MeiMei is fully bilingual in Chinese and Russian, thanks to several years living in Minsk as a student. Her English (and maybe her Chinese, though I cannot tell) has a Russian accent. In addition, she’s an excellent pianist.

Her job at JiDa was as translator/interpreter for the exchange students and music teachers from Ukraine, but midway through last school year, there was less call for her linguistic abilities. Meanwhile, still unmarried at the age of 30, MeiMei was facing the Chinese cultural pressure to find a husband before she got “too old.” So, she decided to quit her university job, and go back home to Hefei to find a mate, while living with her parents and supporting herself teaching piano and Russian.

About two weeks ago, she and I were chatting on QQ, and she asked about my plans for the future. MeiMei suggested I consider working in Hefei. Then I asked if I could visit her this month to see what Hefei is like. She enthusiastically said yes. So, in short order, I and her other friend and former neighbor, Ailsa, were planning a week’s trip to Hefei.

Hefei is the provincial capital of Anhui, which is northeast of Hunan province. China is building out a high speed rail system at a dizzying pace, starting with the provincial capitals, so Changsha, Hunan, and Hefei are already connected with HSR.

Ailsa had already bought a train ticket to Changsha, where she lives, so rather than taking the bus as I usually do, I agreed to keep her company on the eight-hour (slow) train ride. We booked our tickets to Hefei at the Jishou train station. We were on the D150 train to Wuchang station in Wuhan, and then the D3062 train from Hankou station in Wuhan to Hefei.

The distance between Changsha and Wuhan is about 362 km, and the D150 covers that in three hours, a third of the time the next fastest train (the T98A) takes. That works out to an average speed of 121 km/hr (75 mph). The distance from Wuhan to Hefei is 364 km, but the D3062 covers that in 2:23, also a third of the next fastest time, at an average speed of 156 km/hr (97 mph). The ticket price for each leg was 112 RMB, or about $17.

[Incidentally, you can take the D3062, or one of the other D-class trains, from Wuhan and be in Shanghai 820 km (512 miles) away in six hours. Amazing.]

Our “layover” in Wuhan was about six hours, giving us plenty of time to find our way from Wuchang station to Hankou station across town. We decided to do some sightseeing, since Ailsa had never been to Wuhan. But the heat was oppresive (42 C, or 107 F), so we just hit Yellow Crane Tower (Huanghelou 黄鹤楼), then grabbed an air conditioned cab to the air conditioned train station to recover.

Cities in the USA are lucky to have even one train station, which in a lot of places is now some kind of museum, office building or shopping mall. New York has two train stations, and as far as I know, no city in the States has more than two. By contrast, Wuhan has three railway stations now; the third one, in the northern suburbs, is part of the new G-class HSR trains connecting Wuhan to Changsha South station (also new) and Guangzhou North in Guangdong. The G-class trains zip between Wuhan and Guangzhou North — a distance of 1022 km (639 miles) — in just three and half hours. (That works out to be about 180 mph on average.) Tickets are $76, cheaper than airfares, so the domestic airlines have had to cut their prices to be competitive.

(We rode a G-class train from Wuhan to Changsha (90 minutes) on the way back, because it would allow both of us to grab afternoon buses home. The ticket was $25, only $8 more than the D150 fare.)

Anyway, on to our itinerary. We had dinner first with MeiMei and her husband, went to a KTV, then crashed at a hotel on Changjiang ZhongLu near Suzhou Lu downtown for the night. The next few days were packed with activities, as MeiMei and her parents wanted to show us a lot of sights.

Her dad is partner is a small metal stamping factory in Sanhe. The company supplies parts (brackets and chassis pieces) to JAC, one of China’s domestic auto and truck makers. As a boss, he gets a company car, similar in size and style to a Buick, and a driver, Mr Wang (no relation). So, we were able to tour Anhui in comfort.

We visited ancient cities at Sanhe, She (pronounced “shuh”) county and XiDi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the Bao family gardens; the ancestral home of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin; the boyhood home of physicist Yang Zhenning*; the home of Qing dynasty diplomat Li Hongzhang; Fantawild, an amusement park; and the Golden Peacock Spa Resort. We also did some shopping — I needed a new supply of contact lenses, for one thing.

We ate a lot of great food, and drank of lot of expensive and potent Chinese liquor. Ailsa, who weighs all of 90 pounds soaking wet, held her own liquor very well. (One of the popular sayings in China is that Hunan woman are not only the most beautiful in the country, but also the best drinkers. Then again, they say the same thing about the women of all of the other provinces, too.)

Ailsa has been fretting over my newfound bachelorhood, and MeiMei wants us both to move to Hefei, to each find jobs and significant others. MeiMei was trying to fix Ailsa up with at least two young men during our trip, but I don’t think anything clicked. On Wednesday night, the two of them persuaded me to sign up with a Chinese matchmaking site, jiayuan.com (literally, “family garden”). MeiMei and her husband, a busy journalist, confessed that they found each other on jiayuan.com last year, and were both happy with the results.

So, Ailsa helped me navigate the elaborate questionnaires on the site — it’s all in Chinese naturally — and we’ll see what happens.My little precis of myself is all in English, so it’s going to stand out like a sore thumb. I’m not expecting un coup de foudre, but it can’t hurt to try.

Having taken a whirlwind tour of Anhui, which has many other places worth seeing, my next trek is to Beijing to welcome the new American family coming to JiDa. I’ve been to Beijing now five times, so I am almost an old hand at it. This time, I am going with two students from my college, neither of whom has been to Beijing, so I get to be a tour guide to five people. Holy crap. Wish me luck!

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* Yang won the Nobel Prize in 1957 with T.D. Lee, for discovering a key law of the Standard Model of particle physics. Yang and experimental physicist C.S. Wu once gave a symposium at Palmer Labs at Princeton. My freshman year physics classes were in the same building almost four decades later. So maybe there are only a few degrees of separation between Yang and me. Another noteworthy fact about Yang is that, at the age of 82, was engaged to a woman only 28 years old. They married in 2005. Lucky fellow. I suspect they did not use jiayuan.com, though.

A little push at the beginning makes it more interesting.

Of course, it’s not very current. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened in the USA weeks ago, but I saw it for the first time here just last week. In Chinese. With Chinese subtitles.

I didn’t miss a thing.

Some B-movies have redeeming virtues, despite poor acting, bad direction, cheesy scripts, or lousy camera work. Really bad movies (grade Z’s), though, combine all four to make a US Grade A turkey.

And being a science-fictiony kind of film, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, brought really bad to a whole new level with really awful science concepts.

Here’s a few glaring mistakes.

The Bad Guy (TBG) has a huge underwater lair that puts Stargate Atlantis’ digs to shame. Yet, this underwater metropolis is supposedly a secret. How? Its heat signature alone would be as bright as lighthouse beacon to a spy satellite in orbit.

For argument’s sake, let’s suppose the US government knew about The Bad Guy’s secret underwater lair. Wouldn’t the Defense Department be just a teensy bit interested in why TBG has all of that expensive hardware hidden away, especially since TBG is supplying high-tech stuff to the DoD?

(Then again, maybe not. Consider the DoD’s careful monitoring of Blackwater and Halliburton operations in Iraq.)

And he also has a secret weapons facility in the Arctic! Apparently, he hasn’t read up on global warming.

Meanwhile, The Good Guys have their own top-secret underground lair in, of all places, the Sahara Desert. No heat signature problems there (maybe), but if keeping water out of a high tech facility is difficult, think about keeping sand and dust out of one. Not a clever choice, in my book.

In this Saharan facility are hangars the size of aircraft carriers, a deep-water training tank the size of Seaworld, and multiple levels of living, dining and training quarters.

How did all that stuff get there? Without being noticed. By anyone, like the Saudis, or Mossad, or the Russians, not to mention the Egyptians. (I won’t even go into the money required to buy and build all that stuff, secretly.)

One of the cool GI Joe gadgets is an exoskeleton that enables the wearer to run (judging from a fleeting glimpse of its heads-up display) up to 80 mph. It seems impervious to denting, abrasion, gunfire, explosions and high impact collisions with trucks, automobiles, pavement and nearby buildings.

Setting aside the difficulties of manufacturing something from such wonder materials, consider the safety of the poor guys inside. Someone forgot to read up on the law of inertia here.

Imagine you are in a metal can hurtling along at 60 mph when you suddenly hit a larger, immobile object. Your metal-can conveyance (commonly known as a “car”) stops moving and crumples into a mere shadow of its stylish design. Meanwhile, you and anything else in the car keep on moving at 60 mph until something gets in your way. If you’re lucky, your seat belts and airbags will do the stopping job, slowing your body at a rate safe enough for you to walk away. If you’re not, the rapid deceleration will make mincemeat of you.

So, our Heroes are bounding around Paris at high speeds, with acrobatic agility, and slamming into things left and right, without feeling a thing! In the real world, their insides would be a slurry after two or three high-speed impacts. An exoskeleton (especially one that is form fitting!) cannot protect its occupant from concussions and broken bones, unless the engineers also designed inertial dampeners (à lá Star Trek) to evade the law of inertia.

And speaking of inertia, TBG’s force weapons also violate Newton’s Laws. Somehow, a henchmen fires one of these things, concentric rings of — something — fly from the barrel, and heavy objects going flying like feathers in the wind. But there’s no recoil. It seems that pushing a car aside with one of these things would at least muss up your hair.

Nanomites. The main premise of the movie is that TBG, who also appears to be the sole hardware supplier to the US government (strategically a really bad idea), has developed a nanoscale robot that eats anything in its way, like army ants. [Reminds me of another B-movie I saw ages ago, with South American villagers yelling, "Moribunda! Moribunda!"] These little buggers can chew through a tank in no time flat, leaving nothing but … dust? I’m not real clear where the waste products go, exactly. Anyway, the nanomites can be turned off, or their voracious appetites could possibly eat up everything, including The Good Guys and the Whole Earth. (But not other nanomites, hmmm…)

So, the TBG, not content with being the sole hardware supplier to the US government, owning a secret underwater lair the size of Denver, Colorado, and an Arctic weapons facility, decides he will unleash his miniature terror weapons on a strategically important site … the Eiffel Tower. A logical choice, since France has such a dominant role in world affairs now.

He sends two of his loyal underlings, the Hero’s Ex-Girl Friend and the Mysterious Asian Dude, both of whom have serious anger-management issues, in a high-tech SUV to race around the streets of Paris to use a handheld rocket launcher to splatter the nanomites all over the base of the Eiffel Tower .. from about a mile away.

A boat up the Seine would have gotten the job done much more effectively, methinks. Paris has a nifty Metro system, too. Careening SUV’s around Parisian traffic is tres inélégant. You’d expect someone with a Denver-sized underwater lair (and an Arctic weapons facility) to be a little more efficient.

TBG’s high-tech SUV survives crashes, explosions and all kinds of mayhem until it is broadsided by a TGV. There’s three problems with this premise. To the best of my knowledge, the TGV does not have surface-level crossings in Paris — they kind of defeat the purpose of high speed trains. Two, the SUV survives explosions and all kinds of collisions, and hitting a train barely dents it, but it gets knocked out when it lands on its roof? What is it? A turtle? And what of the train? It (well, its cheesy CGI simulacrum) keeps zipping through the Parisian streets as if nothing happened. Real trains, like, derail when they hit cars.

Talking about characterization in an action movie like this one is pointless, but comic books do a better job at character development.

Take the Hero, his GF and her brother/his buddy for example. Hero and girl are engaged, hopelessly in love. Well, I can tell she is, anyway. Sienna Miller acts better than the wooden Channing Tatum (Who picked this guy’s name? Seriously, I think of Carol Channing and Tatum O’Neal whenever I hear his name.) On a mission in Iraq, Her Brother/His Buddy gets killed by friendly fire — he goes into an enemy bunker and the Air Force takes it out. Boom!

Hero’s now Ex-GF gets seriously pissed at the US government because her brother was killed in Iraq. So, she signs up with the TBG’s outfit, where she specializes in being a cold-hearted, ass-kicking bitch of a killer with really nice cleavage. Even meeting her ex-BF, our Hero, in the GI Joes’ sub-Saharan lair doesn’t slow down her single-minded rage of vengeance.

Oh, yeah. She has a secret identity, too. He’s married to some rich dude. So, she’s not helping TBG for money and glory. She’s just really, really pissed.

Our Hero gets captured saving Paris from even further destruction from nanomites. Then TBG says he will use our Hero as a test subject for some nasty nanomite surgery. Faced with this gruesome demise of her (formerly) beloved BF, the Hero’s Ex-GF loses her anger-management problems and tries to set him free. We then discover that TBG’s evil doctor henchman — her own fucking brother, who didn’t die after all, but just got warped, like Anakin before he went Darth — has nanomited her, to make her do TBG’s bidding.

No amount of dialogue could help explain this plot point. Brother almost killed. He signs up with The Bad Guy. His sister gets really pissed off. She signs up with the same bad guy. She doesn’t recognize her brother in his Darth Vader-like suit, but surely he knows who she is. (Human resources would have noticed. Trust me on this.) He doesn’t say, hey, sis! It’s me! I’m not dead! Surprise! No, he shoots her up with nanomites to make her a lackey of TBG. These kids have some serious family issues, I’d say.

Then there’s the whole Mysterious Asian Dude-Silent Good Guy in a Full Bodysuit subplot. MAD was a star pupil at a martial arts school in Japan (?) apparently. SGGiaFB was a (white) street urchin who nevertheless had kick-ass martial arts skills. MAD catches SGGiaFB stealing food in the academy kitchen. They fight, pretty equally matched. Kindly, wise, aged sensei stops MAD from inflicting serious damage on the street urchin, accepts the boy into the academy, and eventually voices his approval when SGGiaFB finally defeats MAD in practice.

MAD (who if you remember has serious anger-management issues) goes postal, kills the kindly, wise, aged sensei, and flees the academy. Meanwhile, the street urchin grows up, dons a full body suit (including a face mask with no apparent means of allowing air, water or food in), and becomes a kick-ass GI Joe operative. Predictably, these two foes duke it out in the end, and MAD falls — apparently — to his death.

Now, the movie’s makers have left things open for a sequel, gods help us. One of TBG’s henchmen, who likes to whistle, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” has undergone nanomite cosmetic surgery to become a dead ringer of the movie’s President of the USA. He switches places with the real POTUS in the POTUS’s emergency bunker (supplied by TBG and protected by TBG-nanomited Secret Service agents). And, given the surreality of this movie, he impersonates the POTUS so well that no one notices … yet. (Dare I say this movie was made while George W. Bush was still in office?)

The best part of the movie is Sienna Miller, and not just because of her cleavage. Until the ridiculous change of heart/character at the end, Miller oozes evil, kick-ass bitchiness throughout the other 85% of the flick. The budding romance between Hero’s Other Best Buddy Who’s Not Dead or Warped and Red-Haired Heroine with Really Nice Cleavage is kind of fun to watch, if only because she’s so frosty military .. and white … and he’s so bumbling affable … and black.

And yes, I know these characters have names. Mine are more descriptive. Get over it.

By the way, we paid 25 yuan (about $3.50) each to see this flick, on the insistence of my friend’s younger brother. If you paid substantially more to see it, I am sorry for your loss.

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Cultural enrichment sidebar: What’s Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen’s debut as a film director. In 1966, he took a Japanese action movie, dubbed English dialogue that had nothing to do with the original plot, and created a comic masterpiece. As for the Bizarro world, see here.

You have 2 minutes.

{Cue Jeopardy thinking jingle}

The answer is B! Author and theoretical physicist Hawking was born in Oxford, England, 67 years ago and is currently the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, which at last report was still located where it has been for the last 800 years, in England.

Reading comprehension quiz:
Now read this excerpt from a recent (fubar) editorial from the Investor’s Business Daily, and identify the logical fallacy. You have 5 minutes.

The U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the "quality adjusted life year."

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Discuss your answers among yourselves for the remainder of class.

Words fail me.

[ADDENDUM: IBD has since corrected its error, by deleting the graf mentioning Hawking.]

Don’t believe everything anything the Republicans say about health care reform.

Granted, it’s not on a par with Pixar’s or Disney’s animated features, but this cute little kiddie movie about three young adventure-seeking houseflies is not a complete waste of time. It recreates one of the most exciting moments in US history for a new young audience, while giving them a glimpse of what moving in space is really like.

The plot is pretty simple. Three nerdy flies, Scooter (fat kid), IQ (bespectacled brainiac) and Nat (the ringleader), live in a junkyard near Cape Canaveral within sight of the Apollo 11 launchpad. They all want to have an adventure, like Nat’s grandpa did 37 years ago, but all they can do is dream.

Nat’s grandpa tells him once again his story of how he saved a sleepy Amelia Earhart from splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean by flying up her nose. Nat then decides to hitch a ride on Apollo 11, due to launch the next day.

They successfully become stowaways on the moon mission. They correct an electrical short on the outbound leg. They hide inside the Neil Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s spacesuits to become the first flies on the moon.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Soviet flies try to sabotage the reentry phase, but are thwarted by Nat’s grandpa, his mother, his two maggot brothers, and grandpa’s old flame from the 1930s, Nadia, a sympathetic go-fer to the head Soviet fly spy.

It’s a plot line designed for a eight-year-old, on the same level as many TV cartoons, but as kid movies go, it’s not awful.

There are a few bones thrown to the parents and grandparents watching. Nat’s family name is McFly (who could resist, after all?). A Mona Lisa postage stamp in the McFly living room wall has bug eyes. Nat’s mom frequently exclaims, “lord of the flies!” whenever she’s upset. There are some musical quotes for the old folks, too. As Nat and his buddies float inside the Command Module, Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz plays, as it did in 2001: A Space Odyssey. As the Command Module docks with the Lunar Module, the orchestration alludes to the score from Apollo 13. And, of course, the title song is an old Frank Sinatra classic from 1954.

For this space bug (pun intended) and physics teacher, the animated physics is for the most part dead-on. The launch sequence looks almost as real as an actual Apollo launch. The orbital maneuvers remind one of the graceful movements in 2001 and in real life. Objects in the spacecraft follow inertial paths, and the flies have to beat their wings to move; the animators mercifully did not have them “swim” through the air with their insectoid arms. Acceleration from transorbital burns sends the unmoored flies apparently in the opposite direction from the Apollo’s velocity vector.

As the Lunar Module approaches the moon’s surface, Aldrin and Armstrong capture the three flies and seal them in a test tube. The animators could have violated the First Law of Motion and had the flies beat their wings and push against the tube in an effort to dislodge it, but they didn’t. While Nat, IQ and Scooter do try, they fail.

The physics is not perfect. Vibrations from the landing do finally dislodge the tube, but it does not fall to the deck. In fact, the Lunar Module was close enough to the surface by then for the lunar gravity to pull the tube downward. The decision may have been poetic license, though. The fall might not have been enough to break the glass tube to free the intrepid insects, so the animators instead have the tube float between a heavy camera heading toward an instrument panel. The impact shatters the tube.

We get to see Armstrong climb down the ladder and step on the lunar surface, uttering his famous “one small step for man” line. The animation of him and Aldrin loping around on the moon is pretty lifelike. And, for those moon-landing doubters, the movie clearly shows the upper pole on the US flag keeping the flag outstretched.

As the movie ends, the present-day Aldrin appears, advising us that at no time was the Apollo moon mission contaminated, and that the possibility of three flies sneaking aboard the spacecraft was “scientifically impossible.” In a continuity error, the camera then focuses on the three heroes waving from inside an astronaut’s helmet. (Earlier in the movie, Nat is inside Armstrong’s suit and his buddies are in Aldrin’s.)

(One other error caught my copy-editor eye: a panel in Mission Control is mislabeled, “Authorized Personal Only.”)

Experiments with insects in orbit have shown flying insects are initially disoriented, and cannot fly worth a darn. Nat and his buddies have no such problems, however.

Will kids care about or even notice the little errors? Probably not. I am not even sure their adult companions will, either. For the most part, Fly Me to the Moon is a fairly accurate, child-sized recreation of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission. For those of you old enough to remember watching the real landing on TV, it would be worth spending an hour and a half with your younger family members to view this flick. Sharing your feelings about the real event might inspire some new would-be astronauts.

There are teacher’s guides for the movie, one for the 2D version and one for the 3D version. Here’s the link for the 2D version I saw.

This movie is rated G, by the way. Scooter burps a couple of times and farts once. Christopher Lloyd (who of course played Marty McFly’s friend, Doc, in the Back to the Future movies), Tim Curry, Robert Patrick, Kelly Ripa, Nicolette Sheridan, Ed Begley Jr., and Adrienne Barbeau are among the voice talents.

Wheeler coined the term “black hole” in 1967 for the corpse of a massive star after it went supernova: hole because its mass punched a hole in space-time, black because it sucked in all available light. Wheeler also gave a name to a central theorem about black holes — that we can only observe their mass, angular momentum and electric charge — by quipping, “Black holes have no hair.”

Wheeler was an accomplished theoretical physicist, who participated in the development of the hydrogen bomb, our current understanding of astrophysics and many other topics. A member of the Princeton faculty from 1938-1976 (I switched majors during his last year), Wheeler taught for awhile at the University of Texas before returning to Princeton as professor emeritus.

There are plenty of stories in the ‘Net about Wheeler, but to get a flavor of the man’s personality, here are two exceptional links: The Daily Princetonian‘s obituary and a memoir at Cosmic Variance, written by Daniel Holz (Princeton ’92), who unlike me actually got to work with Wheeler.
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* I’m dating myself here. Palmer Lab is now part of the Frist Campus Center, external shots of which appear in the TV show, House M.D., as the fictitious Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.