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STEAM DREAM Xiao long bao (steamer of dumplings) is like Peking ravioli with super-juicy insides.
Photo by Brook Griffin.

Taiwan’s culinary situation is as wonderfully confused as its history and politics. It’s part of China, but it is not. Over the past century, Taiwan/Formosa has spent most of its time as a colony of Japan; the second-most time as part of China, but outside the control of the government of China; and the third-most time as the recognized government of China, without actually governing anything on the mainland. For 30,000 years, there were no Han Chinese in Taiwan. Today, they outnumber the indigenous population.

I started tracking these changes when a helpful reader, Ju Chien Hsu, e-mailed me some pointers after I reviewed one of the first Taiwanese restaurants in Chinatown, 13 years ago. “You must try the Crispy Smelled Bean Curd,” she wrote. “This is uniquely Taiwanese and definitely an acquired taste. (I consider tofu to be the cheese of Chinese cuisine; think of this as one of the rank ones.)” All these years later, I finally found a restaurant that featured the dish on an English-language menu, and took advantage of the suggestion. (Although Jo Jo Taipei has translated almost everything, there is a little blackboard with about six specials in Chinese. Once we ordered enough exotic food, our excellent waitress attempted to explain what they were.)

Each table at Jo Jo Taipei starts with a small dish of Spanish peanuts, and another of a sweet-hot lightly pickled salad, mostly cabbage. Then a waitress comes with a tray of potential appetizers.

Spiritualized know how to bring their aural soundscapes alive in real time and space. Add strobe lights, psychedelic shapes, and an audience dancing as one and you have the perfect night out. (Click here to read the full review.)

Spiritualized
July 30, 2008 at the Roxy
Photos: Derek Kouyoumijian

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Thanks to the Olympics, the world’s attention is trained as it never has been before on China, the superpower that many believe will economically and politically dominate the 21st century, just as the United States dominated the 20th. For those, such as myself, with deep misgivings about what this international transformation of power and influence will entail, the plight of Tibet — its people, its environment, its religious and cultural traditions — provides a sobering lesson in reality.

It is difficult to imagine an American — perhaps any Westerner — with a greater sympathy for, and understanding of, Tibet than scholar-activist Robert Thurman, a Columbia University professor who also happens to be the first American ever to be ordained a Buddhist monk. Presiding over Thurman’s ordination was the Dalai Lama, then as now the spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet, who has lived in exile for the past 49 years, following a failed uprising against the Chinese, who entered the nation in the 1950s.

Thurman’s most recent book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters (Atria/Beyond Words), is the fruit of a 45-year-long friendship between the two men. A week before the beginning of the Olympics, I spent an hour on the phone with Thurman discussing intersecting issues that concern China, Tibet, and the world. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

When you speak, can readers assume that you are speaking for the Dalai Lama?
Not precisely. I quote the Dalai Lama frequently to support many of my points. I also have other inspirations. I want him to have plausible deniability in terms of his formal relations with the Chinese. The Chinese, however, do not seem interested in negotiation. They like to preach and to scold — it is hard to get a word in edgewise. My aim is to explain to people what the Dalai Lama wants without making the Dalai Lama responsible for my explanation. For example, take the case of [the Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China] Hu Jintao. When I say that the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu would nominate Hu Jintao for a Nobel Peace Prize if he or any other Chinese leader had the balls to stop acting like a 19th-century imperial power or a 20th-century superpower wannabe, I am explaining a course of action that would quite naturally result if the Chinese began acting in a humane way and granted the Tibetan people autonomy. I’m suggesting what the Dalai Lama might do, could do, and what would follow.

Most of the job-related fears that keep journalists up at night are relatively mundane. We worry about getting scooped, making factual errors, pissing off the occasional source or story subject. But on rare occasions, a more ominous scenario presents itself — namely, the possibility that our reporting could cause actual harm to someone we cover.

In a grim front-page piece published in the Sunday, August 3, edition of the Boston Globe, columnist Kevin Cullen wrestled with just this concern. Cullen’s subject was the death of Rakan Hassan, a 14-year-old Iraqi boy who was brought to Boston for medical treatment in 2005, after a mistaken attack by US soldiers killed his parents and left him paralyzed.

Cullen had written about Hassan before, in a series of stories that detailed his evacuation from Iraq, recuperation at Massachusetts General and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospitals, and return to his home city of Mosul. Those pieces — published in 2006, before Cullen was tapped as a metro columnist — were models of great feature writing: highly readable, packed with evocative detail, touching but never maudlin.

This story was different. Hassan, Cullen told his readers, had been killed earlier this summer, in a bomb blast at his family’s home. As the story progressed, Cullen explored whether Hassan’s Boston caretakers should have allowed him to return to Iraq — and whether the Globe’s coverage of Hassan’s story might have somehow led to his death.

“All of us who cared about this boy, who loved this boy, are left to wonder: did we do something, however unwittingly, that got him killed?” Cullen wrote. “Did somebody somehow read Rakan’s story, maybe online, and set out to kill him and his family, to prove that anybody who takes sweets or help or anything from the Americans is a collaborator who shall die the death of an infidel?”

After mentioning other potential factors that may have made Hassan a target (his treatment by US Army physicians stationed in Iraq; his brother-in-law’s security job with the Iraqi government), Cullen concluded that the motivations of Hassan’s killers might never be known. But then, a few paragraphs later, he found himself returning to the question: “Would he still be alive if I didn’t write about him? If Michele McDonald’s beautiful photos of him never appeared in this newspaper?”

Photo illustration by K. Banks.

When the 21st century is old enough to support a sense of historical perspective, the date 8/8/08 may well be more significant than 9/11. The Olympic Games, which begin today, mark China’s modern coming of age.

“Modern” is an important qualification. As the planet’s oldest civilization with a recognizable sense of continuity, China has seen glory before. Gunpowder, paper, printing, and the compass were all products of its ancient genius. But for much of modern history, China was a nation on the margins: misunderstood and discounted, shamelessly exploited by Western powers and brutally pillaged by the Japanese.

Chairman Mao Zedong changed that — though it takes a strong constitution to stomach the murderous nature of his achievement.

Mao brought China neither peace nor prosperity. His Soviet-inspired agricultural policies led to famine; his Cultural Revolution transformed the country into a massive concentration camp. Median estimates of the total number dead as a result of Mao’s will and whim float around 50 million — give or take 10 million. Whatever the body count, most historians agree that Mao was the greatest mass murderer of all time.

It was Mao’s perverse achievement to forge in the smithy of the ancient Chinese soul the makings of a reconstituted superpower. Whether the nation’s ascendancy is because of Mao or in spite of him is almost irrelevant. The DNA is too tight to unravel, the duality too synthesized to deconstruct. Mao, or a version of him, is China. China, in some manifestation, is Mao. Mao’s embalmed corpse on display under glass in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square taps into the Confucian ideal of ancestor reverence, and yet also transcends it. Mao, the great helmsman, washes all other ancestors with his wake.

The cult of Mao is a form of zombie politics; it is part of the voodoo employed by the shrewd, sophisticated bureaucrats who command the Middle Kingdom. They are, by Mao’s standards, faceless. The art of ruling the world’s most populous nation is to be one of a crowd. (During the terror of the Cultural Revolution, only Mao’s favor could save one from the chaos; to survive, the individual had to melt into the mob. Its memory disciplines the masses.)

China today is a dragon with a capitalist head and a communist heart. It is a living, breathing, thriving contradiction. Because the dragon is rising (the metaphor is no less apt because it is melodramatic), its momentum tends to mask its weak spots.

Illustration by Chad Crowe.

For the next month, self-important columnists will station themselves in Beijing and argue over which country established itself as the world’s biggest sporting superpower this summer — the United States, China, or maybe even Russia.

But — news flash — the contest is already over. The winner is (drum roll, please) . . . Spain. This surprise sporting development tells us something about the diminishing role of the Olympic Games in the modern sports world, the power shift going on in Europe, and even something about the state of the current presidential campaign.

True, Spain won’t win all that many medals at the upcoming Games — but that’s beside the point. Despite all the hype about to smother the planet like a Beijing smog cloud, the Olympics will soon be unmasked as the overrated spectacle it is — one that is also long past its modern heyday, which occurred in an era when there were few other international competitions.

Today, of course, is much different. In terms of the intensity of worldwide interest, the Olympics pale in comparison with such events as soccer’s World Cup, and even the world cups for cricket and rugby. In the US, the Olympics do draw decent ratings, but mostly from a non-traditional-sports-fan demographic (i.e., women), attracted to both the “up close and personal” network portraits of the athletes and the focus on events that seem less physical than conventional sports (i.e., gymnastics).

But this year, even the patience of traditional US Olympics fans will be tested. Because of the 12-hour time difference between Beijing and the East Coast, most of the winners will be known via the Internet long before the events themselves are actually telecast here. Meanwhile, the audiences for any network television event are diminishing by the year — thanks to competition from the Web, cable, and other outlets.

So, even if the Chinese emerge as the upstart athletic power they have been quietly boasting they are, or the US once again fends off all challengers, fewer are likely to care than ever before — outside of China, of course.

A new armada
On the other hand, the Spanish have already won this summer’s triple crown, a feat that hardly raised a flicker of interest in the States, but that in many other parts of the world counted for a lot more than a bushel-full of Olympic hardware.

With Beijing 2008 finally at hand, China’s Tibetan occupation remains Hollywood’s cause célèbre. And why wouldn’t it be? Which other oppressed minority has the Beastie Boys, Michael Stipe, and Richard Gere as spokespeople, and a spiritual leader who’s played Lollapalooza?

But all this focus on Tibet sells Beijing short in the Nasty Oppression Global Standings. Under Paramount Leader Hu Jintao’s big, secure tent, there’s room for all of China’s recognized minorities, dissidents, journalists, unapproved religions, and trade unionists to have their land and resources encroached upon and their spirits, souls, and possessions (as well as fingers) crushed! Wielding the catch-all charges of splittism, organizing and leading a counterrevolutionary group, and illegally providing state secrets (a handy one for those nosy journalists), Dai Lo (that’s “Big Brother” in Cantonese) has effectively sidelined all critics of the party. (If the various crimes and statutes are too confusing, just remember the maxim that guides lawful Chinese citizens: Hu’s Your Daddy.)

Though Beijing’s enemies — at least those who haven’t been bred out of existence through intermarriage with China’s Han majority — are way too numerous to list, consider the following four non-Tibetan religious, ethnic, and intellectual minorities a sort of Olympic qualifying heat. In order to advance Beijing’s “Harmonious Society” in preparation for the 2008 Games, members of these groups have been locked up, exiled, or have disappeared altogether. Enjoy the synchronized swimming!

Uighurs
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) contains China’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal. To meet mounting Chinese energy demand, Beijing’s building an 1100-mile pipeline to funnel natural gas from both the XUAR and its energy-rich Central Asian neighbors Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

The pipeline and attendant urbanization of Xinjiang are tied to the Western Development Strategy, a Chinese government plan to move millions of Han Chinese (who make up 92 percent of China’s estimated 1.3 billion people) to Xinjiang. The Han have claimed the bulk of the jobs extracting the area’s resources. Thus, much like their Tibetan neighbors, the native Turkic Muslim Uighur minority has been marginalized in their own homeland.

As it does with other minority areas, Beijing ostensibly treats Xinjiang as an autonomous region. Uighurs can worship in state-approved Mosques and become Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members. But when Uighurs second-guess Beijing, they are quickly reprimanded. Rebiya Kadeer, a former high-ranking party member who questioned the income disparity between Uighurs and Hans, was charged with sharing state secrets for mailing newspaper clips to her exiled husband in the United States. After serving six years, Kadeer was allowed — as a condition of Condoleezza Rice’s 2005 state visit to China — to join her husband in Washington, DC. After her release, however, Beijing locked up two of Kadeer’s sons on trumped-up charges. They are hardly alone. In 2004, Uighur journalist Nurmuhemmet Yasin received a 10-year prison sentence for inciting separatism. His transgression? Writing a short story about a caged bird that yearns for freedom.

The 2004 United States Olympic basketball team featured such high-priced NBA pros as Tim Duncan and Allen Iverson — but barely limped to a bronze medal by beating Lithuania. The vaunted ’08 squad, meanwhile — featuring Kobe Bryant (who couldn’t play in ’04 thanks to his since-dismissed rape trial) and LeBron James — looks like it might be poised to suffer a similar indignity: they recently only eked a win against an Australian team that had its best guy resting on the bench.

Then there’s the Jamaican bobsled team, who, in the 1988 Calgary Winter Games, didn't even finish a run to officially qualify — the only team out of 26 nations to DQ. They became the darlings of the Games, and their story was made into a Disney flick starring John Candy. (Er, you win some, you lose some.)

Point being, sometimes we’d rather root for the unknowns, the underdogs, and the uniques than the professional jerks who are only competing to sweeten their endorsement deals. Here, then, in honor of China’s love for the auspicious number eight (the Beijing games are to kick off this Friday, August 8, 2008, at 8:08:08 pm), are eight athletes from around the world you may or may not have heard of.

MA LIN, CHINA, TABLE TENNIS
“Boring, dry, and extremely effective,” Ma’s official bio describes his style of play. Uh, whatever happened to “Swifter, Higher, Stronger?” No matter. Ma, who joined the Chinese national team 14 years ago (at age 14), is a ruthless competitor. He “isn’t trying to please a crowd,” he’s just gunning for a win. We still think we could beat him at beer pong after a few keg cups of Milwaukee’s Best.

LUMINIŢA DINU, ROMANIA, HANDBALL
Dinu, whose name means “little light,” is a blindingly popular figure in Romanian handball. Indeed, she’s considered the greatest goalkeeper in that country’s history. But don’t take our word for it — consider the following news account: “Două dintre componentele de bază ale echipei naţionale de handbal feminin a României, portarul Luminiţa Huţupan Dinu şi pivotul Ionela Gâlcă Stanca, nu au fost convocate în lotul tricolorelor pentru returul cu Islanda, din barajul de calificare la Campionatul European 2008.” (We’re assuming you speak Romanian.)

RICHARD “STUBBY” CLAPP, CANADA, BASEBALL
This is probably Olympic baseball’s last stand. The International Olympic Committee has voted to remove the sport from the 2012 London games. Still, the Washington Post reports, “players and USA Baseball officials are optimistic that a clean, competitive tournament in Beijing will help to convince the IOC that the sport holds valuable global interest and deserves to be included in future Olympics.” Rather than the Americans, though, it may actually be the Canadians who change people’s minds. Make that one Canadian — if a 35-year-old veteran of the Edmonton Cracker-Cats with a name like Stubby Clapp can’t save Olympic baseball, no one can.

Facebook follies
I’m still chuckling to myself thinking about how true the “Not-So-Pretty Facebook” article (News and Features, July 18) rang. Seriously, why are we friending people on this medium that we barely knew in high school, or maybe didn’t even like? And why the need to broadcast every last feeling, thought, meal ate, song heard, and heartbreak to our current status?

It’s absurd, and yet when I log onto Facebook in the morning before I start my day, it feels like walking into a big party where I know everyone there. It’s also a fun distraction, but there is a balance to be achieved, of course, between “tastemaking” and oversharing.

Put in its proper place (I’m not including the time I couldn’t sleep and was up at 4 am adding flair to my profile), at this point, I’d rather live with Facebook than without! Thanks for all the truisms and the Friday laugh.
Rachel Lombardo
Manchester-by-the-Sea

It seems Sharon Steel’s issues are not with Facebook, but with her own high school–esque insecurities. While everyone would agree that Facebook is a gossip fest, it seems she dedicates entirely too much time and thought to her social-networking-site presence.

I’ve never stressed over what people would think of me based on my profiles, even when my psycho older sister and my former boss added me as a friend. My privacy levels are set so that potential employers can’t search for me on either site, but I still posted the pictures of me in a pink cowboy hat at the recent Gay Pride parade! These sites are for fun and keeping in touch with faraway friends, a point the author seems to have forgotten. I read the article a few times looking for a hint of sarcasm but didn’t find any; I’m hoping Ms. Steel exaggerated her Facebook woes to make a better story.

There are more legitimate concerns about Facebook, a great example being their creepy online tracking system that posted what you purchased from certain Web sites. I was none too happy to be a member of a site that employed a 1984 Big Brother marketing feature. It was highly protested and I believe it has been removed, but who knows what they’ll come up with next?
Theresa Condito
Somerville

I read your Facebook article with interest, but it seemed overblown to me. Folks like Emily Gould and Julia Allison would be overwrought oversharers with or without the Internet. And people who lament over Internet insecurities probably are insecure in other aspects of life, too.

Greetings, Olympic sports fans! You are out there, aren’t you? NBC Universal sure hopes you are. Because if you aren’t, and you decide to spend the next three weeks watching anything except the hammer-throw quarterfinals, heat six of the women’s 4-x-400 relay, and profiles of the Hungarian dressage team, there are going to be some TV executives committing suicide. Well, assisted suicide, maybe. If you’re a Nielsen viewer, there might even be a camera in your house — and if it catches you switching to Greatest American Dog during the trampoline semifinal, an animatronic chain will yank a pin from a grenade crammed in the mouth of whichever NBC marketing executive promised a 17 share to the suits upstairs at 30 Rock.

So, lives are in your hands. No one is telling you what to do, but think twice before you turn on Don’t Forget the Lyrics!, or any other non-Olympic programming for that matter, next week. Besides, it’s not like the Olympics are completely boring. True, the actual sporting competitions have lately taken a back seat, drama-wise, to the question of whether terrorists will strike during the Games, or whether the budget can be managed by the IOC without two dollars out of every three ending up in mysterious accounts in Antigua, or whether Chinese guards will bayonet free-Tibet protesters along the torch route, or, indeed, whether NBC will be felled by yet another disappointing ratings showing. But that’s not to say the athletes aren’t providing some sordid entertainment themselves.

In fact, just like regular athletes, Olympians frequently rack up ugly arrests. Who can forget these anti-heroes of sports-crime?

The lover’s lane rapist
This was a recent one, actually. Alvin Henry was a one-time Olympic sprinter, a New Yorker who ran for Trinidad and Tobago. He went to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney on the T&T 4-x-100 team, but never actually ran in the Games. He returned to America, however, and did some running there. This past month, Henry was arrested 16 days after a rape in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, when the victim identified him while riding around the park with police. Henry had allegedly raped the woman at gunpoint and was a suspect in numerous other sexual assaults dating back to 2003. The unknown serial rapist had been called the “Lover’s Lane Rapist” because he frequently targeted women he had seen having sex with their boyfriends in the park — he told one of the victims he had taped her in the act. “I knew something wasn’t right with him,” Henry’s cousin told New York papers.

FROM General Administration of Press and Publication, Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China

TO All organs of the National Press

8.8.08

Greetings, faithful steward of information!

On this auspicious day, this day of mighty augury, replete with the promise of the lucky number “8,” we commence the noble proceedings that will most certainly not be remembered by all the world as the Clusterfuck Olympics, Worst Idea Ever, Historic Environmental/Sporting Disaster, etc.

Beijing is ready! The air sparkles with asbestos crystals, mighty industrial hoses are sluicing the public toilets, and in the Olympic Village, the apartment buildings that fell down last night have already been rebuilt. All dissent has now been neutralized! Four million pollution-producing vehicles have been impounded. The embargo against hair-dryer use continues to be energetically enforced. And the People’s Internet remains secure — the glorious firewall whose protective coils encircle our Republic like those of the celestial dragon Tianlong will never be breached, never!

What, you ask, can you do? What is your part in this magnificent popular effort? Read this handout carefully, comrade. Read it again, even more carefully. As the “eyes of the world” turn upon China, you have an important role to play! “No news is good news,” says the American. He is incorrect. All news is good news, and the Republic looks to you, as a state-approved news propagator, to draw the attention of our international guests to the famous “silver lining.”

No doubt by now it has not rained upon the opening ceremonies, drowning the occasion in sulphurous yellow-dog precipitation that raises a strange foam upon the scalp. Thanks to the preventive actions of our farseeing Weather Modification Program, whose stirring and masculine arsenal of silver-iodide rockets already will have been fired into the looming clouds to “empty” them, such an eventuality will assuredly have been avoided!

But if not, it will be your job as a journalist/news outlet to emphasize the distinctively Chinese character of the ensuing downpour — its plum-scented richness and softness, and its hygienic properties! The choreographed appearance of 80,000 government-issue umbrellas will also be splendid beyond imagining. All press officers have been issued with a copy of “Rain,” by our great seventh-century poet To Fu: “Bright drops descend/Lacing with jewels my lonely pomegranate bush./ Generous heavens,/ Send this old man a bride, will you? Damn!” For your convenience, the poem has been translated into 47 languages.

Photo by Sara Faith Alterman.

BEIJING — On television images and in photographs, Beijing looks ready for the surge of athletes, government officials, VIPs, and gazillion visitors who are about to cover this city like white on Olympic rice. The international media has fractiously scrutinized China’s capital for the past few years, allowing the Western world to look over Beijing’s shoulders as the city prepared to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. We watched as it put the finishing touches on state-of-the-art athletic facilities; fought air pollution; and equipped taxi drivers, hospitality workers, and public servants with the English skills they’ll need to communicate with the thousands of foreigners who will be flitting about Beijing during the month of August.

Except . . . not.

I’ve been living in Beijing since the beginning of July, covering the mad month-long preamble to the Games. My experience has been the polar opposite of what I had read and seen in news stories about how the Chinese are ready and willing to accommodate the Olympic athletes, coaches, spectators, media, and volunteers. How silly of me. I should have known that a country that vehemently denied SARS and tried to poison our pets and children might be a little less than forthcoming about the asinine, algae-scented shitshow that is the 2008 Olympics.

Oh, Beijing. You’re like the ex-boyfriend that I wanted so badly to love, but just couldn’t bring myself to face in the morning, once the booze wore off. I wish I could break it off with you (and go home), but I’ve vowed to stick it out, so I’m trying to make the best of it. Really, I am. But you lied to me, Beijing, and that hurts. It hurts my heart, and it hurts my pride. And it hurts my tender lungs and sinus cavities, too.

Hack attack
I have literally seen the sun once since I have been here, and not because it’s been rainy, or cloudy, or because I sleep off my one-dollar-draft-beer hangovers until the following evening. The gray haze that hangs over the city like a burdened conscience is the result of years of pollutants being wafted to the sky, tits to the wind. Hacking up black mystery gunk has become an accepted part of my daily routine, and I’ve grown to actually find a cathartic satisfaction in hawking a chunky loog — though I’m not sure that Olympic athletes will find that as hilarious as I do. How any of the outdoor competitors will complete their events without developing a nasty case of emphysema in the process I’m not entirely sure. I can’t even walk three blocks without sputtering and wheezing like a dying engine.

The inside of the Silhouette Lounge in Allston is a bit like a pinball machine: it’s a tiny space packed with an abundance of competing sensory stimulants. There’s the clacking sound of a billiard ball in the corner, the alluring lights of the ever-popular erotic-photo-hunt machine, the buttery scent of popcorn, the flash of neon message boards, which seem to display only run-on sentences. And there are 10 televisions of various sizes and qualities (one is dead) that occupy every inch of wall near the ceiling, simultaneously blasting sports games, Keno numbers, and late-night news.

A few months ago, the Silhouette added its 10th TV, a flat-screen vertical set provided by Somerville-based company BarCast, which is described on its Web site as “an interactive network of high-def flat-panel displays.” According to Evan Steiner, BarCast’s vice-president of business development, it’s just one of 55 Boston watering holes that the company has attracted since January.

“It’s all about interactivity,” says Steiner, on the phone from Somerville. “It’s a new medium. You can text the screen and it’ll show up in all bars across the Boston network. It’s sort of the same as the mentality behind JumboTron screens at sporting events,” he says, meaning that just as you might glance up at the screen at Fenway and see yourself or a friend, you can now glance up at a bar and see you or your friend’s text message (or blurry texted photo) — with the occasional advertisement in between. This pays BarCast’s bills, so they’re able to place their screens above beer taps around town at no cost to either the bar or the company.

The Silhouette is one of many drinking institutions around town that Steiner and his partners deemed “young, hip,” and BarCast-worthy. On a recent, rain-soaked Tuesday night, a group of twentysomethings passing a pitcher of PBR around a booth is momentarily mesmerized by a game called Jumbly, which involves assembling words from disassembled letters as they float across the screen. Suddenly, the broadcast transitions — rather unsmoothly — to an ad for Brubaker (a woman shown from behind, with a bottle of the beer resting snugly in her thong strap), then to a photo of a thin woman in a tight green tank top and a BarCast hat, whose image recurs throughout the evening.