Yay for China!

I read a New York Times article today with the following pleasant paragraphs about the Detroit auto show:

“Five manufacturers from China are showing cars here this year, up from one in 2007 and 2006, when Chinese vehicles were first displayed in Detroit.

They are still learning the finer points of auto-showmanship. Their displays tend to be plain and dated. Changfeng Motor’s name was misspelled on trinkets the company gave journalists this week, and it proclaimed in a press release that its display “steps on” the auto show for the second consecutive year.

Guang Ming, meanwhile, suggests on a placard that its tiny, yellow electric cars, with names like The Book of Songs and A Piece of Cloud, are suitable short-range transportation for “renowned environmentalists” like President Bush.

On Monday, the head of a battery maker called Build Your Dreams, which started making cars just five years ago, offered to show a hybrid sedan to a writer from the blog Jalopnik.com. Instead, he provided a mini-test drive, right through a news conference going on nearby.”

Hey, I’m in Iceland!

I went stargazing tonight. An amateur astronomy group runs a telescope on the top of an elementary school in Seltjarnares, and tonight they had an open house.

The school was dark–a man emerged from the cafeteria to guide us up three separate ladders and into the dark room where the telescope was. Through a slot in the roof we could see the sky. There were ten or so people up in that small room already, which was nice because it was cold.

I couldn’t see anyone’s face, but we all stood in a circle around the telescope and took turns looking through. Occasionally someone would crack a joke in Icelandic (I could only imagine–probably along the lines of “Is that a galaxy? It looks like a smudge!”) and everyone would laugh. Briefly there would be a chuckle of conversation. Somehow all of this seemed like a quintessentially Icelandic experience.

We looked at Mars, the Crab Nebula, and Orion, which was stunning. The crab nebula was just a smudge. But I still tried to memorize it–I knew there were people waiting behind me in line, but this was my one opportunity to see something extraordinary. There is a metaphor there, by the way–and I’ll give you a hint, I think it’s a metaphor about death.

The build-up was so fantastic–the deserted school, the three flimsy ladders, the darkened room full of people–that the stars were just about the only thing that could have lived up to it.