mirror reflection

Last night Major League Baseball and baseball fans (including me) around the world received earth shattering news that the best baseball player in the world and perhaps one of the greats in the history of the game tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. Alex Rodriguez currently of the New York Yankees reportedly tested positive for steroids in 2003. The history and records of baseball is very integral part of being a fan of baseball. Currently the sacred record of baseball - all time home runs is held by the notorious steroids user Barry Bonds. Alex Rodriguez was to be the player who embodied the ideal athlete who through diligence and talent was to restore the integrity of the sacred records of baseball.

Listening to the New York sports radio stations over the internet, the disappointment of the fans is palpable. For fans, sports is the diversion to escape from the rigors of real life. It affords people to be entertained by seemingly larger than life heroes who one can live vicariously through.

Unfortunately, the sports world is very much part of real life populated by real people like us all. The competition is high and the payoff for the top performers like any other industry can be very high. Its actually not surprising that people are willing to take the risk and take performance enhancing drugs to give them the best chance to succeed. This sort of thing happens in all walks of life. Here in China, parents line up to buy Chinese medicine reputed to enhance cognitive activity in the days leading up the College entrance exams for their children. Scientists are engaged in genetic engineering that may one day produce intelligent babies. What parent wouldn't want a child like that? How many people lie on their resumes in hopes of getting their foot in the door of a better job?

Trying to get an edge on the competition is an inherent character trait that all species have. I think it is safe to say that at this point, humans has gained such an advantage over the rest of the animals that it has become unfair.

So just how unfair is what Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez have done? That is a tough question to answer, as they are only doing what we humans are programmed to do. Just like any other subset of society, sports is just a reflection of who we are. Sometimes we don't like looking in the mirror because we might not like what we see. Unfortunately, heroes are just creations based on standards and ideals that nobody can never live up to.

Shanghai Comfort Food 生煎包

So the other day, I had some spare time and decided to head over to one of my favorite restaurant that specializes in a Shanghaiese type of pot sticker pork bun (生煎包）. The restaurant is located near the biggest square in Shanghai - People's Square (人民广场）and the famous pedestrian shopping street - Nanjing Road. The restaurant is called Yang's Fried Dumpling (小杨生煎）。

The first thing you have to realize about these buns is that it does not pretend to be healthy. It is pan fried and has lots of soup with pork and some pork fat, but the taste is very satisfying. The bun is slightly larger than the size of a golf ball and the bottom of the bun is fried to a perfect crispy texture but the top half has a doughy soft texture - a nice contrast. When you bite into one of these - like its soup dumpling brethren which I will profile in a later entry - you have to be careful because it encases a nice size pork ball along with copious amounts of soup from the pork itself. You would be advised to take a small careful bite, just enough to open up a hole on its soft top side so you don't blind one of your fellow diners with hot pork soup squirting out of your bun. Then you should suck out a good amount of the soup before continuing on to finish off the bun. The price of these are a minimum purchase of 4 pot sticker buns for 4RMB - 58 cents (exchange rate of 6.84) with each additional bun at 1RMB apiece.

The restaurant itself is basically a hole in the wall with a bare minimum of service and decor. The menu contains some complementary dishes such as beef soup with soy bean noodles , duck blood soup (another topic for another day), fried tofu soup, etc. But make no mistake about it, the star of the menu is the pot sticker bun. For the uninitiated, in order to get your buns, you have to pay for the meal first at the cashier then proceed to the line to get your buns located next to the front entrance of the restaurant. After getting your buns, if you have any other complementary dishes, you need to present your receipt to the servers inside the restaurant. Finding a table is another adventure, as during dining hours the place is normally packed. You can either wait for about 5 to 10 minutes, take out and eat on the street, or find an empty seat on an occupied table (there is no sanctuary here).

I am not a big fan of Shanghai style food, but if it is known for anything it is this pot sticker bun (生煎包）。

The particulars of the restaurant:

Yang's Fried Dumpling (小杨生煎）
97 Huang He Road (near People's Square) 黄浦区黄河路97号

Other locations include:
54-60 Wu Jiang Road (near West Nanjing Road) 静安区吴江路54-60号(近南京西路)
720 East Nanjing Road 黄浦区南京东路720号食品一店内

The Bailout, The Stimulus

So now that we are in the middle of the global financial crisis, governments are scrambling to attempt the remedy the situation. Since we are in the internet age, problems have to be addressed by yesterday or the natives will become restless. Therefore, governments - notably the US Government have been engaged in a campaign to save the economy.

The question becomes this, how can governments faced with an economic crisis of unprecedented scale and complexity be expected to tackle this issue in a intelligent, pragmatic way? I think the answer has been partially answered already with the seemingly haphazard fashion that governments have responded so far.

The latest theory is to throw massive amounts of money into the economy with the hope that it will stimulate it. I am certainly not smart enough to figure out if this will work or not. But I think in the big picture sense this credit bubble was created in the first place by massive over consumption by everyone around the world.

A few years ago, when I was still back in New York and was observing the real estate bubble growing, what struck me was that the real estate around the world were also growing at an unreasonable pace. In the newspapers all you read about was that countries as varied as China, Ireland, UAE, England,India, Poland, Vietnam, etc were experiencing even bigger real estate booms than the US. I read stories of economies in those countries booming and its citizens enjoying an accelerated rise in standards of living. All of this consumption were directly or indirectly related to the cheap credit available at the time, and that is how interconnected we all were. Therefore, spending was more and more dependent on the house of cards named credit.

Now that credit has been effectively cut off, I think we are in a process of returning to normalcy. The problem is that from where we came from this is a drastic change of the credit landscape. The actions taken by governments around the world to lower interest rates and throw money into the system in hopes of stimulating the economy is the obvious short term answer to cushion that fall. The problem is that I hope that all of these actions will not act as a catalyst to return our economies to the broken model that pervaded globally in the past 10 years in the long run. I am not sure if the answer is to get people to buy more cars by lowering the standards of issuing credit again by stimulating the banks. Maybe its better to just go with the scorch earth way. Clean up everything in sight and start anew. Maybe everyone has to suffer in the short run and take a step back before moving forward again.

The other problem that we don't have is time to intelligently and carefully consider these issues in this day and age of the internet before people become agitated. Patience is a virtue that not many of us have these days.