Two stories regarding China once again caught my eye. Funny how that happens after a visit when you fall under the spell of a place, isn't it?

First up, the high speed rail system between Beijing and Shanghai is supposedly all good to go once again. Whether or not anything has been re-engineered following the collision that killed 43 people back in July is an open question. For a nation that plans to build thousands of miles of new high-speed track by 2015, getting that system back on track has to be a nerve-wracking story for a whole lot of people.

Secondly, the explosion in car sales in China is unavoidable if you just look around the streets there. Oops, maybe that's a crude word choice to follow up a train crash story. Still, the Chinese love their cars. And they also apparently love to categorize those newly-coveted cars. A Mercedes, apparently, equals an old fart. An Audi means "bureaucrat", so just get the hell out of the way if you see one. I'm sure there are others - the handful of ridiculous Lotuses and Lambourghinis I saw speeding around the cities certainly indicate a very particular kind dickish customer. But where I was surprised in this piece was in the news that one of the hottest luxury car lines in China is actually the Buick - the oldest American car maker, and one that's recently even been dissed by GM's execs. Nevermind that Buick is also partly the namesake (derived from a favorite Midwestern cliche') of my prior blog. Buick's back, baby. At least on the streets of Beijing. I don't know why, but that makes me happy.

To a certain degree, I'm trying to get inside the mind of a quite particular character - the crazed yet totally committed protester. There are many variations. I'm wrestling with the why and the what behind those exposure seekers or windmill tilters or just plain out of their fool minds they're so into whatever thing crowd. I'll admit being intrigued by that degree of Kool Aid consumption. I don't really have a big history of such cause craziness myself. I've been more often into drive-by activism. Like that thing not long ago over on my long-running personal blog - I somewhat facetiously called for dumping garbage in front of Williams-Sonoma stores after receiving ill treatment. But then I was almost immediately found and satisfied in reply by an awesome PR exec with that company - their intelligence gathering would make the Mossad envious. Another recollection - which came quite out of the blue on a pre-dawn run today - is that of this gonzo dude from a journalism class in college who went deep deep undercover literally posing as a homeless guy. Flat out stayed in a mission, probably even drank anti-freeze and god knows what else with the folks around him, just plain went all native on a story that seemed to come out of left field. I don't know if I liked or even understood that degree of awesome commitment on his part. I think I respected it. Crazy for a cause. Good or way way out there bad - there's something to be said for that. I still don't get it. But I'm trying to understand.