So the other day, my Chinese buddy invited me to his kid’s birthday party. Actually it was for his 5 year old and 10 year old (girl & boy respectively). Despite the fact that he’s obscenely wealthy, I had visions of a dozen kids screaming around a flaming birthday cake while the adults got buzzed up in the corner on the spiked punch.
Um. Yeah. Wrong.
Driving past the gated security in one of the most prestigious (and quiet) neighborhoods in my area, I saw what appeared to be a massive block party. It looked like the whole town was on ‘shrooms – chest-thumping bass, neon lights smearing the sky, and a full blown stage set up complete with performers and magicians. I had never actually seen such a sight in this area prior to this experience.
Apparently it was indeed a very good year. Stepping out of the car, we were welcomed by the ‘registration desk’ – a booth whereby you must sign in and announce your pedigree. 250 children, their maids, and parents were having the time of their lives. Women dressed to the 9 in glittering evening gowns, men talking Mafia-style in the corners of the yard, and children e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e.
Looking around, I saw enough high-tech equipment to run a TV station. Closed-circuit video was being played on TVs hung throughout; video of the magicians on stage visible from any seating position, a DJ spinning the latest toons at jet-engine decibels through speaker the size of shipping containers.
This is the other Jakarta. (compare this to yesterday’s post)
Food vendors had been hired and set up in strategic places along the property, with a cake that would put a wedding to shame, sitting directly in front of a billboard size full-color banner of the two children.
As I started talking to some of the guests, I quickly noticed the conversations turning to business endeavors. A typical chat began:
Me: Hey there, how’s it goin…
Notme: Fine, fine, just brought the kids over for some fun.
Me: Yeah, I see – So what do you for work?
Notme: I own a resort on the west coast of Java. You should stop by sometime.
Me: Wow, that’s great, how many rooms do you have? (thinking a half-dozen)
Notme: 267… I’ll make you a booking, here’s my card… So what is it you do for work, Brandon…
Me: … … … Um…You wanna grab some food?!?…
As I crept away to the quietest seat I could find, the DJ put a new spin on the party. I fainly recognized the beat from 1989 but thoughts of junior high corrupted my cranium. I couldn’t quite place the song… until it hit me. Well, the lyrics did at least – “Heeeyyy….. we want some P*SSY!”
The DJ had decided to play 2 Live Crew’s most sexually explicit song full-blast at a 5 year old’s birthday party…
Ce La Vie!
Wew…. what a party. Did they watch Spongebob Squarepants too? 🙂
sounds like fun… did shakira come?
PS: pics and all looks good. done with upgrade?
No, but I’m sure Inul was somewhere amongst the crowd.
The upgrade is complete – things went pretty well, only down for about an hour (when I was in a meeting and couldn’t fix it). The only quirky thing seems to be a problem with my database from the import – on posts that were typed in Word and/or copied from another source and pasted into a post, there are “?” question marks in place of hyphens, apostrophes, and some quotation marks. Any ideas?
Dreamhost simply acknowledged, “yep looks like a database error” – Well no sh$t guys – thanks – but they didn’t offer any solution. Guess I’ll be slowly going through my 3 years of archives to fix them one.by.one.by.one.by.one…
i’m not too sure what’s the environment you/your host is running on, but it’s the fact that ms word use inverted aposthropes (for the closed model) and also some of the singular ones, and the hyphens are replaced with a slightly-longer hyphen (don’t know what it’s called). you can look on your MS Word, autocorrect table and see the characters substitutes. The special characters are mostly used for MS Word formatting and more importantly to sub for the international characters from different countries (Yen, Cent, Pound, Greek symbols, etc.)
some apps refuse to acknowledge these special characters and replace them. One way – work most of the time is to replace them with the proper ISO code (look for ISO/special character HTML table). Depending on what ur environment is, you can probably do a find and replace or some database operation to replace them.
It sounds like that is the problem anyway… i could be wrong.
You didn’t bring your camera to the party? Hmmm, make sure you get invited to the parent’s b’day party. I chuckled to myself, they must have thought it was the ‘PUSSYCAT’.
the blog looks great with the new header image Brandon (in Firefox, that is…)
n@n – I only brought my handphone – which does have a semi-decent camera, but wasn’t sure if I really wanted to upload low quality images to my blog – should I? I took video as well of the magicians, but was so blown away by the fact that they played that song that I actually forgot to take video of it.
Trappedinasuit – Thanks, I’ve worked hard to get it the way that I like it. Now if I could only leave well enough alone, I’d be set. 😉
What a funny story. Sounds like a great party.