My Favorite Media 2010

I've decided this post is entirely IndiaAdventure related, as besides travel and getting violently sick, about all I do in India to wile away the time is consume media.

Best Book:
This one was an easy one for me, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. An astoundingly brilliant book, the best 'our generation' book since Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Described by my sister as "mesmerizing", Freedom is a must read for anyone trying to figure out how to get through the incredibly boring and shitty middle part of life.

Best Video Game:
This is tough. Despite being the biggest year for video games sales in history, it was a surprisingly weak year for truly great games. Luckily, Halo:Reach came out to show everyone how an amazing game is made. It completely makes up for the awful Halo:ODST last year, and ranks as the best of the series for me. Its long, hard, beautiful, well paced, and incredibly inventive. I say its tough because I was also blown away by another game this year: Castlevania Lords of Shadow. Its so crazy that a Castlevania game is vying for my game of the year; Castlevania games haven't been good in over a decade, since Symphony of the Night in '97 (which I played through again this year in its entirety and its just impossible not to just spam kill everyone with the absurdly overpowered Holy Shield / Steel Rod combo). Lords of Shadow is a tremendously good game. Incredibly long, playing on the hardest difficulty level it took me well over 30 hours to complete. Its exciting, well balanced, innovative in parts, and where its derivative of other modern hack and slashers it does it better than the game its copying (I'm looking at you Shadow of Colossus and God of War III).

Best Album:

While I, like many, many others, have been listening to nothing but Kanye West's new minor masterpiece since it came out, unlike most top 10 lists you'll see I'll resist the urge to put the last great album of the year as the best album of the year (although its an amazing album, Kanye's best, and fully makes up for him picking on poor, homely little Taylor Swift). There were lots of great albums this year. Eminem's Recovery was a great return to form for him, albeit a bit one dimensional. The National put out their best album with High Violet. However sad I am about the demise of The Shins, James Mercer's new band Broken Bells put out a fantastic first album (although there are no songs on it that Natalie Portman would hand to you in a doctor's office waiting room). I'm an unapologetic Angels and Airwaves fan, and their free album this year, LOVE, is great; not a bad song on it. Shout Out Loud's Work wasn't received too well by a lot of critics, but I loved it and listened to it on repeat for weeks. Speaking of wearing the electrons off of an album, Vampire Weekend's Contra played on my iPod on repeat forever. The weird Americana/Bruce Springsteen/Punk drummer band Gaslight Anthem had their best album this year as well with American Slang; it probably made me more homesick for the US of A than any other this year. Freak folk was well represented this year by two phenomenal albums; Mumford & Sons debut Sign no More and Bombay Bicycle Club's Flaws. But, for my favorite album of 2010 I'm going to go with one you've probably never heard of but should be listening to; Swedish singer/songwriter The Tallest Man on Earth's The Wild Hunt. Its an amazing album and of an already amazing catalog, its Kristian Matsson's best yet.

Best TV show:
My sister records a bunch of TV for me onto DVDs and sends them to me at great cost all the way here to India. Unfortunately, I think 2010 TV was so bad its pretty much killed TV for me. I enjoyed the two seasons of Survivor this year like I always do, but that's just a guilty pleasure of course and doesn't represent anything close to art. Everything else was terrible. I've watched House for all of its seasons, even struggling through the awful season with the cop, but this one ended my viewing of that show. Terrible. All the sitcoms I used to watch have completely jumped the shark. Sorry, I think TV is dead, there is no best TV show of 2010 I'm afraid.
(Edit:) After writing this last night I remembered that in fact 2010 contained one of the best hours of TV ever - the final episode of Lost. So of course Lost is the best show of 2010, but unfortunately that only strengthens my argument that TV is shit right now as it was the end of one of the greatest series ever.

Best Film:
This one is tough for me, not because of all the great movies this year but because I've seen so few of them living here in 1850's India. But, of the ones I've seen, its a year with a fantastic studio monster Inception and a fantastic independent little gem Winter's Bone. I'm going to go with Inception, because while Winter's Bone is easily one of the best movies of this year or any other, its primarily so good because of the tremendous performance of its lead, while Inception is just all around amazing. Of course I haven't seen any of the late December Oscar bait movies so I could be missing the next Lost in Translation for all I know (one of which is a Sofia Coppola film, coincidentally). Honorable mention goes to Scott Pilgrim vs the World. I normally dislike comic book movies, but this is a wild, crazy, media mash of visual and auditory delight. Its not your parent's movie, that's for sure. And Kieran Culkin steals the show as the too cool for school roommate, his best performance in 8 years, since Igby Goes Down.

Hong Kong

In Hong Kong for the weekend. Staying at the Island Shangri-La on Hong Kong island. Top floor, "club" room. Awesome hotel, 60 stories. Room is identical to a Kruengtep wing Shangri-La room in Bangkok, minus the balcony. Same intoxicating smell wafting through the lobby floors. I'm hording the L'Occitane soaps, of course.
Went to the Hong Kong philharmonic orchestra on night one. Good. Did Barber's Adagio for Strings first (the Platoon theme if that helps). Second was an original piece by a Hong Kong composer for the bamboo flute. The chick on the flute would give Ron Burgundy a run for his money. Third was Copeland's Third symphony, of which I'm not a big fan. Orchestra was young and talented. Definitely no London Phil or Tokyo Phil, but a great show all the same. Concert hall was on Kowloon side.
The shopping mall integration is pretty advanced here in HK. They are a far cry from Singapore, as all of the malls don't interconnect, and there are still sidewalks here as opposed to the only way to get through the city of Singapore is through the malls. But there are a shitload of malls all the same. Big emphasis on luxury items. Ultra-luxury watches are an obsession here, almost every billboard is for a super lux watch brand; Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet... watches that go for hundreds of thousands of dollars and make my watch look like a goddamn Swatch. Exchange rate with USD is terrible, makes everything more expensive than it should be. To the point where when shopping if you ask for the price in USD they will invariably give a 20% US discount on whatever you are shopping for, and that 20% will get your just down to a bit above full retail. Bogus. Except video games, which are about 1/2 price here. Brand new just released PS3 games for $30 US. Awesome.
There is a movie theater in the mall below my hotel that plays movies all night. I have reduced my sleep to 2.5 to 3 hours a night since I've been here and so far seen Red (actually quite good. Willis embraces his old age), The Switch (just awful and super slow paced. Everyone attached to this that usually makes good movies should hide their head in shame), Charlie St. Cloud (horrible. horrible. horrible.), Saw 3D (wow, so bad), Life as We Know It (terrible, too long, I really hate Katherine Heigl), Due Date (really not funny at all, however implausible that seems), and Grown Ups (unbelievably, Adam Sandler films just keep getting worse). So, lots of bad movies and one good one, but god damn its nice to go to the movies in a clean movie theater with a quiet audience.
Went to the two Michelin star classic French fine dining restaurant Petrus last night. Amazing experience, gorgeous restaurant on the top floor overlooking all of Hong Kong. Harp player, classic French motif. My dinner companion was a bottle of 1978 Chateau Petrus. Man it was delicious.
Every other meal I've had Sushi. Great sushi here, all the hard to find stuff I like; aji, uni, toro, ama ebi, you name it. Of course the gotcha is its way too expensive. Like $25 per piece of Sushi (not served in pairs like normal - one piece). Ouch.
Tomorrow heading over to Macao. My fool-proof roulette system will surely break the bank at each and every casino. I don't want to give away all of the details of my system, but, I'll let you know that it was originally developed by a Mr. Wesley Snipes in 1992's "Passenger 57".

I'll post some pics when I upload them.

Zimbabwe - Elephant Safari

Having once seen a "When Animals Attack" on Fox back in the day of an elephant rampaging through a zoo killing everyone in sight, as well as this video:



I was a little leary of an elephant backed safari. Luckily Jake the elephant decided not to kill us in cold blood and instead just walked around and ate trees. We got off lucky.

The vicious stare of Jake the elephant:


The murderous pachyderms lining up for their next round of hapless victims:


An elephant with the "ooga booga" strapped to his back. Roughly translated: "death saddle":


Jake lashing out for an unsuspected attack:


Clearly a recipe for disaster:


Jake stuffing what I assume to be a severed human hand into his mouth of razor sharp teeth:

Zimbabwe - Victoria Falls Hotel

Zimbabwe is pretty much a shithole. Sorry Zimbabwe. You can tell immediately how much more depressed the economy of Zimbabwe is than the neighboring countries Zambia and Botswana. They abandoned their country's currency recently due to hyperinflation and now just use the American dollar, which they are clearly trying to apply their habits of inflation to. Unfortunately, assuming that the country doesn't just start producing counterfeit US dollars (which I wouldn't put past them, honestly), they'll quickly run out of currency to exchange. A total mess.
The hotel we stayed was clearly the nicest hotel in Zimbabwe, and from appearance is quite attractive. The management was horrible, though, and the rooms were as well. There was a solid day's worth of fun things to do in Zimbabwe. Unfortunately we were there for three days.

South Africa - Lion Sands - Flickr Set

Link to the Lion Sands Flickr Set

South Africa - Lion Sands - Lions

Lions are like big huge housecats. Super lazy, lay around all the time and eat. I think the big difference is that a lion can kill you super easy (if he just wasn't so sleepy), but a housecat has a much tougher time of it. The housecat would need to position itself just exactly right over your sleeping face, or step in front of you at just the right time so you trip and fall out a tall window.
Landon had no concern of driving right up next to a feeding lion. It wasn't even because he had a huge elephant gun right in front of him on the dash, as he barely even had the case unzipped. It might have been because this dude Eddie sits on a little chair bolted to the front of the car, and Eddie would clearly be the first one eaten, giving Landon more than enough time to carefully back the Land Rover out of any danger.
According to the story told, the big dead hippo was killed in a hippo e hippo fight, and the lions just ate the loser as a meal of opportunity.















This lion was having a tough time chewing through the thick hide of the hippo, so he had the brilliant idea to get to the juicy center through the butthole.

South Africa - Lion Sands - Elephants

There will be more elephants later from Zimbabwe and Botswana, but here are the Sabi Sabi variety of elephants. They travel around in families, but not huge herds like in the open Kalahari.
These enormous cows with distended noses are clearly much smarter than humans. The adult ones just look at you like "another damn metal box full of hairless monkeys", but the teenage ones like to try to scare you with their big ears and aggressive personalities, and the young ones play with each other and act like little kids.





Super guide Landon explained that they cry out the side of their faces like this when they are stressed out. He probably explained it better than that.

South Africa - Lion Sands - Cape Buffalo

The Cape Buffalo is one of the "Big Five", but inarguably the least interesting of the big five. Its a big dirty cow with a brain shield of about 6 inches of solid cow bone. They just stand there and chew cud. They are so lazy birds nest on their faces. The video accurately portrays 99% of a cape buffalo's daily activities.

South Africa - Lion Sands - Leopard

He's eating a young impala antelope in the tree.








Video of him climbing back up the tree to eat more impala brains.