GLOBADOM

Coping with husband/dog rebellion 101
Finding lost or missing items 200 – prerequisite: coping with husband/dog rebellion 101
The Art of Relaxation 100 – For beginners – who have never learned how to relax and feel it cannot be justified
Linguistics 100 – learning how to understand people who speak while yawning or eating

I think I will also register for Ryan’s language course – as many as I can get

Raise the Red Lantern, one of the prettiest movies ever to come out of China, has suffered from some terrible DVD releases.

But at long last, while I wasn’t looking, it appears the latest two NTSC (and Region 1 or 0) editions don’t suck. DVD Beaver raves: Acceptable visual quality! And subtitles that make sense!

Alas, they give and they take. The ERA release comes down hard on those who would illicitly show this video on…

oil rigs?

Mr Fry (he’s a brit, so he nae gets a dot after his social title) is Britain’s most talented . . . reviewer of mobile phones?

Quite. I assure you this is the most insightful state-of-the-smartphone you are likely to read.

(Þ: Fireball Gruber.)

Let’s just not contemplate what was in the bottle.

So I was musing on the routine China-this, China-that coverage these days, and I started thinking, “hey, what about India?”

And then I learned something that most everyone else who has asked that question already knew: India’s per-capita GDP is about a third of China’s, and is about half of China’s PPP GDP.

Here’s lots of pretty charts, in convenient PDF format. The intro to that document suggests the issue is that democracy or no, China essentially embraced aggressive market reforms about a decade earlier than India did. Here’s a roundtable discussion on the subject of whether India will catch up, by a bunch of experts.

I asked a pretty clever friend what he thought the answer was relative differences in environmental and regulatory controls. And there’s probably something to that. But the other thing to note is that compared to China, India has seen far less foreign investment. Whether that is the symptom or the cause of the lower rate of economic growth (and the present rather gaping chasm in average outcomes), there it is.

This appears to be the real trailer for a real cartoon.

Due to an oversight, neither The Lovely One nor I had a book to read on the airplane trip back, so we bought some in Schipol.

I think she was a little weirded out that I chose This Is Paradise! by Hyok Kang.

The hook is that Mr. Kang is a rare escapee from North Korea, but even more rare, he escaped as a young teenager with his family. The book is his first-person description of what life was like in North Korea.

I finished all 200 pages in the plane with time to spare. It was compelling reading. The short version is this: the famine in Korea was far, far worse than I realized, if this account can be generalized. Hyok Kang escaped with his family to China in 1998; by that time two thirds of his schoolmates were not coming to class, either because they were too hungry to do so, too busy feeding themselves, or because they were dead of hunger.

The telling point may be that when the family escapes to rural China, it seems like an unbelievable paradise, because everyone has enough to eat. And also, that was where he first saw that exotic fruit, the banana. After four years living underground in China, they finally make a circuitous trip to South Korea.

The story is harrowing. I have some cause to doubt the completeness of the account: in one passage, Mr. Kang admits to having joined a “gang of bad boys” in China, and says rather obliquely that he became “involved in acts of violence that I now regret.”

But as an unfiltered portrait of what life is like in North Korea, it’s rare and done well.

Here at Wired Cola, we’re all about leveraging synergy in our quest to become the most cybermorphic purveyor of fictive beverages the worldâ„¢ (a trademark of Globadom® LLC) has ever known.

But this is our corporate blog, and here today, we’re going to leverage a little synergy by paying homage to our friends in the marketing department at Apple (“don’t say ‘computer’) Inc., who revealed two clever things today, one of them even beverage-related.

The first revelation we want to discuss is the Apple-Starbucks synergy. In sum, it’s thus: when you get within striking distance of a Wi-Fi hotspot hosted by one of these newly upgraded Starbucks shops, a little Starbucks icon appears on your iPhone or your iPhone-minus-Phone, aka iPod Touch. Tap that poor little virtual button, and you can browse the music currently playing in the Starbucks, and if it fills you with the same joy as a Venti Mocha Frappuccino, you can buy it right there.

That’s it. I’m not making this up. They’re rolling it out to New York and Seattle Starbuckses in October, and wave after wave of Starbucksae will be upgraded from then to the end of 2008.

Frankly, it seems they could have done more with this. Hopefully in Starbucks 3.0 (or is that iPhone 2.5/iPod Touch 2.0?), you will be able to see the daily drink specials right on your mobile convergence device, and check the sell-by dates of the scary cookies, too. And if you like what you see, you can order and pay for it, right through your iWhatsit!

Actually, come to think of it, that’s a slightly less stupid idea than the actual iStarbucks convergence that actually got rolled out today.

That brings us to the second thing Apple revealed, which has nothing to do with beverages, so I hardly know why I’m mentioning it.

Apple cut the price of the “real” iPhone to $399 today, a mere 67 days after launching the device.

Why? Dumb question: because $399 was the real price of the device all along. Mr. Daring Fireball sums up the matter in two perfect paragraphs, which explain exactly what happened.

Nonetheless, inessential elaboration is a core competence here at Wired Cola, so here goes: nobody else in recent mass-marketing nerd-toy hype vending has tried anything like this. The usual formula is that you try to make your your PlayBox Wii60 sells out within days, and is then unavailable to normal humans for months, while speculators float vast rafts of said product in the safe harbors of eBay and Craigslist.

Apple decided to be its own speculator: A million people wanted this thing badly enough to pay $200 more than Apple really needed to charge for it, and put that money directly in Apple’s hands. The result was that demand was choked just enough to match supply (iPhones have been continuously available, more or less, since launch day), speculation was unprofitable and virtually nonexistent, and just as a side note, I estimate this play made about $200 million in pure profit for Apple, over and above what they would probably consider “normal margins.”

We here at Wired Cola, when we hear a marketing tale like that, well, we just salute the perpetrators. Are you sure this is the same company that’s doing that Starbucks thing?

Oh, by the way, here’s my opinion of the rest of the stuff: Shuffles are stocking stuffers, the new Nano is ugly but functional, the biggest iPod Classic (“Classic” means “we’re going to kill this off soon”) is justifiable only as a multifunction detachable storage device, the Touch, at only $100 less than the iPhone, is a waste of time for Americans, but will be a hot seller in parts of the planet out of range of the AT&T network. the WiFi store may sell iPod Touches all on its own, and is a genius play that was a bit overdue.

In other words, Apple will sell, according to my carefully tuned estimates, roughly a zillion iPods in the next four months, and approximately half a zillion iPhones.

Things that can be exported from Greece to the joy of others: ouzo, loukoumi, halvadopita.

Things you should leave in Greece: mastic liquor (locally, “mastiha,” but the transliteration is not universal). Don’t believe the review on that page: mastic liquor is weird, like a girl-drink that took a turn for the weird, and remember you haven’t even started mixing yet.

Those Campari Red ads: Athens featured billboard ads with Ms. Salma Hayek touting Campari Red all over the place. Now, I am all in favour of more photos of Ms. Hayek in the world. This seems to me a great idea for civic beautification (actually, how about next year, instead of fibreglass whales or bears, we do fibreglass Salma Hayeks in Vancouver? I suppose the need for a local angle would drive the consensus to fibreglass Pamela Andersons), but in several of these ads, Ms. Hayek seems very uncomfortable with the situation. I’m not sure that’s what they had in mind for selling booze.