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Somebody told me of this yesterday and I simply could not believe it to be true. However, research this morning has proved this to be correct –

Forget The Beatles.

Forget David Beckham.

Forget Doctor Who.

The true British Invasion of America has begun.

Tesco is opening a line of supermarkets in the US, starting basically right down the street from me.

Los Angeles, as usual, is being the test-market guinea pig.

Oh, they’re being all cloak-and-dagger and all by giving themselves a different name (”fresh & easy” is the official name) but don’t let that fool you. It’s still Tesco.

I should have known this was coming when I started seeing HSBC Banks popping up all over the place (”Bringing you great British drama”).

You can see some photos of ugly parking lots with construction signs proving my words here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_%26_Easy.

What’s next? Driving on the left side of the road, for friggin’ sakes?!

I do hear that they’re going to compete directly with Whole Foods, which might help knock those bastards’ prices down. I, for one, shall rejoice.

Recently, I took a look over my list of read classic science fiction and found that it was wanting. Driven with a mad desire to succeed at any cost, I launched forth to overcome this deficiency in my character and consume those works of the genre that were glaringly absent from my I’ve-read-that list.

One such work of classic science fiction is one that is probably missing from many an American’s list, especially those born from the 1970s onward. Until recently, I believe that this particular book was hard to come by in the US. In any event, it was completely under my radar until I chanced to learn of it in the most unlikely of places.

When they’re not grunting like primeval apes, passing out from alcohol consumption, or preoccupied with shopping for the latest leather S&M gear, members of the classic metal band Judas Priest can actually form complete sentences. Unsurprisingly to anyone who listens to their lyrics, lyric-writer and vocalist Rob Halford (who once looked sorta normal, unlike his current incarnation as an Earth-bound Vogon escaped convict) is a fan of science-fiction (you can’t hear it, but as I wrote this I said “science-fiction” with a bad Birmingham accent, just to get in the Priest mood). Happening to watch a documentary recently about the band, I heard Rob Halford mention John Wyndham’s 1951 British sci-fi classic Day of the Triffids as an example of science-fiction he loves. Not having heard of this novel before, I instantly declared that if Mr. Rob Halford liked it, then goddamnit so would I.

And I did. A lot.

I just finished the book a few days ago, a nice slim volume that doesn’t fart around like, oh, Robert Jordan, but just gets right on with it, so committing to reading it takes slightly less time than writing a doctoral thesis, or building a pyramid.

Briefly, the story tells of survivors of an apocalypse brought on by humankind’s stupidity and arrogance, two separate catastrophes which unite to utterly destroy civilization, and nearly everyone on the earth, in the most unsettling and disturbing of ways — when a satellite loaded with nasty bacteriological weapons crashes to the earth in a spectacular worldwide light show, it blinds all who watch it. Our hero Bill, recuperating from an accident to his eyes, has missed the whole thing, and removes the bandages to discover a world that doesn’t work anymore. Chaos ensues, and typical post-apocalyptic violence results, while Bill struggles to survive and eventually to locate the handful of others who through pure luck missed the light show, and saved their sight.

But that’s not the end of humanity’s suffering. From somewhere in the heart of Soviet Russia, a genetic-modification experiment gone wrong has resulted in the Triffid, a plant that gets up and walks, and has a nasty habit of lashing out with a poison whip that instantly kills its victim. After a nice ripening process, the Triffid then proceeds to scoop up the flesh of the festering corpse.

With humanity blinded and incapacitated, the Triffids take over, and things get bad very, very quickly.

Day of the Triffids is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel before there was a genre called The Post-Apocalyptic Science-Fiction Novel, published years before books like A Canticle for Liebowitz and I Am Legend solidified the stereotypes and established the term. There were obviously grim views of the future (a British specialty), but none so typically post-apocalyptic as this book. From a plot point of view, this story would not have felt at all out of place in the more jaded climate of the 1970s, or even the 1980s. Without artifice, John Wyndham wrote a quintessential survival story in a world irretrievably destroyed.

I’ve been peculiarly interested in the post-apocalyptic novel of late, since I’m knee-deep in my own little composition of the genre. Day of the Triffids proved a particularly enriching read, as Wyndham masterfully exploited the possibilities of the genre to mine immense riches of character and drama. The hero Bill struggles through not just the exigencies and miseries of outer world, but his own internal turmoil, fighting within himself to have a reason to even go on. Post-apocalyptic novels can illuminate the human capacity for hope like no other, and I have yet to read a novel which illustrates it so well as Day of the Triffids.

Tackling the idea of bacteriological warfare and genetic-modification is startlingly prescient for 1951. Indeed, it was so far ahead of its time that it is only now, in the 21st century, that the concepts seem at all timely, particularly the genetic-modification theme. In our current climate, when scientists fiddle with nature by affixing animal genes to plants, suddenly the concept of creating a plant which walks and eats flesh is not so very far-fetched after all.

I grew up on British literature of all types, from When the Tripods Came to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, from P.G. Wodehouse to Arthur Conan Doyle, and discovering a classic written in the literary style I love so much which had somehow passed me by, is a wondrous treat indeed. Had this same story been composed by an American, it would have been so different, in texture, in attitude. Anyone who has ever read a novel by a great 20th Century British novelist knows what I’m talking about. The quality is ineffable, but inescapable.

Humorously, author Brian Aldiss dubbed Day of the Triffids a “cosy catastrophe”, without meaning irony, and I’m damned if he didn’t hit the nail on the head with the term. For even among the dreadful misery and horrors that we experience in the book, there is a grounded, solid and imperturbable core of domesticity and warmth in the English character that even man-eating plants and bacteriological catastrophes cannot diminish. And it’s wonderful.

One of the great classics of science-fiction.

Next up: another of Wyndham’s masterpieces, The Midwich Cuckoos (twice adapted to film as Village of the Damned)

photo from Wikipedia

One of my least favorite things to do in the world — only slightly more tolerable than being strapped to a chair and forced to listen to Vogon poetry — is waiting around all day for service/tech/sales/uniformed people to come and service something/install something/sell something/shoot something.

They like to give you these “windows” of time, like “sometime around the Fifth of September, give or take a week”, and it’s pretty much impossible to get any work done while you’re sitting around waiting them to make their “window”, even if you work out of the house.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these service people actually get a perverse pleasure out of knowing that their crappy little fifteen minute repair job is going to devour six or seven hours of your life … and that’s assuming they don’t get lost and have to call you fifteen times on their cell phone because they can’t figure out the difference between Apple Avenue in Palos Verdes and Orange Avenue in Pasadena.

At this very moment I am sitting in my chair waiting for some satellite installer to come and upgrade my dish and give me a nice, spanking new HD DVR for my DirecTV and HD rig.

This makes me nervous.

This makes me nervous because it is the first time since subscribing to DirecTV eight years ago that someone other than myself has installed my satellite system. I’m what you call a Type-Tech-A personality, which means that I always, always, always build my own computer systems, repair my own computer systems, install my own satellite dishes, realign my own satellite dishes, etc.

Since some stranger is scheduled to come and fiddle with my own fucking equipment, I have some personal growth to take care of. I have to learn to let go. To trust. To delegate. All those mature types of things. I’m an adult. I can do it. I can grow.

And if the guy does anything even remotely stupid (which is likely) I will calmly retrieve my mature kitchen knife, maturely stab him in his stupid little eye, and maturely kick his ass off my property so I can install my own dish. Five LNBs and all.

I like Wil Wheaton’s little Twitter post about today, which uses the word “fucking” and “hot” four or five times, and about nothing else.

Short, but sweet. Indeed, the man is right. I just got home from Whole Foods and it’s so hot that … well, that the air is not cool and human beings are unhappy. Yeah. I’m a wordsmith.

Okay, so on the way home, I saw the asshole of the day, and wanted to share his assholeness with you:

I’m driving along a 35-mph street, and a car passes me going the other way, said car being tailed in the most assholeish manner by an asshole in his asshole car. Nothing special in that. Lots of assholes in asshole cars along the road.

The only thing is that this asshole also happened to be reading a copy of LA Weekly while he tailed the person in front of him in his asshole-mobile.

I give him four out of five asshole-stars for putting some real effort into being an asshole.

I woke up at three in the morning feeling awful. I think my spaghetti dinner hadn’t agreed with me or something, because the room was spinning.

Two minutes later the lightning starts.

We had just endured the hottest day of the year, and I’d already read the NWS weather statement which warned that there was going to be a heat spell lasting through the weekend which, worst of all, was going to “feature” very high nighttime lows (I totally hate that).

I trudge into my bathroom to wash my face, and then the first boom hits. And it’s frickin’ huge. I pause, wondering how the hell I am standing and listening to thunder following a day without a single cloud in the sky.

Then the big one happened. You know, the type of lightning where the thunder is absolutely simultaneous with the flash. It was so loud and so strong that I wondered for a moment if it had actually struck the house (fortunately, it hadn’t).

And then it rained.

In August, in Los Angeles, after the hottest day of the year.

Okay, so it was only for two minutes, but still. Freaky, man.

This morning it’s hot as hell again, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. But there is this odd sensation of humidity, like after a rain in the tropics.

I’m dreaming of the cool autumn…

You know, I’m getting really tired of greedy companies trying to squeeze more money out of fans of classic films and television by constantly reissuing them in ever more ridiculous “super-duper remastered rejiggered repulsive regurgitated” editions.

But what really ticks me is off is when the studio and/or filmmakers go back and try to “update” them with new effects, or new editing, or whatever.

Worst case scenario: Paramount is issuing Star Trek: the original series Season 1 on HD-DVD this November, for a whopping US$220. But what really offends me is that they’ve decided to re-do ALL the visual effects with modern CGI.

Why the holy fuck would anyone want to take a classic 60s show which was produced with sweat and tears with the best technology of its time and throw it all out of joint by pasting modern crap over it? Not only is that extremely disrespectful to the artists who worked on it at the time, but it is going to look ridiculous against the 60s hair styles, sets, and rubber gorillas that Captain Kirk fought.

What’s next, airbrushing out the beehive haircuts and putting digital trousers on all the women?

Leave well enough alone, and find some taste and restraint, guys. Weren’t the Star Wars “Special” Editions bad enough?

The first few years of the 1980s were massively dramatic for the development of heavy metal as a distinctive genre, as it underwent a startling metamorphosis from a murky indistinct corner of the heavy rock scene into a distinct entity with its own sets of rules, styles, and stereotypes.

Stadium rock ruled the heavy world in the late 70s. Fans of the harder side of things freely moved within a songlist that had nasty rockers like AC/DC and Judas Priest, and larger-than-life mega-rock gods like Queen and The Scorpions. Heavy metal, as such, was really just another term (allegedly American) for what the British liked to call heavy rock. In other words, here was music that was simply a heavier, nastier version of what lots and lots of bands were doing at a variety of levels of nastiness. Blue Oyster Cult, for example (I can’t be bothered to type in the stupid umlauts), often gets lumped in with the heavy metal genre, but I challenge you to find virtually anything in their mid-70s catalague which is remotely heavy in any kind of more modern sense.

Denim-clad scruffs yearning for the hard stuff in the latter half of the 70s had to be content with a much broader definition of the term heavy metal, and if you look at heavy metal listening charts even through to 1980, you tend to find lots of appearances put in by groups rarely included with the genre today, such as Heart, or Rush. Even AC/DC, with their high-voltage trappings, are probably more accurately termed hard rock, though their popularity was so massive at the time, and their aesthetic so perfectly suited to metalheads, that it’s no surprise they were popular with the metal crowd.

Yet by 1982, and even more so in 1983, the whole hard rock world had undergone a startling transformation, and the heavy metal we know today had been born and reached a certain maturity. What had happened in the intervening couple of years to make the genre coalesce so rapidly?

It was, of course, the advent of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and the rapid dissemination of its updated heavy rock notions throughout the world. The link between late 70s heavy rock and mid-80s heavy metal is almost entirely on the shoulders of the NWOBHM, which partly explains how the term continues to evoke bleary-eyed romanticism in metalheads to this day.

Part of this is a generational thing, as successive waves of young hopefuls hit their late teens, inspired by the past but pushing things along to a new level — the groups debuting their first releases in one year all two years younger than the last wave, each directly inspired by the previous wave, like a tidal movement of successive crests breaking against the musical shores of the rock world. But it’s not just age — Ronnie James Dio would debut the first album of his band Dio in 1983, and it represented just that generational advancement of the genre over his two albums with Black Sabbath (themselves a major development over the Ozzy era Sabbath releases). Yet people were evidently catching musical waves which would break in rapid succession. Ultimately, the rapidity of the change would result in metal’s undoing, as the only path to follow eventually became ever more selective and extreme, driving metal back into the underground and into the hands of ever more selective tastes.

Anyway, 1983 was a real watershed year, with many seminal releases representing the forefront of true heavy metal. The day really belonged to the Americans this year, who had finally come up to speed with the Britons, and were bursting at the seams with their own hybridized sound.

Savatage—”I Believe”
from the album Sirens (1983)

Enter one of the big names of the heavy metal world: Savatage. A band soon to build a checkered, storied, and ultimately metamorphosic story, in 1983 Savatage were one of many fresh-faced kids in America bowled over by the NWOBHM, and by the classic 70s monoliths they’d grown up on, and ready to leave their own imprint on the genre.

And leave it they did. The group that grew into Savatage spent their formative years in Northern Florida in the late 70s dabbling in heavy metal nascently, eventually coalescing in 1981 and eventually ending up in a local studio in 1982 to cut a number of tracks (apparently as quickly and as cheaply as possible on their shoestring budget), the first fruits of which would be their debut album Sirens released in 1983 on the small independent label PAR records (the enduring popularity of this and the second album would result in a much more well-distributed reissue on the bigger Combat Records later in 1985).

It takes all of two seconds of listening to Sirens to realize that emphatically Savatage represent the absolute ideal of heavy metal as a genre circa 1983, and the album stands at the quintessential forefront of the rapidly evolving sound, easily galloping alongside the Dio debut and the Metallica debut as an instant and genre-defining classic.

Boisterous, energetic, nasty, crunchy, distinctive, caterwauling and electrifying, Savatage perfected the heavy metal sound with a hugely unique and impressive frontman, the guitar wizardry of a truly precocious 6-string hero, and a well-honed writing style perfectly suited to create the most satisfaction for the audience’s expectations with the minimum fuss.

Sitting at the flagship spot on this album, and representing for me the highest level the band would ever attain, is the mini-epic that is the enigmatically titled “I Believe”.

Underneath this innocuous little title (a strange one for a heavy metal song, something seemingly better suited to pop or folk rock) lies a five minute science fiction epic about a group of space travelers forced to flee from an Earth rendered uninhabitable by nuclear and environmental devastation, embarking on a millennium-long journey to find a new planet that will be home to the vestiges of the human race. During this uncertain journey, the narrator conjectures about the existence of other life in the cosmos, and whether they will ever meet it –

Where do we go? What’ll we find? Is there life … other than mine?

After a thousand years of wandering space for a new home, the colonists alight on a mysterious world, where they find a black box set in a large green plain. A metallic, alien voice comes from the box (reproduced to cool effect in the song itself):

Welcome to Earth, May we ask who you are? Our race is called Man. The planet is done, done, done, done, done, DONE!

As the strange metallic voice repeats the word “done” with more and more unhinged frenzy, the song itself shifts into overdrive, as the guitar work of Criss Oliva explodes into a kind of tornado of notes over a double-time beat. The next verses are abstract and enigmatic, as if the horrific realization that the colonists’ centuries-long search has brought them back to the very place they fled from in the first place has driven them mad. Each brief little irrational verse is cut off by yet another frenzied guitar solo as the little epic disintegrates into a tempest of insanity, before it suddenly and painfully stops dead, robbing us of a drawn-out and dramatic finale.

I often hold “I Believe” up as a quintessential example of a perfect heavy metal song possessing all the ingredients needed to make the best potion the genre can offer. It’s got a semi-epic tale to tell brimming with excitement, wonder, and eventually madness, it tells that tale in a musical structure that grows and evolves to match the evolution of the story, and it undergoes a metamorphosis of pace and intensity midway in. It also does what all good heavy metal should do: it spotlights the individual talents of each band member, at the same time that no one ego ever sabotages the unified teamwork nature of the piece. Heavy metal should always be about a group of musicians working together in perfect sync and harmony without losing their individuality, and “I Believe” represents that balance to a fault.

Criss Oliva is justly famous for his spastic and unique guitar flamboyance, but I think the band’s greatest weapon lies in his brother Jon’s vocals, which are massively dramatic and wonderfully adaptable to so many moods. Like with the legendary Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford, Jon can alter his voice at whim from strident and high to booming and low to rasping to pure to anything in between, and he doesn’t shy away from swinging wildly in any direction that the music demands. And the man knows dementia. I have never heard someone shriek or cackle as effectively (and without inducing irritation) as Jon Oliva.

Savatage would survive through thick and thin in the ensuing years, reestablishing their artistic integrity after a disastrous and unwanted push into commercial waters, and ultimately earn a devoted fanbase by the late 80s when they developed into a more progressive metal outfit, churning out elaborate (and expensive) rock operas and concept albums. Tragically, genuis guitarist Criss Oliva would be killed by a drunk driver in the 90s, but brother Jon kept the band alive, and it exists in one form or another to this day. Astonishingly, Savatage has survived most of these years as one of the few bands to stay with a major record label, Atlantic.

1983 was a watershed year for heavy metal, and all the exuberance and power that it brought to the genre is never more perfectly and fully represented than in “I Believe”, truly one of the classic tracks of this silly, scruffy-haired bastard child genre of rock.

Technorati tags: heavy metal, Savatage.

A couple of weeks ago Wil Wheaton went on a bit of a ramble about how much he was enjoying last.fm, another one of those Web 2.0 sites with a kind of stupid name, a widget to put in your site’s sidebar, a little client program to download, and a new silly made-up word or two.

I listened to his enthusiasm, accepted that he liked it, and then naturally assumed it was great for him and not for me, because whenever I hear someone talk about anything music-related, I naturally assume it applies to other people’s tastes in music and not to mine. Classic heavy metal and hard rock is a narrow, narrow field, and some of my favorite bands are so esoteric that they generally cause music software to start talking in a shrill voice and belching smoke, kind of like when Captain Kirk throws a whole lot of unsolvable dilemmas at a fascistic planet-controlling computer built by a long-dead ancient race.

For one reason or another, I eventually decided to give it a whirl — probably because I was a little unhinged after having to spend that one extra hour pulling HTML markup out of a poorly-designed PHP class. And the results were much more interesting than I expected.

For those not yet aware of last.fm, it is a web application that’s entirely free at which you set up an account and then begin building up a profile by listening to music on the media player of your choice, as well as listening to last.fm’s streaming “radio”, which tailors the songs to either a keyword you punch in, or an artist you punch in. The app monitors what you play, makes note of it, allows you to love or hate tracks as they’re played, and thereby build up a kind of matrix of your listening tastes by corellating them with the tastes of others who like similar stuff.

Now, none of this should sound new. The concept of building up recommendations based on the choices of others who like the same things you do is as old as the h1 tag. Amazon.com has done it for years. But I’ve always found that these types of recommendation-building engines are very flawed. Amazon.com, for example, makes some horrendous recommendations to me with both books and music, to such and extent that I simply don’t bother to look anymore. And Netflix? WTF?

Because my tastes in music are about as fashionable and popular as leg warmers, I decided to throw some of my more obscure favorites at the last.fm player just to see how much it would choke. 80s heavy metal Hawaiians Sacred Rite were first out of the gate, one of my mostest bestest bands but which precious few could possibly know. As mentioned, last.fm has a type of streaming radio which you can play either through their website, or through a little player you can download, and each “station” is built on the fly to play music based on a keyword you type in (like “female fronted beauty and the beast gothic stained black metal”) or a band. Type in your selection, hit play, and see if anything comes up … and when it does, if it’s even remotely going to be like what you consider a similar type of music to your input.

When I typed in Sacred Rite and punched Play, I assumed that one of two things would happen. That a) last.fm would stare at me blankly and tell me it didn’t have a clue who the fuck I was talking about, or b) it would play music that was horrifically inappropriate, like Linkin Park.

To my surprise, neither occurred. Instead, last.fm happily accepted my selection, acknowledging their existence, and proceeded to play what little it had in its database of licensed music that was, all things considered, not too far afield at all. Musical styles are always a combination of genre and period, so if last.fm had started spewing out very recent music — even which otherwise might qualify as traditional heavy metal — I would have been disappointed. But it managed to cough up related music that was more or less contemporary and more or less stylistically similar to what is — let’s face it — a very obscure band in the broad scheme of things.

The whole key to last.fm’s flexibility is, I think, the fact that it records everything you play on your computer, not just what you play via their streaming radio (they call this feature, rather stupidly, “scrobbling”). Thankfully, this means that you’re not limited only to what they have in their licensed catalogue, but can still interact with their system and get some benefits out of it. Over the last week or so I’ve been flitting back and forth during my computer workday between playing stuff in my own collection, and popping into the streaming radio feature to see what it can come up with, and by and large what it’s giving me is fairly sensible and fairly shrewd, and most of the time its selections are in keeping with what I consider aesthetically similar music to whatever I’ve punched in. On the few occasions where a horrible gaffe is made (because, say, there are two artists in existence with a certain name associated with the style I’m listening to and last.fm spits out the wrong one), I simply click on the “ban” button and last.fm is suitably chastened.

Now, Sacred Rite is not in last.fm’s radio, unsurprisingly. But a few other somewhat surprising esoteric artists in the same mold are, and I was somewhat pleased when last.fm pulled out a track from Omen, a track from Savatage, and then some more mainstream but not at all unreasonable stuff from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. They say they are constantly adding music to their radio database, of which I have no doubt, but what’s there already is not too shabby at all.

In the end, the key to the software’s strength is that its knowledge of music and its ability to learn about tastes from what people are playing is not limited to what is in its own bank of licensed music. Without that feature, I think last.fm would be just another lame example of a “Recommendations” engine, good for a moment or two of tittering laughter, and little more. Instead, even with someone with tastes as specific as mine, you stand to find your musical self at least acceptably well represented. I’d give it a shot.

Oh, and where would a Web 2.0 app be without a nifty little widget to stick in your site’s sidebar? You can probably see one now on my own sidebar, and with it you now have the power to see what I’ve been listening to recently, and point, and laugh, and say, “My word, but the man has silly taste — is he actually listening to music?”

There’s popular and then there’s popular.

If you have a peek at the Technorati top popular blogs super-100 ego-thon (here) you’ll find things like Seth Godin’s blog, the Huffington blog, even A List Apart, but you won’t find some other very famous bloggers who are nevertheless, uh, famous bloggers. For example, Wil Wheaton or John Scalzi (both of whom I read on a regular basis).

These two guys have high rankings in the Tehcnorati ego-thon, and they get lots of visitors and also a certain amount of fame for their blogs. And I suppose that the Technorati ego-thon is a widely-regarded way of identifying just how “popular” a blog really is.

But.

You want to know something which might not show up in Technorati’s rankings but is without question the most foolproof way in this quadrant to really prove a blog’s popularity? I’ll tell you.

I read a number of post-modern enlightened web design CSS/XHTML wizard blogs on a regular basis. I consider these my professional (as opposed to recreational) blogs. Of these professional blogs, far and away my most favorite — and by sheer usefulness the most instructive — is Roger Johansson’s 456 Berea Street blog. Roger is well-known among the CSS design community, and he’s a favorite destination for lots of web designers and programmers, because he’s just so damned good at what he does.

But exactly how famous?

Well. Sometime yesterday (Sweden time) he posted an innocuous little entry asking his readers to answer three simple questions: do they browse the internet with their browser windows maximized, at what screen resolution do they operate, and what operating system do they use. Simple, straightforward, and requiring one-word answers. He asked his readers to answer in the comments for the post, and after two weeks he intends to close comments and compile the results.

So about fifteen minutes ago I posted my own comment. And what number was my comment?

814.

Eight Hundred and Fucking Fourteen.

Now, you, my gentle reader, may have very different attitudes, philosophies, tastes, and opinions, than me. Many people who know me personally might actually say that’s a good thing if you have different attitudes, philosophies, tastes, and opinions, than me. But let’s be clear on one point: if you don’t think that receiving eight hundred and fourteen comments to a post at your blog in less than twenty-four hours isn’t an astonishing statement on the popularity of your blog, then I’d really like to know what you take that is slowly disintegrating your mind.

Technorati and its ego-thon ranking is all well and good. Me? I don’t care if Roger Johansson’s 456 Berea Street is in the top one hundred or not — anybody who pulls 814 comments in less than twenty four hours is one of the top bloggers in the world.

Technorati tags: Roger Johansson

We all know that more and more products are coming out of China these days, with manufacturers lured there by cheap labor, promises of lower costs, full-service manufacturing and the whole bit.

In the boardgaming world, there are two major gripes I have with the industry, and one of those is the wholesale migration of board game manufacturing to China. Virtually every game I’ve gotten in the last six months has been entirely manufactured there. I’m not just talking about the plastic pieces, or individual components: I’m talking about the whole goddamned thing, from the boards to the bits to boxing and packaging. It just bothers me that the promise of cheaper manufacturing costs convinces American and European companies to abandon the manufacturing facilities of their own countries and support a vast economy that unpderpays its workers, and has no environmental restraints on industry to speak of, just to save a few bucks. Much of this savings is then gobbled up in the cost of shipping the bloody product across an ocean, through customs, and then to the company’s headquarters, all of this well before it enters the distribution networks. If you visit Fantasy Flight Games’ website, who are a current leader in boardgames (and have virtually all their stuff completely manufactured in China), you’ll see how often disasters happen as well, with badly flawed components that have to be replaced (such as with the boards on Marvel Heroes), or large percentages of their stock getting damaged in the harrowing 6,000 mile journey.

Anyway, given the toy industry as a whole, I’m not all that surprised that so many fall for the lure of China, since that goes way back. But another and totally different recent purchase completely took me by surprise –

I had to buy a new exterior door to replace a damaged one at my house, so while in Home Depot I picked one up off the shelf. I’ve bought doors before from Home Depot, and they were always manufactured by a local company in San Bernardino, so I didn’t think to look twice before buying this one.

To my surprise, and horror, however, as I was installing it I discovered that the core of this allegedly solid wood door was made of an inferior type of solid wood that splintered really easily and was a total bitch to work with. What was supposed to be a Douglas Fir solid wood door was still solid wood — only the Douglas Fir was laminated onto some other kind of crap wood in the interior.

Then I noticed the Made in China stamp on the packaging lying in a pile near where I was working.

OMFG.

Little plastic pieces in a boardgame are one thing, but whole fucking doors? What happened to the company in San Bernardino? Well, it seems that other local door and window places still use them, but being the slimeballs they are, Home Depot heard the siren call of cheap and went with a Chinese company. And the result is an inferior door.

But here’s the really ironic thing: it’s the same frickin’ price as the other doors were. So who’s benefiting from the alleged cost-savings here? It sure isn’t me.

Not only that, but I discovered to my horror that all the metal plumbing pipes for sale at Orchard Supply Hardware are now entirely made in China, as are most metal hand tools –

Case in point. I bought a three-pack of chisels from a Canadian company whose crap was manufactured in China. They cost fifteen bucks. The metal was so soft and inferior that the chisels broke after just a few uses. A month later I’m back in Orchard to buy some new chisels and find that Craftsman brand has a three pack with the same selection of sizes inside it, also for fifteen bucks … except these are made in the USA. Guess what? I’ve used them a hell of a lot more than three times and they’re still as good as new.

Come on. Is it really necessary to have our galvanised piping made in China and imported? What of our own steel industry? In Los Angeles alone there are tons of companies manufacturing metal piping. The irony here as well is that the pipes cost just as much for me to buy even though they’re inferior product imported from China!

This does not in any way imply some kind of dislike of China itself, or especially the Chinese people. I’m a huge fan of Chinese culture, language, and history. I cook Chinese cuisine. I often use Chinese traditional medicine. Hell, I’ve even been studying Mandarin Chinese.

My annoyance — and it’s growing daily — is with these weak and greedy American and European companies who so easily chuck the manufacturing facilities of their own countries and rush off to support the economy of a country over which our own laws have little or no jurisdiction, and we as customers end up with inferior crap that costs just as much as it did when it was domestically made.

I think the whole manufacturing/importing model is a disaster, and it’s only getting worse. And there’s not a damn thing I know of that I can do about it.