Taxi Cab Dashboard

Some More Hong Kong Fashion

Blog post picked up by Chicago Tribune

After I posted my blog entry about the wikification of the world, I got the following email from a good friend of mine, "Jack, after reading your Wiki-world blog, I gotta say, if there were a Pulitzer for blogging, I'd nominate your Wiki blog from Tuesday. If that's an original thought, it's brilliant. I love the travelogue, but I like reading your political commentary too."

I emailed Rick back, thanked him, and assured him it was a JVN original. He then wrote back and said I should “submit it for publication someplace.”

I blew it off at first, but then later that day, I decided “Why not?” So I sent it off to the Chicago Tribune and the South China Morning Post.

Then Thursday morning waiting in my in-box was the following email from Marci Lythcott over at the Chicago Tribune, “The Chicago Tribune plans to publish your piece on Thursday morning.”

Whoo-hoo.

Then just to make sure my head wasn’t getting too big, about an hour later, I heard back from the South China Morning Post. “Thanks for the piece Jack, but I won’t be using it. Best regards, Rob.”

Ouch.

I didn’t want him to feel bad about possibly making me feel bad, so I emailed him back “That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. The Chicago Tribune is picking it up.”

Here is the link to the Tribune article:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0303-wiki-20110303,0,3948115.story

Twenty-First Century Apple?

I must have mentioned to my students that I love and miss Cherry Coke. They are available in Hong Kong, but they are little hard to find. This morning, my student Hudson left a Cherry Coke on my desk.

Is this the twenty-first century version of leaving an apple on a teacher’s desk?

I’ll take the diet cherry coke over the apple any day of the week.

An apple doesn’t have any caffeine.

Send Me Some Free Stuff, Will You?

February 28, 2011

Starbucks Customer Relations
PO Box 3717
Seattle, WA 98124

Dear Starbucks Customer Relations:

I am not a coffee drinker; but my wife is.

So she was pretty excited eighteen months ago, when our family moved to Hong Kong. She decided that she was going to collect commemorative ceramic Starbucks mugs from each country and city we visited.

We got off to great start with mugs from Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China, Singapore, and The Philippines.

But then we hit a snag. In the several cities we went to, the Starbucks were out of the collectable ceramic mugs.

We came up empty in Seoul, Korea. In Thailand, we struck out in both Bangkok and Chang Mai.

Offering commemorative mugs that can only be purchased in those cities is really a great concept. Collecting them builds brand loyalty and they provide free advertising when we display our collections in our homes. Also, the process of acquiring them is just a lot of fun. It’s kind of a world-wide scavenger hunt for adults.

But it backfires when so many of your outlets are consistently out of the mugs. Few things are more frustrating than zipping around Bangkok ducking into one Starbucks after another, only to find that none of them have in stock either the Bangkok or the Thailand mug.

Argh.

Our two years in South East Asia is quickly wrapping up and we will be moving back to our life in Chicago. We have a lot of great memories of our times in Asia. It’s just too bad that we will only be bringing back commemorative mugs from Starbucks from half of the cities and countries we visited.

Faithfully yours,

Jack VanNoord

Wiki vs. Anti-wiki Forces part 2 of 2

And so it continues.

Could it be that over the last three weeks, all of us have had a front row seat to the wiki-fication of political power on a global scale?

Whether they go by the title king, pharaoh, czar, or emperor; history has been one long string of brutal dictators who arrogate themselves to a position of power over the people. Sadly, the twentieth-century has been no exception.

But then . . . then in Tunisia, a lone protestor -Mohamed Bouazizi- set himself on fire and a revolution is ignited. Before a fortnight had passed, Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine is out of power.

And then Egypt happens. After thirty years of maintaining an iron grip on Egypt, Hosni Mubarak tumbles.

As we learned from The Wall coming down in Berlin in 1989, this is how change comes about. Stasis. Stasis. Stasis. And then . . . BOOM. Things hit a tipping point, the stars align, and sweeping, cataclysmic change happens.

Now the possibility of a post-dictator world has gone viral.

Don’t misunderstand; it could all go horrible wrong. When the dust settles, the Muslim Brotherhood could co-op the revolution and Egypt could go from bad to worse. Libya could be the new Afghanistan before this is all done.

But dare we hope that these unprecedented events will be Tiananmen Square with a happy ending? Could this be The Berlin Wall times ten? Hope springs eternal.

I think that we are all witnessing something new. History is filled with would-be leaders in search of a following; but now we are seeing not one -but a dozen simultaneous, popular movements which are essentially leaderless.

Unprecedented.

How very totally wiki.

-Jack

Wiki vs. Anti-wiki Forces part 1 of 2

I apologize to all of you who faithfully come here to read about the VanNoord’s adventures and misadventures in China. Over the past 18 months, I have dutifully limited myself to that topic. I know that you don’t come here for commentary on current geo-political events. But as I open my Yahoo news feed and see that Qaddafi is about to become the latest dictator to fall from power, I can’t contain myself.

I have a friend –a librarian- who is steadfastly anti-Wikipedia. I get that. Part of it stems from the fact that she feels her traditional role as a guardian of information is threatened by something like Wikipedia. We have had some great chats about both the merits and shortcomings of Wikipedia. I understand that Wikipedia is not an acceptable tool for student research, but holy cow is Wikipedia amazing. First, the sheer volume of information is astounding. Second, I am always surprised how accurate, organized, and balanced the information is. I go to other sources, but somehow I always end up back at Wikipedia.

In theory, Wikipedia shouldn’t work. Anybody and everybody able to add or edit content? That’s crazy talk. On paper, it’s the most convoluted idea ever. But in reality, it works and works well. Sure, there are a few shepherds and a few referees, but essentially, there is no one in charge. It’s grassroots; ground-up; amorphous. It inverts the pyramid of knowledge and power. It’s nothing short of informational anarchy. Man, is it beautiful.

One day, right in the midst doing verbal battle with yet another anti-wikipedia-ite, it dawned on me that the whole world breaks down into wiki and anti-wiki forces. There are those people throughout history who have embraced this type of de-centralized, power-to-the-people phenomenon and those who have been scared witless by it.

The American Revolution? British versus Colonists? Nope. Wiki versus anti-wiki forces. The British wanted to regain centralized control over the colonies; the rebels wanted to retain control over their destinies and continue their experiment in self-governance.

The Protestant Reformation? Essentially, wiki verses anti-wiki forces. The Roman Catholic Church and its hierarchal power structure wanted to retain control over the people and religion and access to God. Luther and the gang wanted to establish the priesthood of every believer thereby doing an end-run around all the gatekeeper and high priests of the Christian faith. They sought to devolve religious power downwards and locate it in its most basic elemental unit: the individual.

Tiananmen Square, June 1989? Wiki versus anti-wiki forces.

And thanks to the new media, the wiki-fication of history continues. Gone are the days of the anointed few at ABC, NBC, and CBS who function of the arbiters of news and information. Hello, CNN, 24-hour cable news, and the internet.

Although they're kicking and screaming, the days of Sony, Universal, and other big music cooperation are numbered as content producer and content consumers connect directly with each other without the gatekeepers of all-things musical dictating to us the music to which we have access.

And of course there is the wiki-fication of . . . well, Wikipedia. Information has gone global, viral, and grassroots. Encyclopedia Britannica, may you die a quick and painless death.

Because People We Care about, Care About Them

Every Friday, our whole staff of teachers -kindergarten through twelfth grade- has morning devotions together for fifteen minutes before the students arrive. As of last Monday, no one was scheduled to share on Friday morning. I ended up doing the devotional. Here is the partial text of what I shared.

I am here today, because Colleen sent out an email asking for volunteers to share this morning . . . and none of you replied.

She emailed me three days ago:

To: Jack
From: Colleen
Regarding: Friday’s staff chapel vacancy.

“Hey Jack, you’re a talker. . . .”

So here goes.

There are a lot of things that Julie, the girls, and I love about Hong Kong. There are a lot of things that we love about ICS. But one of the things that we love the most is the sense of community we experience here on a weekly basis. We have never experienced anything quite like it. Part of it is due to the fact that the people we work with, worship with, live with, and hang out with are actually. . . the same people. Which I think is a lot closer to the way that we were designed to live, than a life-style in which we all commute thirty minutes in different directions to go to work, school, and church.

Of course, the fact that this is a community build around acommon commitment to the Lordship of Christ makes it pretty distinctive as well.

The third thing that makes this community so special is the fact that a large portion of us are living so far from the places our people came from. When you are far from family, your friends tend to become your de facto family. We end up sharing each other’s joys and carrying each other’s burdens.

We end up carrying about people we never met because people we care about care about them.

A song –drawing upon the Book of Acts- that I used to sing in Sunday School asserts “They will know that we are Christians by our love.” Absolutely, this is referring to the love that we give to a hurting word. But it also means that the world will know that we are Christians by the love that we show to one another.

This week, the ICS family seems to have been hit particularly hard. Henry is making preparation to fly home to Nigeria to bury his dad, Ben is waiting for an inevitable phone call regarding his dad in Canada, we are all just reeling from the difficult news coming out of kindergarten, people we care about have people they care about down in New Zealand who are hurting.

And Julie and I got some heart-wrenching news of our own a week ago yesterday.

I know that none of you knew my brother-in-law Ken, but as an acknowledgment of all the hardships we help each other carry, I would to like share a little bit about him. To be honest, this doesn’t need to be about Ken, I could just as easily be reading a tribute to Henry’s father or Ben’s father –and if I had known them as well as I had known my brother-in-law Ken, perhaps I would. But I offer you the following as tribute to the way –in Christian love- that we carry each other’s burdens.

We end up carrying about people we never met because people we care about care about them.

I then went on to read a tribute to my brother-in-law Ken who died suddenly last week. You can read the tribute below in a separate blog post. I then concluded with the following:

To our friend Down Under, your earthquake ravaged country is in our prayers. Ben and Henry, you are in our thoughts. And to little Elton and family, please know that we are praying incessantly for your healing. Even if we don’t know these people personally, we end up caring about them, because people we care about, care about them.

We finished our time together by singing along to the Jars of Clay’s version of “They will Know We are Christians by our Love.”

I'm too Hungry to be Offended

Our school cafeteria offers one Chinese and one Western dish every day. Or at least they try. Some days, I look at the two offerings and I can’t figure out which one they think is the western dish. Regardless, it’s always delicious.

No matter what food the cafeteria is serving, they always provide spoon, forks, and knives. Never chopsticks. Except for –and this, of course, makes perfect sense- on days they serve soup. Once or twice a month, the cafeteria offers Japanese udon soup with the wide noodles. This they expect you to eat with chopsticks.

It actually works out. You use the chopsticks to pull out the noodles and the other bits of goodness and then you sip the broth from the bowl as if it were a teacup. We have gotten used to it and don’t think twice about it.

Until last week.

Annika and some friends walked down to City One Plaza after school to hang out and have a snack. At a little food shop, they each ordered a bag of noodles. The women behind the counter handed the first girl a bag of noodles and pair of chopsticks. The second girl: a bag of noodles and pair of noodles. Third girl: bag of noodles and a pair of chopsticks.

When Annika stepped up to the window, the woman handed her a bag of noodles and a spork.

“Really? Seriously? A spork?” Annika thought.

It was really sweet of the lady behind the counter to make accommodations based on Annika’s cultural background. “But, what I supposed to do with a spork?” Annika thought. “I know I’m just a white girl, but I do know how to use a pair of chopsticks.”

Annika went back to the window, and the lady was gracious enough to give her a pair of chopsticks.

Oh, the burdens of living as a misunderstood minority.