ISpyShanghai

This was my housewarming gift from Dingle.

The packaging says you’re only allowed to leave it running for 1 hour, but it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re watching a dog hump your laptop. 

I’ve written to the manufacturers to suggest that a 60 minute timer is added to version 2.0.

(also on youtube)

There’s a great new shop opened up near Dingle’s house- it’s called Meat Puppets and it sells all kinds of utterly useless tat.

The woman who owns the place speaks good english, which will be very useful when she’s back working in Starbucks after the business fails.

Here’s what I wrote about it for Shanghaiist:

Gadgets! Gadgets! Gadgets for all!

If there’s one business model that’s sure to ride the current economic storm, it’s a shop which sells nothing but useless gadgets.

Recently opened “Meat Puppets” on Shaanxi Lu (near JianGuo Lu) is a shop that sells gadgets such as “High School Musical” themed magic 8-balls, old-fashioned telephone receivers on a curly cord (to plug into your cell phone, obviously) and one of two awesome infra-red powered air guitars!.

Take that Credit Crunch!

Takara Tomy Air Guitar Pro – 275RMB

Takara Tomy Air Guitar Pro Acoustic (pictured) – 475RMB. 

 

One thing I didn’t mention in that post is that I bought the guitar in the picture, and then tried to make a video of myself playing the thing.

With limited success.

I hear strong rumours that there is a clip of Professor Dingle playing “Walk This Way” on his, whilst wearing superman pyjamas. Let’s wait and see if it turns up eh?

I have a new love in my life, and her name is The Electric Chanting Buddha Box.

Buddhists, as we all know, are big fans of incense and chanting so with my apartment being close to Jing-An temple, there are about 5 or 6 Buddhist supply shops on my road which sell more incense than anyone could need. Until now though, I thought you had to go to the actual temple to get your fill of chanting, but oh how wrong I was.

All you actually need is a plastic box ranging in size from a box matches to a small radio. Turn them on and relax as the sweet, cheap sound of incantations and wood-block beating fills the air. Since the sounds are looped, you don’t have to worry about getting up to change the CD, it’s like having a singing monk as a house-mate, except you don’t have to put up with claptrap like:

“If I were the one who took the last of the milk, would not the last of the milk also have taken me?”

I think there’s something really appealing about these little gadgets and ended up buying six of them on Saturday afternoon- all of with look different and have different sounds. There seems to be a huge range of these little gadgets, every new shop I went into had a stack of them, all with their own sounds and designs. Some of them are small enough to hang around your neck- as modelled by the handsome chap below:

I call it my “Third-eye Pod”. This is a very clever and amusing Buddhist pun.

The most expensive one was I think 30 RMB (2 quid) and the cheapest was half of that- in the end I bought six of them, which might seem a little excessive but like the Buddhists say, you only live once!