Talkin' Shit About A Pretty Sunset

Because he was born five weeks early, my son Elliot has been in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) since he was born last Monday, November 16th. They say he can come home tomorrow -- nine days into his life outside the womb.

He's a tough little dude and has been handling it well, but we are dying to have him home. I envy all the parents who have kids born to term and can cart them home in a day or two. You guys are lucky!

My boy Elliot was born November 16 at 4:27pm. He's 5 weeks premature so he's in the neonatal ICU for maybe over a week. He's got all kinds of tubes and catheters and crap running into him, but you can still see he's an outlaw, just by that little twinkle in his eye.



Already smiling and ready to man the winches or reel in a rockfish at a moments notice, perhaps.

Multiple choice quiz: a) this photo was taken at a Malaysian aquarium store and these are pets; b) this photo was taken at a Malaysian restaurant and these are dinner choices:

Took these photos from the top of the Jing Mao Tower. This is what I mean by shapeless motionless clouds blending to the sickly yellow pollution haze that's permanently hovering over the city:





The only thing I can imagine completing this skyline is a giant set of Mickey Mouse ears.

In Shanghai, my biz partner took me to a sushi place that I would have never been able to find if I hadn't been shown it. It was the quintessential unmarked place with two small red lanterns with Asian characters being the only thing indicating an awesome restaurant up the dirty black-carpet-covered stairs. Above, was some of the best sushi and sake I've ever had.

I took three pictures of the joint while sitting at the bar:

It's been raining every single afternoon here in Kuala Lumpur Malayasia and does not make for good picture-taking weather. But below is a photo I snapped of some of the world's tallest buildings taken with a nice light and foreground while trying to hold the Panasonic Lumix steady from a moving taxi cab that I liked:



God, I hate the words "Kuala Lumpur". Who the hell named a city that -- after lumping koalas?? I wish I wasn't here. Sure, I love seeing all my business partners but I should be home helping my wife with her pregnancy. Meanwhile, I'm schmoozing in Asia, waiting til Saturday ... taking decent photos of tall buildings.

The old cliché about swamp animals tasting like chicken couldn't be more wrong when it comes to Chinese turtle. The turtle leg soup was flavorless and the muddy broth stuck to my gums; the turtle neck salad was 70% bones; the turtle guts and onions tasted uninspired; and the turtle blood liquor was like a less sweet Jagermeister with tiny bits floating around in it.

I hate to seem like that fat weenie Andrew Zimmern on Travel Channel. Granted, I love to eat foods from all over the world, but I don't seek them out simply because they're strange, gross or exotic. I just like good-tasting food first and foremost. The reason I found myself eating the above monstrosity of a meal had nothing to do with shock TV though; I was eating all that turtle mess because the product I sell goes into turtle feed and I prefer more sales to less.

The Chinese believe all sorts of ancient bullshit about health -- sometimes referred to as Eastern "Medicine" by western hippies and yuppie fools. The Chinese still believe much of the "wisdom" derived from a period in time when nothing was known about human nutrition, disease or health -- before science, really. Simply because this knowledge has the cachet of being from a long long time ago, it has a vast following. Therefore, many Chinese think eating turtle will keep their sexual drive and energy up, and will make women's skin youthful.

The turtle farming region is in Hangzhou, an industrial city 110 miles southwest of Shanghai. If you've never been to China, you cannot imagine this level of pollution and industry. I've been to nearly every country in Asia and I'd never seen anything like this. Imagine that region on I-75 right before you get into Detroit or that section of northern New Jersey right before you get into Manhattan -- the sections where you pass a natureless field of industrial smokestacks and the car starts to stink up. Now imagine those smokestack regions stretching for miles and miles: that's the entire highway from Shanghai to Hangzhou, and for all I know, it could extend another 200 miles past Hangzhou.

A sickly yellow haze sits over this entire region. You can barely see the buildings only a half mile in the distance and you can't distinguish the separation between the motionless shapeless clouds and the polluted air-soup that envelops everything below. It was through this industrial endlessness where we stopped at the turtle farm for lunch and meetings.

"Turtle farm" makes it sounds more complicated than reality. We walked down a dirty highway and turned off down a gravel road that looked like I was entering the city dump, then past piles and piles of industrial trash before reaching this turtle-rearing facility. The farm is split into two sections -- outdoor and indoor. The outdoor ponds are massive acre-long concrete tanks holding muddy water and ugly-ass turtles whom nature cursed with heads that look like human penises with tiny pig noses stuck on the tip. The indoor ponds were in giant shacks made of corrugated metal roofs and thick black tarps. The hot stale air hit me as the door was opened, and I shined a flashlight into steamy darkness to see hundreds of tiny dickheads sticking out of the dirty water in concrete tanks.

The farmer reached into one of the writhing dark tanks, and pulled out this snapping beast whose neck stretched like some pornographic cock trying to bite us:



Here it is trying to attack us:



Luckily, I have a strong stomach. I have to in order to do business in China, but damn, after about a week of Chinese food I crave pizza and burgers like crazy.