LUCKY SEVENS!!! The seventh post, the roll of the dice in the hopes of avoiding...craps. Crap.

This one is going to be the Randomness Post. My moms calls leftover night "Clean up the kitchen night!", and this one is surely going to be a 'clean up the blog notes' post.

1. Send me your lists if you want anything. I'm prepared to ho myself out for any item, big or small - I may have to ship it if it's really large. Drogas included, though I will slam but not swallow, and only cheese. ha ha. No slamming of cartons of cigarettes...ow. Counterfeit stuff is cheap over here, and real stuff is cheaper than US but not a massive bargain. Maybe there should be a 'p' in that word, just to make it interesting..."counterfeipt." Like receipt.

2. The money here is a little annoying for a playa like me. All different sizes. The tens are about the size of Monopoly money (a little bigger), the twenties are about the same size as USD, and the 100s and 500s are real big. My knot looks all crazy over here. And don't get me started on the coins - they got coins for one, two, five, and ten dollars, plus the centavos, so I gotta be carrying around all this change now. More dimunition of my flavorful steez. Dammit.

3. Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, and Brian Blade playing tomorrow. Best seats in the house are HKD400 - like 50 bucks, even for the front row. Freakin' awesome - except they are sold out! Catch them if you can, though some people are saying that Herbie is mad boring now and plays elevator music. Sheee-it, I still would have gone.

4. Doctor's visit, first consultation: HKD1500 (around 192 bucks). Meds, HKD125 (about 16 bucks). Completely the opposite of my steelo in NYC, where I pay 5 bucks for the visit and 90 for the meds. Crazy.

5. Check out Reefer Madness, by Eric Schlosser, that Atlantic Monthly cat who wroteded (ok, I'll stop the ghetto stuff) Fast Food Nation. Good exposition and analysis of three features of the underground economy in the US - weed, migrant labor, and porn - and of course this guy is just a great writer. The weed section is perhaps the most compelling, since the rationale behind criminalization is so illogical and the laws, sentencing guidelines, etc across the country are so disparate, though the migrant section is at times heartbreaking. The porn section, the longest by far, is also fairly intriguing, but only because I had never heard of this one man who built the biggest porn empire ever. Check it - a good read, and a quick one at that. Tell me if you think Schlosser is proud of his photo on the back (I think it's a good one - you just know he was psyched with how that one turned out).

6. Cell phone walking speed. I'm sure you know the walk - it's real slow, and people walk that way when they are having a conversation on the mobile phone. In New York, it's usually just one person on the whole block who is doing it - "Chauncey? How aaaaare you, ohmigod! I'm sooo glad to heaar from you! Have you seen the new Prada ballsac holders? You. will. die. They are soo" etc etc. Over here, due to the high population and the ubiquity of mobile phones, those people are all over the place. Well, not those people exactly, but...you know what I mean. I can't go two blocks without getting stuck behind someone cruising at cell-phone walking speed. Come across them all the time, like 4 or 5 during a short 10-minute walk to work. Driva me crazy.

7. A diary entry to round out the 7 Wonders of Randomness in the Purging of the Blog Notes. Sunday I went to the gym, jerked around the 'hood for a while, bought some veggies, and went to this dope Indian place for dinner. No one was in there, which made me psyched because it SUCKS to eat alone, even with reading material, and I was, uh, alone. Had some samosas (so many of you are dying of shock reading that, I'm sure) and an amazing vindaloo that was rich in color, complexity of taste, and punch. Kapow. Read an oldish New Yorker and laughed a lot. Walked out of there so full that I had to shake all the lovely honeys' gazes from the bars to the left and the right (ok, just one bar, on the right - that's it) and make my way home. You know how you can get so full that walking past a real stinky, hot Chinese food joint is just murder? That smell hits your ol' (dirty) factories - your nose, that was a bad pun - and your brain just panics and says, "Oh, no you ain't! You AIN'T eating more! I'ma make you thr- don't mess with me, I will make you throw the hell up if you don't keep walking!" I was like that.

ok, peace.

More later,
Chucky