Illustrated Groupthink May 9th
Ni hao Shanghai. Are you happy like me?
Things are hotting up in anticipation of the Expo and I for one am excited! This year’s theme is 城市,让生活更有美好. For those of you who don’t read Chinese it translates roughly as “Welcome to the eighth circle”.
As is natural in the lead up to these kind of things, the citizens of Gotham must be kept safe from the evils of electronic music, cheap drinks and dancefloor make-outs with strangers. Accordingly the Shelter is being shut down and rumblings indicate the fate of Yuyintang will be uncertain in coming weeks.
Municipal authorities detained bored expat housewives and their Filipino nannies at a writers’ meeting held in one of Hongqiao’s many gated laowai communities last week. Fortunately the arrests did not leave any expat babies without childcare as the Chinese assistants to the Filipino nannies were able to temporarily care for the city’s most precious resource. Replacement Filipino childcare workers were quickly brought in from Windows Scoreboard and I Love Shanghai, ensuring none of the children were overly traumatized by the ordeal.
There are unconfirmed reports of counter-revolutionary knitting circles being broken up around the city and HAL advises readers to take care when congregating in groups of more than three or four individuals. Make sure to have your passport on you at all times. Do not leave the house until 2011. If you get hungry you can call the laowai relief center at 6209-6209.
To celebrate Expo weekend, HAL will be postponing our next official Groupthink to May 9th. The theme: illustrated writing. Do what you will with the theme. For more details or to RSVP email editor@haliterature.com. See you there.
There will be an unofficial Groupthink on May 2nd, during which the founding editors of HAL will be getting drunk on Ray/Jerry’s Velvet Hammers from 4pm onward and maybe talking about writing. Google our email address for more details.
The arrests of the Filipino nannies follow the passage of the inarguably unconstitutional “Fuck with a Mexican” bill by the United States of America’s state of Arizona’s state senate this week. The dollar is weak but hell if the shit-heeled cowtown mayors aren’t going to sweep their brown purveyors of landscaping and housekeeping straight into the Rio with a splash big enough to make a hat dance to stay dry. Note: no language in said law prevents the citizens of Arizona from exercising their right to sue the cops for not harassing honkies. Hunker down for the next round: legalized eviction of intellectuals from the Grand Canyon State, where the zealots will not rest until they see the President’s foreskin or lack thereof so that they might determine his true religious beliefs. See “Birther Law,” for more information or just forget it and go get some take-out tacos and settle in for a night of Jon Stewart, the last American Hero.
This post brought to you by a freelance food writer trying to avoid ghosts of deadlines past and the realities of living in an increasingly totalitarian state.
Your Animated American Sister,
D