The lead story on the BBC News webpage is about severe protests and demonstrations against Chinese rule in Tibet.  There, you can read that activists have released graphic photos of dead bodies showing bullet wounds, and that the police have finally admitted to firing shots at some protesters.  You’ll also read that riot police raided a monastery, causing 300 monks to run for their lives as police committed acts of “gratuitous violence” and kicked monks in the stomach while they lay on the ground.  The phone service had mysteriously been cut.  And the BBC’s own reporters noted that there had been severe limitations on their travel and ability to report.

Cruise over to China Daily.  The lead story is on the Olympic flame.  Click on “China” to get national news stories.  The lead story there is “China’s new cabinet maps out working rules.”  You have to dig for a story about the crisis, and I found one.  105 Lhasa rioters surrender to police.  There, you’ll read that “rioters” killed innocent civilians.  There’s no mention of China’s military actions.  But, there is a link to a story couple of days old titled, We fired no gunshots — Tibetan government chairman.  I wasn’t able to find any article admitting that the government in fact had shot anyone.  Rather, I found a humorous and pathetic grab-all story recounting that local religious authorities were decrying the Dalai Lama (who’s won the Nobel Peace Prize), that Tibet’s 1957 military invasion was “peaceful,” and for good measure, that “mobs” stoned a Han Chinese girl’s head without provocation.  (The Han are eastern China’s ethnic majority.) 

Although China Daily never likes airing China’s own dirty laundry, it always enjoys having a good laugh at the United States — a country where protests against the government usually do not result in death.  Some people actually take pride in the fact that this is a country where protesting is legal: a point that seems lost on the site’s editors.  Thus, photos of Iraq war protesters are often prominently displayed on the front page, including today.  This is pretty typical for the website, but what I found truly bizarre is that the CD has created a special slideshow about Eliot Spitzer.  For fans of the absurd, this is not to be missed.  What sounds like plaintive Chinese pop music starts up soon into the slides.  As the captions peter out, it appears that the editors are simply running out the clock so that they can finish the song.  I have asked for a translation.

Also good for a laugh is the commentary, Property boom is here to stay.  After the ritualistic paean to Beijing’s “beaming vitality” and the amusingly gushing reference to “millions of skyscrapers being erected” (do the math — even in China, it can’t be millions), the author gets down to business.  “Are these sprouting buildings constructed on speculated ground, as property prices have been surging at a pace faster than the average growth in incomes?”  The answer is, of course not.  Do I even need to spell out the irony here?  And tragically, the author has failed to learn his microecon 101, confusingly calling the government to impose “price controls to make housing affordable for everyone” (but China must not “resort to administrative means to rein in housing prices”) while at the same time “subsidizing buyers with cash reimbursement” and cutting deals with developers to cap initial sale prices.  Huh?  Even Paul Krugman could not get behind this weird a plan, but “the authorities seem to have acknowledged this approach.”  And despite the opening reference to China’s glittering array of wealth, the column contains the rare admission that it is “a society where the majority of people cannot afford housing.”

As the Olympics near, we are going to hear more and more about how China is doing for itself.  The record continues to be one of shame.  And I remind people that it was just 2001 that China’s military captured and interrogated several U.S. airmen after one of their inept pilots caused a mid-air collision.  They are not our friends.  In the 1980’s, America was obsessed with the prospect of having to surrender our economy to the Japanese, and that was a country we actually got along with.  It is a long road from the China of 2008 to the Japan of 1980.

Does anything, other than the dystopic projection, strike you about that sentence?

I am officially starting a crusade against the phrase “to a person.”  It is clunky and irritating.

Everyone knows the old phrase was “to a man.”  “To a person” seems to have really taken hold in the last few years.  Now, I’m for women’s lib as much as the next guy (tweaking you here, of course), but I find “to a person” extremely grating — unlike many of the other gender-neutral phrases we’ve cleanly adopted, such as “flight attendant,” “letter carrier,” “firefighter,” “chair,” and even “chairperson.”  “To a person” just doesn’t work.  (Moreover, it never really made a lot of sense even in its masculine incarnation.  What, exactly, is going to these men or persons?)

The great thing about English is there are tons of replacements.  How about “almost unanimously,” “nearly universally,” or “almost all?”  (”Vast majority” continues to be off-limits.)  Other suggestions?

Oh God, I’m propagating the blogosphere echo chamber.

Not surprisingly, some people are very cross about this, and some Conservative members accuse the government of sacrificing Conservative districts (literally) while shoring up marginal Labour constituencies that were affected by this year’s massive river floods.  Whatever; I can’t pass judgment on that.

It is interesting, though, that Britain has the stomach (or lack of backbone, depending on how you feel) to decide what to save and what to let go.  In America, we haven’t made many honest decisions about this, except for a few million-dollar cliffs in Massachusetts.  We certainly haven’t faced up to certain geological and physical realities in many places where a decision will be inevitable.  I’m thinking of New Orleans, of course, but also North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the Florida Keys, and a scattering of Appalachian hollows and river towns.  Our course is always to shore up and rebuild on shaky ground, burying our heads in the sand as it washes away around us.

When I was growing up, we had all kinds of things in the backyard: apple trees, a cherry tree, a peach tree, grapevines, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries (disgusting), asparagus, tomatoes, potatoes, radishes, carrots, beans, sunflowers, corn, and God knows what else.  We had a shed, which my dad built from the ground up to hold all the tools, and a compost pile (a mysterious shaggy creature).  We also had some kind of mini-greenhouse on legs, which I think was used to grow herbs.  In the front yard we had a huge lilac bush and a ton of flowers. 

It’s kind like I’m going through repressed memory therapy here, but I’m just realizing that damn, I grew up with a ton of gardening going on.  It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.  I’m sure I assumed everybody kept a grape arbor in the backyard, if I had even decided to think about it, which I’m sure I hadn’t.

Now I’m thinking that reviving this life would be a great thing to do on my own, but living downtown in a condo isn’t exactly conducive to having a garden and a compost pile.  The next best thing is to read about it, so I did.

I went down to the library and picked up Compost, a deceptively small book about composting.  The British author says you should actually compost food waste and paper waste in equal quantities — great, because I generate huge amounts of paper waste.  I also read The Square-Foot Garden, a classic that eschews the traditional row method of planting in favor of little squares that you never walk on, so as not to compact the soil.  (I now am realizing our garden looked like that — another thing I just assumed everybody else did.)  For a human perspective, I tried to sift through The 3,000 Mile Garden, a book of sort of gardeny love letters between an Englishman and a Maine cat lady, but it got too creepy.  (I tried!)  Because it was there (in the gardening section! what a scam the Dewey decimal system was!), I also picked up and devoured Silent Spring, the 1962 classic that helped launch the environmental revolution and crusaded against broad-spectrum synthetic pesticides like heptachlor, dieldrin, and DDT, all of which are now off the market.  I read all this stuff in the span of about three days last week, when I should have been studying, then I slept on it.  I heartily recommend all these books except the one.

After all this ecological ferment, I’ve decided: I can’t wait to move to Florida so I can grow a garden.  Apparently the soil is crummy (either sandy or clayey, and full of nematodes), but you can fix that, and you can grow up to five crops a year because of the wonderful sun, temperatures, and humidity.  I also decided I would like to try to never throw anything away, again, ever.  According to Compost, you can even compost things like old clothes (they’re cotton, a natural fiber) and cardboard.  I already recycle all kinds of stuff, including my cans, paper, electronics, and so on.  The only things you really can’t recycle are certain plastics — what else is there to throw out?  So, once the move comes, everything’s going on the compost pile or in the recycling.  I even researched how to compost meat, which everybody says is a bad idea (rats and flies), and I came across "bokashi," a Japanese invention involving a sealed bucket, wheat bran, and bacteria, which is a process that anaerobically "pickles" your meat, permitting it to then be composted.  Sounds gross, though, to leave a bucket of rotting meat outside, but if it works, why not.

Amusingly, these decisions have led me to realize I’m going to have to live on a lot with some sun and some amount of land, i.e., I might actually have to move to the suburbs or the country (!).  Cityboy might go on hiatus for a while.  But I think it will be enjoyable to come home, change from the suit into the play clothes, go muck about in the garden for an hour or so, then get a shower and have a refreshing drink while admiring the garden, and have a dinner including vegetables I grew myself.  That kind of life should give plenty of time for contemplation.  Shouldn’t life be relaxing and innately rewarding?

Well, ask me again when I’m sweating through 90-degree, 90% humidity days next summer.

What on Earth is CNN reporter Alina Cho wearing???  It’s a shapeless mufti with two freaky Band-Aid/buckles haphazardly sewn over the shoulder.  Didn’t she realize this was a story about clothes?  Or — chillingly — is she one of the victims, too?

I am grateful, then, that I at least have my laptop with me so I can listen to my own music.  But there’s some terrible problem, and I can’t get the music working!  Windows Media Player says it can’t access all of my files, which is bizarre.  So I download WinAmp, copy the music to other locations, try Yahoo Radio, reboot multiple times — anything to drown this guy out, but nothing works.  It’s a travesty and I can’t think!

Finally, after half an hour of screwing around and NOT writing, I figure out the driver problem, and I crank up the first song that plays: Sedated, by the Ramones.  Ahh, sweet blessed peace.  I start jamming along, banging my head and really being happy.

And that’s when I notice them.  A group of four ‘tweenies, sitting in front of me, giggling.  And one of them has a camera phone and is trying to casually hold it over the shoulder so he can video my inspired Ramones performance.  The others are dying laughing and trying to discreetly help him point it the right way.

Not wanting to wind up on YouTube, I stop chair-dancing and just stare at the phone intensely.  They quit taping me and act like it never happened.

That’s when I turn on the flashlight on my phone, lean over, and take this picture of the little bastards:

(Perpetrator in blue hoodie.) They immediately melt in mortified embarrassment.  Giggling stops, whispering starts.  Nobody can stand to look at me after that.

Suck on it, punks.  I’m not thirty yet.