who doesn't love Jackie Chan?

i've always been a fan. and he seems like a swell guy too.

Chan said a portion of profits from his businesses a clothing label, fitness clubs, restaurants and a line of cookies go to charity.

As a poor boy attending the Beijing Opera School, he recalled receiving food, clothes and other gifts from the Red Cross and a priest, who asked him to help less fortunate children when he grew up.

Chan's early stuff is still my favorite (Drunken Master, Rumble in the Bronx), but i really love the stuff he did with Owen Wilson too (the Shanghai series).


Jackie Chan's latest movie, The Myth

utter_scoundrel got me a copy of Chan's autobiography signed. i guess that makes me a geek.

: D

let this be an end to the NBA ~

okay, i'm only a wee bit behind at the half-mark point for the 50bookchallenge. but for rest of the year i refuse to pick up anymore National Book Award winners. The March was a disaster and Middle Passage was absurd.

no. 26 ~ Middle Passage by charles johnson ~ i have no idea what this book was "about". i felt like it actually turned the horrors of the slave trade into a cheap adventure novel. the writing was uneven at best and full of what felt like anachronisms in 1830. and then there's that whole "god" in the hull he meets and describes as taking the form of his father (a runaway slave) but covered in writhing creatures, blah blah blah (to no purpose whatsoever).

That is what I mostly saw, and for the life of me I could no more separate the two, desering father and divine monster, than I could sort wave from sea. Nor something more phantasmal that forever confused my lineage as a marginalized American colored man.

what? i almost threw the book right there and then, but having only thirty pages to go, finished it (with immense disgust).this one was a big loser.

: o p

next up i have a choice between two more sailing books or i can go find something else. i'm kinda seasick at the moment, frankly, so i may have to dig up something fresh (and on land) in the interim.

( my 50bookchallenge list thus far )