clever bloke once point out that tehre was a reason why the big G above gave us two ears and only one gob) and some other people too. For example the pillock who spent minutes excitedly talking to me about Shanghai. did i know that the population of shanghai was exploding? he wanted to know, so i told him that i had heard something along those lines. He told me quite sincerely that the population of shanghai had now reached 1.3 billion. '1.3 billion what, exactly?' i asked, attempting to save the fellow any shred of knowledgable credibility he may have had. "1.3 billion people. its quite a lot isnt it?" Yes, you poor deluded moron, that is rather a lot of people. gosh. then there was another bloke who tried to tell me that there more construction cranes in shanghai than in the rest of the world combined. How the heck is that supposed to be, even for a second, remotely plausible? considering, if nothing else, the sheer volume of cranes in the rest of china? But then of course i realised, it did all make sense after all. I mean, look at the facts. If you had a city where the population jumped from 18 million to 1.3 billion in a breath, you'd need quite a few cranes, millions of the buggers, to build homes etc for the 1,282,000,000 people that youve just discovered actually live in your city. youre going to need cranes. which pretty much wraps it up from me for the evening. goodnight.

Posted 10:01 AM by Gobbler
"It is necessary to maintain the system of cadre participation in collective productive labour." Quoted in On Khrushchov's Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World (July 14, 1964)

It has been somewhat bizarre weekend. Friday night saw another Xuzhou escapade. Last time i went up it had taken us 12 hours to get there to this time improved arrangements meant that it took just 7. It turned out to be a very good evening although i managed to get myself into all sorts of trouble. As you do. Let me explain. For that is my principal function here, that being the writing of bloggage, as the author, to explain, elucidate and detail certain events appearing to the author as interesting to the general, that is to say specific, audience or rather readership, as interested members of the internet community, as it were, who are reading these words, herenow being written, which is what i do. In a manner of speaking.

Now that we have that cleared up, let me go on. Barbeques. I dont know if i mentioned this before but eating food in Xuzhou is no picnic. Nor is it your mundane restaurant effort. Chairs are not to be found, for example, and the table only manages to be about a foot off the ground. For one high quality Xuzhou-esque bbq you will need:

1) A building site or area of wasteland.
2) A tent
3) A number of varieties of dead or soon to be heading that way animals.
4) Little troughs for the charcoal.
5) A small ocean of beer.
6) Crap plastic cups in which to put said beer which look incredtibly crap and weigh less than nothing but that are actually indestructable. (they are made of indestructable bendy plastic stuff.)
7) Hungry foreigners.

We, as you can guess, made up the hungry foreigners element of the little gathering, and happily spent the next few hours chowing down bbq'd produce. Goat is quite yumptious, and you occassionally get the feeling of being at some occult sacrificial ceremony as and when the previous goat has been all carved up because they bring out the next one and hastily post it off to goat nirvana. i havent seen this i should point out, but i have heard the stories and been advised to avoid the large pools of blood outside the tent.

I dont know why it should be the case but the eating of hte food seemed to be almost continually accompanied by gan bei's, which is of course where you down your drink. No sooner have you polished one off, managed to release a badly needed belch to prevent an explosion from the build up of gas, (which would not be ideal at all) when some other little git bellows "Hah hah, gan bei gan bei gan bei gan bei gan bei! Hah hah!" Soon we had made satisfying inroads into the stockpile of 'Pong Chong', the local ale. ITs quite a reasonable drop. And then we had the boat race.

The Boat Race did of course not involve any boats, but rather lots of beer. Quite what boat races have to do with boats is beyond me, but i was willing to push such technicalities for the moment. this is a high precision, high brow, high octane competition where two teams line up and have a drink relay race. when the first person finishes and puts the cup upside down on his head the next person goes and so on until one team finishes. The other team had Emerson as captain, the american geezer elsewhere described, and we had Nathan, some sound Australian bloke. The tactical approaches were noticably different. Emerson had his lot in a close huddle and was busy shouting encouraging things to his team and disparaging things about our team; something along the lines of "Come on!! Hugga hugga hugga!! Kick the crap out of them!! Hugga! Win win win!!!" Nathan was far more laissez-faire. We got into a drinking order. "Right guys," he said eventually, "What you gotta do is drink your beer and put your cup on your head. Like, really quickly. Lets win." How could we lose?

Had i not been present at the event i would not have believed that we could lose. It was my first ever boat race, surely we would win. Unfortunately it became clear rather early in the proceedings that lose we could indeed, largely because they were better than us. This called for desperate action. For my part i began slagging off the other team, shouting and screaming obscenities. I do not recall telling Emerson that he was going to 'Die like a dog!' or that "I'm gonna nuke your arse!" but i wish i had done and besides i said many other satisfyingly unpleasant things. But this was not enough to secure victory. We turned to the last course open to us. Cheat. Or, ratehr, bend the rules. And the cup. Squish it so theres less beer then. Also you dont really have to drink all the beer, all you have to do is aim at your mouth, pour, and then pop the empty on your physiog. Of course, one must hold ones head suitably forward so that the inevitable dribbles/stream goes on the barbeque and not your neatly pressed newly washed khaki trousers. Otherwise people will think that one has soiled oneself, and one doesnt want that. Anyway, we still didnt win. Outrageous! Ok so we didnt lose, the competition was declared a draw, but i didnt like it at all. Oh well.

Next i was nearly hospitalised by 'Matey' due to a slight disagreement over a conversation we were having. Somewhat excited by the boat race, a heated debate emerged about the nature of relationships. Of course, i know what youre thinking, its just the sort of chat to have after a boatrace. anyhow, as i believe i have intimated already, it turned out that we were not rooting for the same opinions, but i would not be discouraged. Not at least until i got him so worked up that he ended up pointing a large and well backed up fist in my direction and shouting "Mate, you dont know what the hell youre talking about, so just shut the hell up before I f***ing lamp you." Lampings are, in my opinion, generally best avoided. thye involve having a fist striking your face or other part of the body in a manner that usually causes physical discomfort. He looked genuinely put out and i decided not to push the point any further, so apologised. It was just like the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again, but happily nuclear holocaust or in this case at least a sound lamping was avoided and the conversation turned to less volatile ground. I believe that we may have begun discussing the relative virtues of daisy chains and the merits of using the 'she loves me, she loves me not' pulling-petals-off-a-daisy-method in solving ones issues of the romantic variety. Then we had a beer.

'Aloof adj. cool and distant'

Then i got into even more trouble when i described GB, that is Ms. Ellen Gordon-Bouvier, as being aloof. Apparently its a criticism that is not unlikely to leave an indelible mark on ones emotional psyche. It didnt go down well at all, so poorly in fact that said GB saw fit to bring it up again the next evening. Regrettably my case was not assisted by the fact that i could not immediately remember having described her as such and recovered slowly when questioned about it. I think i managed to assuage her angst a little after a few minutes but shortly after plunged myself back into the hotpot again by reiterating to heather my previous remark that she was 'ever recalcitrant' This marvellously big word means 'unwilling to cooperate/ disobedient', and was originally intended to be somewhat complimentary, but in my excitement i managed to intimate that I was of the opinion that she wasnt behaving as much like some kind of faithful pet as she should. However she took it i didnt express myself particuarly well. Of well. All i managed to do was dig the proverbial pit. I could have escaped persecution by pointing out that i had also said that she was 'delightfully intriguing' but i wasnt quick witted enough. Oh well. But of course, all that happened last night, which was saturday, ans will have to be the subject of another blog. one must get ones beauty sleep.

Evil Uncle: 21/3 Which ones Charles Manson? Is he that dodgy old actor? Or is he just some top murdering chap? 24/3: blogging eratic, dont know where this mystical third post came from, its a funny world. things are regular again now. I thought the 'i like chinese' song would work sooner or later. Am in rehearsals at the momet for the mr creosote sketch... 26/3: I saw a marvellous sign on the bus this weekend, right up your alley. On the exit to a service station a sign said 'Thankyou for your Come'. Doesnt sound like they are concerned at all about reservations. Just a bit later we passed 'A kiosk for Alarming'.

Sianodel: 24/3 will use a cricket bat next week...

Vinny Boy: 20/3 Damn straight, and if they forget to bring a pen then they can just write in their own blood. Marvellous.

Laura: 20/3 Good to hear that youve moved in now, sounds like things are ticking along nicely. Look forward to the pictures sweatie!

Mum: 18/3 Not a bad idea. or perhaps a rice eating competion, one grain at a time, and they have to count out the grains one by one in english... 23/3 Actually not a bad idea at all. May well give it a try, thankyou. they like a good song. and i do like a good meatball.

Rach: 23/3 So what youre saying is that im creating hordes of rachels here. scary thoughts. one is enough dont you think?

Benjita: 23/3 Will look into it. its definitely possible but money is short. would probably have to get a boat as i reckon its cheaper but i'll investigate. Would be cool man! Anyway i think you should come here as yoouve got more money than me.

Mr Keith: 28/3: Sorry old chap coffee too dear in these parts. And your methods are only suitable for application to very special students. I too shall have a beverage for you.

Football Rich: 26/3: Hello Sweetcheeks. Sounds like life is one long struggle for you as per usual. Best of British to Bob, but i dont worrytoo much as, clearly, hes a tiger and thus generally unstoppable. I dont understand why your worrying about them refusing to grade coursework as i assume you never bothered to do it...