Also thought I’d mention that I’m really digging John Mellencamp’s upcoming No Better Than This, his second collaboration with T Bone Burnett and to my mind much better than the last album they did together (Life Death Love & Freedom).

Last week I watched the Criterion blu-ray of The Red Shoes.  Often cited as the best film ever made about dance (or at least ballet), it’s a film that I could have sworn I saw back in film school and yet, watching it now, it was completely new to me.  Except in how I realized how this film is the source of dozens of shots, scenes and situations that subsequently appeared in hundreds of other films.  The recent restoration is remarkable as is the film itself.  Read Roger Ebert’s essay on the film in his The Great Movies series here.

But I have to confess that tonight I watched the blu-ray of Powell and Pressburger’s The Black Narcissus, the film they made a year earlier, and I think it’s an even greater film.  Jack Cardiff won his Oscar for cinematography for this film and it is a far more astonishing film – a group of nuns are sent to northern India to start a school and hospital in a “palace” that formerly housed a harem, 8.000 feet up in the Himalayas.  The isolation, the temptations that are around them, the interior changes they go through, much of it falls into a “read between the lines” or perhaps “listen to the silences between the words.”   This film is really unique in British cinema and will stay with me longer I think.  It is very ambitious on multiple levels and succeeds completely.

We also watched the Millennium trilogy over the weekend – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  Yes, all three of Stieg Larsson’s books have been made into films in Sweden – with the same cast across all three.

It’s really impossible to discuss much of the plot here beyond telling you that it involves a massive conspiracy.  Larsson’s title for Dragon Tattoo actually translates as Men Who Hate Women and that title fits the story better even if it’s not as catchy.  It’s called the Millennium trilogy because it initially revolves around editor Mikael Blomqvist and his muckraking magazine Millennium.   But the main character is Lisbeth Salander and the performance by Noomi Rapace across all three films is breathtaking.  She deserves international stardom for this.  The crimes depicted in the films are shown very graphically, perhaps too graphically, and Rapace gives a bold and fearless performance of a complex character.  I’ll also mention that the first film can be seen on its own, while film #3 picks up immediately after #2 ends – #s 2 & 3, which share a director, can basically be watched as a single film.

An American remake is set for the first film and Daniel Craig has been signed to play Blomqvist and he’ll probably do a decent job of it but he’s actually too big of a star for this role which makes me fear that too much will be rewritten for the American screen.  I don’t know who else could play Salander the way Rapace does.  The film will be directed by David Fincher and actually I think he can improve upon the original, which is quite okay but more workmanlike than artistic.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has just been announced as the first book to sell a million copies in electronic form and that speaks to its widespread appeal.  Larsson had planned six books in this series but died after completing the third.  There are rumors that he may have been murdered.  And given that he was a reporter, is there a question that the conspiracies he writes of could be based on fact and that someone was afraid that books 4-6 might have gone too far?  Or is that just hype?

Sunday I was shopping in Mong Kok and so of course stopped into some sneaker shops.  Walked past this shop called “Dahood” and saw these in the window:

And I gotta tell you, they look even better in “real life.”  And I thought, “What better way to show my love and admiration for Jimi Hendrix than by wearing him on my feet?  Buying Converse is easy because they run large so I can pick up a size 11, a size most shops here stock, and they’ll fit fine.

But later on, I saw a pair of Nikes that I loved, too.  Nike, I need a size 12.  I went into every shop along Fa Yuen Gai, probably 20 in all, and all of them stocked this shoe but none of them had a 12.  One shop shocked me by having a 13 in stock!

So, determined, Monday night I stopped off at New Town Plaza in Shatin on the way home.  5th floor is loaded with sneaker and sporting goods shops and not one of them had my size in this either.  At least they had more helpful sales clerks – one who told me that the style was a month old so they couldn’t order it any more;another that told me that not only do most shops not stock size 12, those that do just get one pair at that size and once those are sold, that’s it.

I suppose I could have continued my quest for several more nights – Times Square?  Hang Hau?  Ah, frig it, internet.  Found a shop that had it and that also had a web site smart enough to read my IP address and toss up a large banner reading, “Yes, we ship to HONG KONG!” before I even thought to check.  Ordered them last night, got the shipping notice this morning with the UPS tracking number, another quest resolved.

Okay, at the moment, retail therapy is one of the sole (no pun intended!) pleasures in my life and no, I don’t feel like going into detail about it.  Just take it as played.

Speaking of retail therapy, my iPhone 4 order is settled and I’ll be picking it up on Friday night, after I leave the office and before I head to the next PASM Workshop party.  We’ve got a super hot model from China which I guess is why this party is titled, “The Heat Is On.”  If you want to check out the invite on Facebook (and maybe even come over to join the fun – HK$100 all you can drink!), then check the details here.

Yes, I don’t give a poop about “antennagate.”  I’ll shove a case on it and it will work fine.  Incidentally, today I had my first experience with iOS 4′s multi-tasking.  I’d had Skype fired up for some chats with my boss, who is currently out of town.  And even though I closed the app and was doing something else, I kept getting notifications for the next several hours as people noticed I was online and wanted to chat.  (One reason I hate chat software – I find it quite obtrusive at times and so only run it when I need to.)  At any rate, yes, it does work as promised.

Last for now, just want to mention a fabulous lunch I had today in Kennedy Town.  I’d passed this place last week and made fun of their sign:

I’ve never been to Twon before so can’t say if this is truly the best steak there or not.  Anyway, the place is called Al Basrah although the sign in front actually said Al Basrah Cow Pampas.  The menu cheerfully informs you:

I am BAHADUR K.C. SHIVA Founder of the trendy SOHO diniing area in Hong Kongin 1995 successfully open first restaurant Nepal Cuisine & La Pampa Argentinean Steak House, La comida coccina spanol, Bar Club, 1911 Kathmandu!!  Now I have chosen an upcoming new area in western district to open the first Fine Dining Restaurant and Wine Bar serving both middle eastern cuisine and the best Argentinean beef cuts from the FALKLANDS and SUCCULENT LAMB SHANKS FROM PATAGONIAFood of high quality with healthy aromatic spices to suite discerning Diners.

Whether or not this guy really kicked off the Soho dining scene I can’t say but I’m not entirely sure it’s something I’d boast about.  But I shouldn’t make fun because Mr. Shiva was there in the restaurant at lunch time and he turned out to be a very nice guy indeed.

Anyway, I wasn’t too impressed with the look of their $48 quick lunch buffet so I decided to order off the regular menu.  From a section called “The President’s Favorite,” I chose Biryani Laham which the menus says is Iraqi style lamb shank with rice.  And HOLY FUCK WAS IT EVER GOOD!!!!!  The rice was great, the lamb was so tender I didn’t need the knife provided and I wanted to ask for a straw to suck out the marrow from the shank, not sure why I didn’t, what I could get of it was enough to remind me why Anthony Bourdain often tags bone marrow as his favorite food.

The iPhone photo above doesn’t begin to do it justice.  The only down side was that I was only able to finish about half the dish.  I had them wrap up the rest for me to take home, shoved it in the fridge at the office, but by the end of the day I was feeling so frustrated by the day’s events that I left it behind in the office (called a friend who was still there and told him to take it home for dinner).

Anyway, should you find yourself in Kennedy Town or in the mood for something from the middle east, definitely give this place a try.

And, uh, oh crap, 12:30, time for bed!

First stop lunch.  I always love to eat at Laurel but we were hungry and I knew that at 1 PM on a Saturday afternoon it would be at least a 30 minute wait for a table, so we picked a different spot in the mall (sorry, I’m spacing on the name) with reasonable quality stuff and average price of around Y10 per dish.  Of course I ordered way too much and we were full before the last dish came.  And since it was a long time in coming, I tried to  cancel it but they wouldn’t let me.   Oh well, at Y38 (fried chili peppers stuffed with minced fish, spicy as hell) I didn’t mind too much.

Walking around the shopping mall, it seemed as if every shop had the same two iPad knock-offs, each of which seemed to have both Windows and Android installed.

As you can probably tell, the boxes look the same (the one on the right has the Android logo on top) and these things seemed relatively okay on first glance.  Note that on the bottom there is a connector port (not Apple’s dock connector) as well as USB and a Micro-SD slot.   The interface seemed like Windows and then you’d tap an arrow and another icon menu would launch featuring Android options, Android 1.6.  The smaller iPad also has a front-facing web cam built in.   Some dealers had taped an Apple logo on the back.   I couldn’t figure out what processor was inside but these suckers were pretty freaking slow.  Asking price everywhere was around Y1200; one shop came down to Y700 and they were trying really hard not to let me leave without buying one, literally hanging on to my arm as I tried to get out of the shop.  But I figured, even if I could get them down another hundred or two (which seemed likely), this was something that I wouldn’t actually use more than a couple of times for novelty or show-off value due to that really slow processor.   Perhaps there are better ones available at Huaquiangbei but we didn’t have time to get over there to check it out.

I did buy a different cute gimmicky thing – a key chain with what looked like the usual set of buttons for locking/unlocking a car but actually had a tiny video cam embedded – for Y80!  Takes Micro-SD cards and seemed to work decently in the shop – tested out this one and it seems to work okay so I’ll be dangerous during the week ahead.

The only other photos of possible interest are these two shots taken from the toilet in Luo Hu looking at the border.  I find the graves on the hillside facing Shenzhen to be of particular interest (sorry, couldn’t get rid of the reflection in the glass) – were these placed there merely because it’s on a hillside facing water or was there some political significance that I don’t know about?  I fantasized that these were people born across the border, came to Hong Kong in 1949 and are hoping that some day their spirits will return to a free China?

The next stop was massage, of course.  I asked around in the mall and the name that came up most often was Queens Spa & Dining so we went back to the train station, found the Queens Spa shop and hopped on their free shuttle bus for the 10 minute ride somewhere near Dong Men.  I thought I’d been there before but everything there was new to me so perhaps it was my first time.

There were six people, all dressed in white, lined up outside to welcome people.  Everything in this place seemed shiny new and immaculately clean.  One floor features a “30,000 square foot water park!” but we hadn’t brought appropriate attire.  The shower area featured three huge baths set at different temperatures with those big stone jacuzzi loungers, very relaxing.

On entering the lounge area, we encountered a Caucasian woman in uniform with a big button that read, “I speak ENGLISH!”  Her name was Natalya, Russian, living in Shenzhen for 10 years.  Actually we encountered a lot more English outside of Luo Hu than I’d encountered in the past – many of the Chinese staff members at the sauna spoke at least some English, at least at a similar level to my Mandarin (probably better), and when we went for our massage later on, one of the two massage girls could speak basic English and told us she was studying at a nearby school on her days off.

We settled into huge lounge chairs in the movie area – big projection TV, the day’s film schedule posted (we watched Four Christmases, Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon, better than I expected) while helping ourselves to drinks and fruit – fancier drinks and food available at extra charge and we did spend Y10 for some popcorn.

When we felt ready for the massage, we were brought to a computer screen where we could choose from baseball-card-like displays of each masseuse, her name and specialties (though only in Chinese) – each one photographed in skin tight outfits looking like pop stars, each one more beautiful than the last, although of course no “extras” are to be had in these kinds of places.  90 minute massages start at Y168 and go up depending on which options you want.  ”Hong Kong style” oil massage was Y188, if memory serves.

Note – if you just want to go there and use the facilities without getting a massage – pool tables, movie and karaoke rooms, mah jong room, water park, food, etc. – the cost is Y98 for 24 hours.  That’s really nice, right?   Walk around Shenzhen, get hot and sticky (no pun intended) and come here and pay 98 yuan for locker, shower, pool and some food, that’s a damned good deal IMHO.

From there, jumped in a taxi to my favorite restaurant, the Luo Hu branch of Sichuan chain Ba Shu Feng.  And for the first time, these guys let me down.  I ordered 4 dishes – 3 of them came relatively soon and were as fiery spicy and wonderfully tasty as ever.  But the 4th dish never showed up.  I kept calling waitresses over, the manager kept coming over, they kept getting on their walkie talkies and asking, they kept telling me it was coming, but it never came.  Finally it was getting close to 11 PM and I told them we had to get back to Hong Kong and didn’t want to miss the train.  As opposed to our lunch experience, this time they were very apologetic and didn’t charge us for the dish that never came.  Which was very nice of them except that fish dish is really freaking tasty and I had been looking forward to it but it was not to be.

So we hopped in a taxi back to the train and very soon we were back across the border in Hong Kong.  One thing I find is that people in Shenzhen are consistently friendly, smiling and helpful – and not just when they’re trying to help themselves to some of the money in your wallet.  Then we came across the border to Hong Kong where no one smiles, everyone’s in a rush and grouchy all the time.  Logic would seem to dictate the opposite should be true.  But these days I find people in Shenzhen to be more laid back and welcoming than the people in Hongkie Town.  My friend’s reaction to his first trip?  He wanted to leave Hong Kong and move there.  Next trip I’ll take him around Dong Men and Shekou and see if he still feels the same way.

On Friday, they reported on the death of diplomat Robin McLaren.  The obituary ended with this quote from Chris Patten’s former spokesman Kerry McGlynn, which I’m sure raised the eyebrows of the 16 people who read the entire piece:

“Sir Robin played the game absolutely scrumptiously, and followed the Patten policy to the nth degree.”

On Saturday, they issued this correction:

The report should have quoted him as saying: “Sir Robin played the game absolutely scrupulously, and followed the Patten policy to the nth degree.” We apologise for the error.

But let’s face it, don’t we all wish that the first version was the correct one?

Yep, a friend and I jumped on the number 58 minibus, HK$5 and 10 minutes later we were in Kennedy Town, walking around and found a place called The Clay Oven, Indian place with a $45 set lunch that was not bad at all.  I’ll be going back to K-Town often to try some of the other places there.

A couple of doors down was this place named Al Basrah Cow Pampa.  As in “Middle Eastern Cuisine – Argentinean Grill Steak.”  I suppose that’s as fusion as one can get.  A sign there proclaims that they have the best steaks in “twon.”  I got a photo but I’m unable to sync my iPhone at the moment.

Which is really weird.  iPad syncs fine.  iPod syncs fine.  Then I plug in the iPhone – nothing, nada, zilch, the phone doesn’t register that it’s plugged in or charging, let alone start to sync.   So one might think that the problem is the sync cable or the dock connector on the phone, except if I take that exact same cable and plug it into a charger, the phone starts to charge right away.  (I’ve tried two different USB hubs; have not tried the USB ports directly on the computer because it’s a pain to get back there and anyway, as I said, everything else is syncing normally.)  Anyone have any thoughts?

Around 5:35 PM, the Black Rain signal went up with just 10 minutes advance notice.  Yeah, one is supposed to stay indoors when this happens, but I took this as a cue to get out of the office and try to maybe beat some traffic home.  As if.  Actually, things were quite okay on the HK side, but once I came out of the Western Tunnel, the rain was coming down as heavily as I’ve ever seen it.  And this being Hong Kong, people were continuing to drive as poorly as ever – lights not turned on, not signaling lane changes, speeding, etc.

So I get to the place near Shatin where Route 8 merges into Route 9 – 4 lanes going down into 1 and even with the rain, a bunch of brainiacs decide to create a 5th lane to cut through traffic more, further backing things up – and then at the bottom of the hill a huge flood.   Then a mile or two down the road, where I get off the highway, there must have been an accident, traffic on the cross street wasn’t moving and had all but completely blocked the intersection.  I sat there waiting for the light to change while another group of brainiacs figured it was a good time to run through the red light and try to squeeze through the small opening in that intersection – I kid you not.  Sai Sha Road had a spot that was flooded completely across.  And then at the traffic circle in Sai Kung town, a taxi driver who didn’t seem to care that there were other cars (including me) already in that circle, he was a TAXI! and he demanded his right of way.  Ah well, just another day on Hong Kong’s roads.

Anyway, before I head to sleep, let me just alert you that Barnes & Nobles is having a 50% off sale on ALL Criterion DVDs – including boxed sets and blu-rays.  Criterion is the “gold standard” for this stuff – great films, lots of time and care spent on the digital transfers, amazing bonus features.  I’d like to own everything they put out but it’s beyond my budget.  So this sale gave me a chance to get caught up on some of the stuff on my want list.  I counted about 30 things I wanted and then cut the list down to these:

• 3 Films by Louis Malle – boxed set featuring Murmur of the Heart, Lacombe Lucien and Au Revoir Les Enfants – each one a classic
• Burden of Dreams – Les Blank’s documentary shot while Werner Herzog shot the astonishing Fitzcarraldo
• Complete Monterey Pop Festival – one of my favorite festival films, finally getting the blu-ray
• Fanny and Alexander boxed set – featuring the over-5-hour version of Bergman’s final film
• Eric Rohmer’s 6 Moral Tales – My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, Chloe in the Afternoon and more, more goodness in one box than I can stand!
• Night on Earth – hard to realize I didn’t already have this splendid Jim Jarmusch compendium
• Yi Yi – I love this Taiwanese family drama, again stunned that I didn’t already have it

So 50% off each of the above and I picked the “slow boat to China” shipping option which was just US$20 – after saving around $200 on the above stuff.  The sale runs for another 10 days so you have plenty of time to check it out and I have time to go back and order a few more – Burmese Harp, Berlin Alexanderplatz and the Olivier’s Shakespeare boxed set are looking very tempting.

Basically this is a social media aggregator that takes your Facebook and Twitter feeds and turns them into a magazine.  They’re working on the basis that much of what appears in these feeds is links – so the tweet becomes the “headline” and the “article” (and accompanying graphics) is made up of whatever content was linked to.   They also have built their own Twitter lists that you can follow (e.g. Flip Photos, Flip Style, Flip Music) and future enhancements will give this more RSS-like functionality.

This is a very high profile start-up, funded in part by Kleiner Perkins, so the launch received a ton of publicity across the net.  I was lucky enough to get the app up and running very shortly after its release yesterday morning.  By the afternoon their servers were overloaded and I heard from people who were having trouble getting things up and running.  And no surprise that it’s currently the #1 free app in the iTunes app store.

I love things like this for two reasons.  The first is that to me it’s a brilliant re-imagining of the flow of social media information.  Some have commented that they don’t like it because it’s taking something “new” and making it look “old” but to my mind, it’s taking something “new” and casting it in a more familiar, more comfortable way.  The second is because I know this is just another evolutionary step and I can’t wait to see what someone comes up with next.

The app is only for iPad and, as I said, it’s free.  So if you’ve got an iPad (or are just about to get one), I strongly recommend you try this out.

Setting goals:

Got the above on Boing Boing.  Go to Boing Boing to get the credit & link to creator.

Spicy soda?  This company is making soda with chili and wasabi.

Go to The Awl to get the link.

Amazon says that for every 100 physical books they sell, they sell 180 eBooks.  And without giving away any numbers, they also say that since the iPad came out, the Kindle is selling at a faster pace.

When I was a teenager, I devoured “underground comix.  R. Crumb was (and remains) my favorite but my #2 was Gilbert Shelton and his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (and the Fat Freddy’s Cat spin-off).  According to Never Get Out of the Boat, someone is scanning the old comix and putting them online.  Funny stuff, or at least it was funny when I was much younger and much higher.

And now a serious one – The Washington Post series on Top Secret America – “A hidden world, growing beyond control.”  I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing but what I’ve read so far is fucking scary shit.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

Excerpted from today’s SCMP:

Lawmakers have rejected a motion to use their special powers to compel the government to produce all of its correspondence with Henderson Land over the mysterious cancellation of 20 of 24 sales at Henderson’s luxury 39 Conduit Road development in Mid-Levels.

A motion moved by the Democratic Party’s Lee Wing-tat – seeking to empower the housing panel to use the Legislative Council (Powers and Privileges) Ordinance to order Secretary for Transport and Housing Eva Cheng to submit all correspondence between the Lands Department and the developer relating to the case – was vetoed yesterday.

The motion was supported by most pan-democrats, and opposed by the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong and pro-business lawmakers. The health services sector’s Dr Joseph Lee Kok-long was the only pan-democrat who voted against the  motion.

The League of Social Democrats and the Federation of Trade Unions did not vote.

Questions have been raised over the cancellation of the sales at the development. They were among 24 high-priced transactions publicised by Henderson in a move many saw as a fraudulent attempt to boost prices.

One of the cancelled deals involved a duplex which Henderson reported was sold for a record-high HK$88,000 per square foot. The subsequent cancellation of the deal triggered accusations of market manipulation.

Doubts have also been raised about the revelation that buyers forfeited only five per cent of the reported purchase prices and were not asked to compensate the developer for any losses on resale.

Cheng said yesterday that the motion was unnecessary because the administration had already submitted all the letters concerned to Legco and there were no more it could provide.

But Lee was unconvinced that the information produced by the government was exhaustive, saying the bureau had only supplied more documents after he threatened to seek use of the ordinance.

The only thing that would have been surprising would have been if the motion had passed.

And ya gotta love this one, also in the SCMP:

Secretary for Labour and Welfare Matthew Cheung Kin-chung admitted on Monday that some workers with low levels of productivity could lose their jobs after the implementation of the minimum wage law.

Legco finally passed the minimum wage law – without setting a specific rate – after a 41-hour debate by lawmakers last week.

The introduction of a minimum wage law is opposed by some employers, restaurant owners and representatives of the tourist sector who argue it will result in higher costs and unemployment in some industries. But supporters, including many lawmakers and unionists, said the legislation was long overdue, because too many workers earned low salaries

See, since they haven’t set the actual minimum wage yet, the scare tactics continue but this is really reaching a new level of insanity:  ”Oooh, with the minimum wage, people who suck at their jobs will get fired!”  Even the headline was more scare-mongering – “Cheung warns wage law may lead to job losses” – of course many people only read the headlines and not the stories underneath.

And so I stayed home and … sigh … installed the 64 bit version of Windows 7 and a couple of dozen apps.  I figured it was time.   I’d installed Win7 before and was dual-booting but I’d never gotten around to installing most of the apps I use on it.   Lightroom 3 64 bit is noticeably faster than 32 bit under WinXP – not sure if that’s a fair point of comparison or not but what the hell.

Migrating iTunes with all my settings and playlists seems to have as well as can be expected.  I’m syncing my iPad now and it’s an hour so far and not even halfway through the back-up.   And that reminds me – I’m running Open Office here instead of MS Office, except that I’m still using Outlook to manage my contacts.   I don’t want to go the bloat-ware route and install Outlook here so I need another strategy for a contact list that syncs to iPhone – any suggestions?

Win7 may be the fastest selling version of Windows ever, or whatever it is that they’re claiming, and I can see some improvements but also, one day into this, I can see a lot of the same old errors and crap that’s been carried over from older versions.  Minor annoyances such as how File Manager still shows directories on tree on the left even after that directory has been moved or deleted and even after I’ve hit the refresh button several times.  You’d think they could at least get the simple stuff right.

So I’ll leave you with a link to Wired’s list of “cerebral sci-fi films.”  Actually it’s rather disappointing – no Forbidden Planet or Fantastic Planet, let alone Silent Running or Dark City.

And another movie list by Julie Gray at Huffington Post, she says this is an evolving list from GASP (without saying what GASP is) of films you should have seen if you plan on working in the entertainment industry.

Although it is simply not possible (or advisable) to have seen every movie ever made, the criteria for this list is that these are movies that have seminal, iconic or culturally significant performances, writing, direction, or premises. These are the movies that set the bar, raised the standard or innovated something new and oft-imitated.

I counted 156 films on the list and I’ve seen them all but I find the list rather distressing.  I counted a total of 3 non-English language films on the list and those are Amelie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and La Dolce Vita.  No Kurosawa, no Bergman, no Truffaut or Godard or Antonioni or Rosselini or Satyajit Ray.  And the sad thing is, this list is the set of cultural touch points for Hollywood today, which is probably one reason why most American commercial film making is so unambitious.

I could probably sit down and do blogs that collect essential film and music lists – well essays more than just lists, perhaps group blogs with several trusted contributors.  The only problem is that I have this little thing called a job.  Could I jettison the job and do these?  Yeah.  Could I jettison the job and do these and earn a decent living from it?  Maybe not so much.