Actually, on second look, the smarmy guys in JiuJiang (see post #1) were actually quite a bit cooler because they'd had the phones hacked to have modern features and full color screens and what have you. I thought that's what these phones would be.

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This is interesting because this was a huge fad in the small city where I used to live in China (JiuJiang). In fact it was quite a status symbol there to have a huge brick cell phone. I would've thought it was really hip except for the fact that you only ever saw smarmy party officials, drunk from their lunchtime bender talking on them.

I have not seen this fad elsewhere in China so it might have just been a JiuJiang thing.

Arrested Development's Teamocil?

As for China, just in my personal experience, a service called QQ is extremely popular-- it's mainly instant messaging, but users create profiles and use it as e-mail, and even web profiles of themselves. Perhaps appropriately given the country, users don't use screen names but rather are assigned a QQ number like 28384739294. People often exchange their qq numbers, and some people even leave them around in net cafes to attract attention.

Another service that is becoming more and more popular is a service called xiaonei. It is an EXACT copy of facebook. I mean word-for-word even (except in Chinese). In one way this points to China's propensity for copying things so exactly rather than R&D'ing their own new products (that's a whole other discussion), but in another way it shows great ingenuity in that facebook didn't have a good Chinese translation, so they just hacked it and copied it in a way that was useful for them. Jury's still out on my opinion of XiaoNei.

YES! Thank you so much Tiabla.

Huge props for posting the whole thing!

@gregc

oh yeah, these seem to be really popular throughout China. I remember first seeing one in NanChang, which is relatively rural with only a few hundred thousand people.

Now did it stop any of the incessant honking that you hear everywhere in China? Of course not, but it was a pretty neat gadget anyway.

Coincidentally, I was thinking of this just the other day, and how someone should really incorporate a decibel meter (audiometer?) into a wrist watch.

@#21

I agree a little bit-- just looking at the thumbnails, I thought the post was going to be about Halloween masks.

However, I can also see the point of the high contrast black and white. The point of the series wasn't to show how beautiful they were-- that certainly comes out in (most of) their stories. But from the artist statement (also quoted above)

"First, I was simply interested in taking portraits of people who appear worn beyond their years by living extraordinarily hard lives."

There are certainly some "younger" people in the photo set (one guy in his 40s), but the centenarians, I guess are definitely worn, er, "appropriately" for their years?

Maybe Story forgot his focus, but I think the pictures are still interesting and thought-inspiring.

You know what would be even cooler than these cord organizers?

WIRELESS ENERGY.

It's 2007 already! When's the future going to get here?

Oh man! I was arrested for something very similar (though much less dangerous).

In college, a buddy and I climbed up onto the roof of my house on the corner of a pretty dead street. Whenever a car would pull up to the stop sign, we'd throw a water balloon at its back windshield. Pretty harmless-- the car was stopped, and any passengers were shielded by the car itself-- but fun for a couple drunk college kids.

Anyway, apparently someone in the car did NOT think it was funny and called the cops, which led to FOUR cars (8 cops) arriving with guns drawn (!). They told us to put our hands over our head and climb down from the roof (good logical thinking there). Once down, the cops threw me and my buddy on the ground giving both of us bruises and spraining my buddy's wrist. There were lots of cursing and threatening and very abusive behavior on the cops' parts especially after one of their number attempted to climb to the roof and fell on his rather large ass (they had to call another cop to bring a ladder).

They handcuffed us, took us to jail, but eventually just charged us with "drinking in public".

I love seeing my tax dollars at work.