ISpyShanghai

How does this image make you feel?

 

Iggy Pop with- well let's say it's his au pair

I mean honestly, deep down.

How does it make you feel? 

I’m sorry you had to see that. If I was you, I wouldn’t look at this idiot wearing Crocs either.

Around this time of year in Her Majesty’s Perfect United Kingdom Of Britain we remember people who died in World War I and the follow-up: World War II. 

November 11th is Remembrance Day and on the 11th hour (of the 11th day of the 11th month) there is often a minute’s silence to commemorate the dead in shops and offices back home.

Around that time every year, many many people buy red paper poppies to wear on their lapel. If there are any TV presenters that still aren’t wearing a poppy by November 8th- the BBC can expect to get hundreds of angry phone calls complaining about a lack of respect and why we should bring back hanging.

 Why poppies you ask? Because on some of the battlefields in Flanders, poppies grew after fighting stopped and some guy wrote a poem about it:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
“In Flanders Fields” 
 Lt.-Col. John McCrae

Poppy Day in China

And now people in Shanghai can join the fun- Marks & Spencers (West Nanjing Road, be careful on the escalator) is selling Poppies!

WoAi represents (everybody)

So far I’ve only seen one person actually wearing a poppy here- it looked very smart but I can tell you- his character is not my favourite.

movember.com

Clever software people (like me, but presumably without a job or girlfriend) have hacked the software on lots of different Canon compact cameras. They’ve come up with new code to run which lets you play games, shoot RAW photos (don’t ask, it’s geeky) and…..shoot timelapse photography! 

So where I used to use a setup like this: 

I can now use one like this:

To make videos like this (sorry about the darts being in the way):

Did you spot

• Our resident American waving an American flag?
• A canoodling couple?
• WoAiZhongGuo in a suit?

If you’ve got a Canon camera (like my Ixus 50 / SD400), the hacked software is called CHDK.
Basic info about it is here. Lots of technical help here and the timelapse script I’m using is this one.

The Science & Technology Museum subway station (Line 2) is mainly famous for its giant fake market. This is where tourists go to enjoy the whole “What price you want to pay?” dance with vendors selling “tribute” watches, fake handbags, dodgy luggage, snide golf clubs, dubious drinking straws, knock-off baby lotion etc. etc.

Snifferbot

The Shanghainese walk straight through all of this nonsense and take their kids to the huge Science & Tecnology museum just across the courtyard.

At least 4 stories high with way way too much to see in the few hours I was there. Intellectually the museum is geared towards kids (the Natural History section is all roaring Lions and Spider exhibitions) but what the hell- I’m 30 years old, I’m done with learning new stuff anyway.

Me: clever enough already

eLandscapes

The first stop was the E-Arts (like normal art, but it needs a plug) exhibition called eLandscapes which was full of 360 degree projections onto domes with people wearing polarised glasses for that 3D experience. Amazing, amazing stuff that’s hard to describe (and harder to photograph), I didn’t realise that techonology had come this far to be honest.

Next up “The World Of Robotics”- which wasn’t exactly as up-to-date.

I was hoping that the whole section would be staffed by automatons who could arm-wrestle, quote 12th century persian poetry and then fly me to the gift shop.

Instead I watched a robotic arm sketch a bored child’s portrait for 20 minutes.  Tokyo in the year 2012 it was not.

Robotic Artist- slower than the real thing

The main attraction of the whole place though is the Imax cinema- of which they seem to have 4. The one we picked was showing a Pirates film where Leslie Nielsen and Eric Idle fall into various booby 3D booby traps as your chair vibrates and water drops from the ceiling.

The “Pirates 4D” movie was funny, scary and something an 8 year old boy would talk about for the next five months. Mandarin-only, but you don’t need subtitles when 3D bees are appearing in front of your eyes and stinging the chair.

eLandscapes Festival - Free
Science & Technology Museum entrance (adults) - 60RMB
Pirates 4D Movie - 40RMB
Dodgy “Cariter” watch- “I give you good price, look-a! Look-a!”
 

<cue Shoe Tuesday music>

Last night I could barely sleep a wink as I was feeling so guilty for living a lie. For over a day now I’ve been lying to you, you who would never tell a lie to me.

I feel like I can never rest until I tell the world what really happened at the weekend, and so to quell my conscience (and stretch out this Shoe Tuesday nonsense for yet another week) I’ve decided to come clean about what happened last Friday.

Whilst dressed as John McClane from the Die Hard Trilogy + Die Hard 4.0: Live Free Or Die Hard- but more specifically the first film, simply entitled “Die Hard” I did not have bare feet.

The party was in a nightclub; there were cigarettes, shattered glasses and drunken feet everywhere. Going barefoot would have been like a very minor form of foot-specific suicide.

Instead, I cheated with a cut off stocking / pop sock and one of Emma’s weird Bamboo insoles. 

It was dark and smoky inside the club so no-one could see my dark and terrible secret. Also, as previously mentioned- no-one had a frigging clue who I was supposed to be anyway.

This barefoot look is a winner though, and I suspect that by next summer- everyone will be doing it. The price of flimsy pop socks will sky rocket, and newspapers will be full of stories about kids using superglue or nail guns to attach insoles to their feet. 

To the parents of those children, I would like to apologise in advance and plead with governments around the world to do all that they can to stop the pop sock madness of Summer 2009.

It's John McClane what was in Die Hard!

So this is my Halloween outfit. If you’ve never seen Die Hard then, well you really need to re-appraise your life, but also you won’t understand the costume.

I went as John McClane- Bruce Willis’s character from Die Hard part 1, 2, 4 and parts of 3 (although I wash my hands of the scene where a huge burst of water sprays him and Samuel L Jackson out of a pipe).

I estimate that of the 200 people who saw my costume, three people “got it” without any explanation, so in any measurable sense it was a massive failure (especially since Shanghai taxi drivers are not keen on picking up guys wearing a dirty vest covered in blood).

The Shanghaiist party was cool, I saw the Pope, a guy dressed as Super Mario, Earl Hickey and a couple of middle aged Chinese guys dressed as cops who…

Oh wait a minute, that actually was the cops- they shut down the party at about 1am.

Emma had a huge toy spider on her back- the wire legs wrapped around her as the giant arachnid sank it’s fangs into her shoulder. Lots of people loved that spider and kept shaking its legs and grabbing its little spider thorax.

The moral of the night seemed to be that if you’re going to hang out at a dark crowded club built inside an old bomb shelter then no-one is going to notice ultra-realistic touches like writing the terrorists names on your arm in marker pen, or the fact you’re not wearing shoes in a bar covered in broken glass, but they will notice a 4 foot spider attached to your back.

p.s. Liam- I’m in for Mo’vember.

I don’t know if any of you are planning to go to the Shanghaiist party tonight, I’m excited about it, got my costume sorted and everything.

If you see a guy whose feet are cut to ribbons, that’ll be me- say hi.

Photo by Nad