GLOBAL WARMING COLD-COCKS ANTARCTICA!

Good morning, Internet.

( I bring you giant ice penises for yr pleasure ... )

Score one for global warming.

Attention new Def Army recruits: yes, you'll be seeing a lot of this in yr Friends page. No need to thank me.

Frozen stiff,

This is dF

YOU, ME AND THE INTERWUB

Or, “I hope you haven’t made any plans, because it’s just going to be you and me for the next few days.”

The bridal unit and mother-in-law left for Shanghai this morning to visit our 7-year-old goddaughter, who moved there with her parents a couple of months ago. She’s been having some trouble adjusting – she very much likes being in control of her surroundings, and one element of that is familiarity. So now that she’s out of her comfort zone in a city that is nothing like HK, to include the language (to say nothing of Shanghai’s unique dialect), she’s struggling a bit, poor lamb.

The reason I’m not going is because I have been declared persona non grata in China. Again.

The visa I used to go to Gudou expired last month, and when I applied for a new one, they rejected me. No explanation. Not that I need one. The visa restrictions that Beijing put in place to keep trouble-makin’ foreigners out of their Olympics are still in force. Sources suggest they’ll stay there until at least after National Day (which means maybe mid-October).

The other problem, of course, is that I am a journalist. As such, my name is on a Special List. That means if I want a visa, I can’t simply get one via the nearest travel agency. I have to show up at the Chinese Consulate in person with a buttload of documents and spend an entire working day filling out forms and waiting for interviews. And even then I could still be rejected. China works a lot like the US in that regard: once you have that rejection flag, that just makes subsequent applications even harder.

I blame President Bush, of course. These rules are old rules, but the only reason China is bothering to enforce them rigorously is because the US began doing the exact same thing to foreign journalists (and also with old rules dating back to the 1950s that were rarely enforced). The US was also rather quiet about the whole thing – I have a number of friends and colleagues in the business who showed up at the border thinking their visa would be automatic as usual, only to be deported after admitting they were there to cover a story. And thus was America saved from the horror of foreign media coverage.

Anyway, that’s why I’m not in Shanghai visiting my goddaughter. So I’ve got the weekend to myself. Plus, it’s a three-day weekend thanks to the Mid-Autumn Festival on Monday. I’ll probably spend it swimming, drinking whiskey and writing SF porn for yr pleasure.

Business as usual, in other words.

Home alone,

This is dF

BEEF: IT’S WHAT’S FOR DESSERT

ITEM [via And I Am Not Lying]: Nebraska: home of the Hot Beef Sundae.



What’s a Hot Beef Sundae, you ask?

Golden mashed potatoes covered with a generous portion of our roasted and seasoned-to-perfection top round beef.  Then aged cheddar cheese, more golden mashed potatoes smothered with our special beef gravy, more aged cheddar cheese, a slice of buttered toast, and a cherry tomato on top.

God help me ... that actually sounds kinda tasty.

Still, if yr going to come up with something like this, shouldn’t it come with bacon sprinkles? I mean, as long as yr ruining yr cholesterol count ...

Also available in Nebraska: Pizza on a stick.

Everything’s better with meat,

This is dF

UPDATE [9.13]: Hot beef sundaes are also available in Iowa. I double-dog dare bedsitter23  to eat one.