Mattel & A September 4th Miracle

I'm reading Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present (amazon link below) right now, and despite the somewhat academic sounding title, Hessler is actually a journalist and former Peace Corps volunteer in China. A couple months ago I read his River Town, sort of a journal of time teaching English at a teacher's college in a remote Chinese city. In this book he's back in China and among other things, including stepping into North Korea, he visits a few former students, of which one lives just outside the gates of a Shenzhen, one of the special economic development zones that seem to involve millions of young Chinese kids living ten or more to a dormitory room and making cheap jewelry or lead-painted children's toys for eighteen hours a day.

This morning Danielle caught a story on the national news about how a Barbie doll that sells for twenty dollars at Walmart costs less than $.35 to manufacture in China. This really isn't anything shocking or new, but I was a little surprised that it was on ABC and not just PBS.

The greediness in this country is unreal.

In other news, a few months ago I had an accident with our camera (which is in part responsible for so few blog posts), I was taking pictures of a guitar that I had decided to sell, and as I moved to close the case, the wrist strap on the camera snagged a tuner and the camera was pulled from my hand. It fell not more than a couple of inches, but that was enough for a dark spot to show up on the display and in every picture that was taken from then on.

We've had the camera for a couple of years, and were a little disappointed with a few aspects of it, so while it hurt to be in the process of selling something and having an unexpected expense come up, we didn't take it too hard. It's been a fiasco ever since, and I've come to hate Sony even more, but that's not the story today.

At the end of the summer, on the last day that the Lakewood Park pool is open, you can take your dog swimming. We'd never gone before, for some reason the date or time never worked out for us. We wanted pictures, and decided that maybe we could crop out the spot, but when we turned the camera on the spot was gone. It still sounds a little as if there is gravel in the body, but it still took these pictures: