On September 4th, 2006, from a pink office building in south Shanghai, the first ever Flumesday post was scripted. That same day, with one clunky click, the site before you, Flumesday.com, was born. The first sentence of this seminal post read, “Exercising has become more rewarding in China as the iGallop, made by Singaporean company OSIM, has become an increasingly popular home machine.” Eek. We all get better. The post focused less on Chinese exercise and more on the innocent Chinese girl whose job it was to ride this thing in a public mall to demonstrate its use. Poor thing. She was riding this ab machine like she was engaged in the most passionate cowgirl sex anyone has ever witnessed. And this was how it started.
One year and 500,000 visitors later, I am still writing about things that I read or see in China (and America) that should be written about. And not just sex. I’ve written about Chinese basketball, drug culture, censorship, prostitution, cabbies, expats, dolphins, pigs, dogs, Bai Ling, online gaming, Jews, Muslims, the world’s tallest man, spitting, the Olympics, Yao Ming (a lot) and whatever else strikes my fancy on a given day. My goal when I began was to choose interesting topics that other writers or bloggers in China did not tackle. My hope was that people would find a perspective and tone on Flumesday that they could not find anywhere else.
My only disappointment is that at times, like now, there have been periods in which posting has been irregular. Sometimes, I am out of town. Sometimes I get busy with other things. And sometimes I just don’t feel like it. But the last few weeks, while the posting of new material has been infrequent, I have been putting more time and effort into Flumesday than ever before. You just can’t see it. Yet. In the next couple weeks, Flumesday will get a much needed makeover. While the look and feel of the site will remain pretty much the same, I am adding functions that will drastically improve the site for the reader.
Other than some new columns and perhaps some new writers, all posts will be linkable, Stateside posts will be archived, navigation between posts will be smooth, posts will be grouped in categories, all content will be searchable through an internal search function (no more Google search), Flumesday will get its own RSS feed, Stateside will have it’s own RSS feed, and finally and the coolest addition if you ask me, in the near future there will be a Flumesday store where you can buy t-shirts and other goodies, the proceeds from which will be donated to a worthy Shanghai charity.
While I’m excited for the year to come on Flumesday.com, on the very first birthday of my very first Web site, I wanted to say thanks to all the readers and commentators for contributing to the site and taking part in what has been the most exciting year of my life. I hope you keep reading. Happy Birthday Flumesday.
•First Flumesday Post: New Ab Machine Riding Dirty
For anyone like myself, a proud and loyal Michigan football fan, today is a day of utter shame. And so is tomorrow and the next day and the remainder of this season. The Michigan football program hit an unthinkable low on Saturday as the #5-ranked Wolverines lost to Division I-AA Appalachian State in their opening game of the 2007 season. Let me take you back to Friday when I was “juiced” for the start of the new college football season. I made sure the old David Terrell #1 jersey was washed and ready for a big autumn. I scrambled to see if I could find the game on the internet (to no avail– ESPN canceled its internet package this year in an attempt to be the biggest bunch of assholes ever). I even watched some YouTube preview video edited to the Any Given Sunday song to get psyched up for the new season. What does Michigan do to repay the team’s biggest fan in Shanghai? A fan who stayed up drinking coffee until 4 in the morning listening to the local Ann Arbor broadcast of the game? They lost. To a team that everyone had written off as a joke, a game everyone believed would result in nothing more than a crushing week 1 win for Michigan, and a fat paycheck for App. State. The Mountaineers got their fat paycheck. And they also got the most improbable victory in the history of college football. Yes, I said what the Michigan broadcasters would not. This was the biggest upset in the history of college football. This was a team from what the NCAA calls its “subdivision” walking into the biggest stadium in American sports and defeating what is supposed to be college football’s fifth best program. This is like the Yankees losing the World Series to the double-A Bowie Bay Sox. It would be like the Spurs dropping a close one to the Guangdong Southern Tigers of the Chinese league. And for those non-sports fans, it would be comparable to Dennis Kucinich walking into The Shelter in Detroit and defeating Eminem in a rap battle. Or winning the Democratic nomination. It was something that should have been impossible. The odds were so skewed in Michigan’s favor, there wasn’t even an official betting line on the game. Appalachian State exposed a wide variety of weaknesses in Michigan, namely the D, who couldn’t make make a stop in the first half and the special teams, who on Saturday were special like the Special Olympics– two blocked field goals and 3 mangled returns? They also proved what I’ve been saying for years– the Big House is not feared or revered by visiting teams the way most Michigan fans believe. If Saturday’s game were a house party, Appalachian St. are the awkward losers we invited to help us look good and get laid. But instead, they trashed the place, drank all the booze, fucked all the women and left us drunk and depressed by ourselves. To stay on this metaphor, if we Michigan fans were alcoholics, Saturday’s game was our rock bottom. This is a loss that should result in a Sunday morning firing of head coach Lloyd Carr, who, as far as I’m concerned, led his team onto the field wholly unprepared. This is a loss that makes Michigan, the most storied team in college football, the laughing stock of the sports nation. And as a fan, I am completely ashamed.