An interesting pair of news items today from the go-get-’em bulldog reporters over at Thanh Nien News, who never met a soft news story they couldn’t somehow make softer:

CKE Restaurants Inc. said Thursday that it signed an exclusive deal to open 25 of its Carl’s Jr. restaurants in Vietnam. The Vietnam agreement with the Mesa Group will see the first Carl’s Jr. restaurant open in Ho Chi Minh City in April.”

And in a related but equally mortifying development:

Subway, the U.S.-based sandwich-shop chain, plans to open its first store in Vietnam in August and is targeting 25 shops throughout the country by 2015 … The Milford, Connecticut-based company will adapt its standard menu to Vietnamese tastes.

Vietnam, bless its Stone-Age heart, has until now remained almost completely untainted by the culinary disease of Western-style fast food. That’s not to say the food here is disease free; nothing could be further from the truth — even the tap water is potentially deadly — but at least the local cuisine has nearly always been local — at least until the turn of the millennium. In 1999, the Philippines’ biggest hamburger broker, Jollibee, broke into the Vienamese market (signature dish: something called “Chicken Chickenrice,” which must have taken the marketing team a full focus group session and entire minutes of brainstorming to come up with). Around the same time, South Korean beef-’n'-bird joint Lotteria stormed the beaches. A few years later, in 2000, the world’s largest perpetrator of fast-food, U.S.-based Yum! Brands, muscled its fat ass into the room, after which a rash of KFCs and Pizza Huts broke out all over the country. Apart from that grease-spattered mob, however, Vietnam has been otherwise franchise-free. In fact, this may be the only country left in the world without a single Starbucks, which might go a long way toward explaining the mystifying lack of sullen, shaggy-haired, plaid-pants-wearing hipsters among the Vietnamese.

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times yesterday, writer David Farley explored the foodie scene in Saigon with Manhattan restaurateur and home boy Michael Huynh for that paper’s Asia-Pacific edition of its weekly Travel section. The money quote:

‘You like congealed pigs’ blood?’ my travel companion asked, pulling me over to a street cart in Ho Chi Minh City. Before I could answer, two bowls of chao, a rice porridge bobbing with slices of pork sausage and cubes of coagulated blood, were plopped in our hands.

In all fairness, the coagulated pig’s blood soup is not half bad.

In tangentially related news, the recently announced Ho Chi Minh City subway (a mythical public transit development not to be confused with the sandwich shop) is proceeding apace, with the first of six lines expected to be completed sometime shortly before all matter and space-time in the universe collapse into a infinitely dense, dimensionless singularity.

Somehow I managed to miss it last weekend in all the hubbub of our 20-person Vespa convoy to Mui Ne, but The New York Times on Sunday ran an article about Vietnam that made no mention at all of 1) the war, 2) communism, 3) rice fields or 4) the galloping local economy. Unusual enough by itself, but the article also made specific reference to lederhosen, dirndls and Bavaria. What could Vietnam possibly have in common with German culture, you ask, other than breathable air comprised of roughly 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 0.93% argon? According to the Times, that would be beer, as fine an answer as any I can think of.

Ho Chi Minh City is home to a handful of European-style microbreweries, most of which are centrally located in District 1 and some of which claim to brew their beer according to the Bavarian purity law known as the Reinheitsgebot. This trend took off in 2001 when the Hoa Vien Bräuhaus, which had previously been importing Pilsner Urquell, built a Euro-style brewery inside the restaurant with the help of experts from the Czech Republic. Other breweries followed, trying to tap into a domestic beer culture that stretches back at least to the 1890s (that’s when the Habeco brewery, now state run, was founded by French colonialists), was revitalized during the Vietnam War** in the 1960s, and currently produces more than 2 billion liters of beer a year.

I’ve been to the Hoa Vien Bräuhaus on Mac Dinh Chi Street, and I’ll admit to being somewhat less impressed than the author, but then maybe that’s because I was distracted from the beer by a plate of bratwursts that had clearly emerged from a tin of Vienna Sausages just moments before. I’ll give it another try and make sure I’ve eaten beforehand. I’ve not been to Nguyen Du Brauhof or the Lion Brewery & Restaurant (home of aforementioned lederhosen – on wall murals, luckily), but they’re now on my Must Visit list. I wonder what variety of beer goes best with grilled goat testicles? (Disclaimer: not a rhetorical question.)

**Whoops. Apparently I was wrong about there being no mention of the war — and me raving about it less than two paragraph ago.

Say what you will about in the downsides of living in a communist nation whose grasp of modernity operates roughly at the Pleistocene level, officials here know how to prioritize threats to the nation. Elsewhere in 21st-century reality, global leaders gnaw their nails down to the quick over whether the day’s terrorism threat level should be orange, ochre, or hot pink, and can’t sleep at night worrying over whether citizens with preexisting conditions will be able to afford tummy tucks. Here in Vietnam, wise leaders know exactly what the problems are, and they know just what to do about them:

New law could ban sensitive subjects at private schools

Newly drafted regulations released Tuesday aim to prohibit private universities from providing degrees in law, journalism and education, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training.

Having tired of the menace such subjects represent to orderly, Stone Age-era society, Vietnam officials have decided that the teaching of such deviant ideas should be squashed and their practitioners placed in leg irons. The obvious solution is that all higher ed should now be controlled by — cue Psycho shower scene music  — The Government.

Despite the rapid growth of higher education quality in the country, many shortcomings have been found, particularly in the process of establishing new schools. This has urged the National Assembly to put education under its supervision from this year.

In other news, production of stone axes and animal-hide loincloths reached record levels here in the first quarter of 2010.

I recently watched a TV documentary on the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which I feel certain the cool heads at the History Channel programmed as a way of diffusing the overblown panic gripping the world over the H1N1 outbreak by depicting just how bad it’s not. See how tens of millions of people succumbed to a seemingly innocuous viral contagion that drowns its victims in their own bloody phlegm? That’s exactly what isn’t going on in your neighborhood. Yet.

I managed not to throw myself off my fifth-floor balcony to preempt the inevitable end. But on my return to work earlier this week, I discovered others have not been so calm about the looming threat of the near-certain eradication of the human species. Last week one of the 4,000 students at my university was diagnosed with swine flu. Shortly afterward, a faculty member, a friend of mine in fact, was also labeled one of the Infected. Both were quickly snatched out of the school, tossed into a van and carted off to the local quarantine hospital, which, if you’ve ever seen a hospital in Vietnam, resembles a cross between The Island of Dr. Moreau and a Bangalore slum, only less hygienic. On the advice of Vietnam government health officials, the school initially insisted that all students and faculty who’d had contact with the two pariahs confine themselves to their homes until seven days had passed or the world ended, whichever came first. But after some consultation with, one supposes, health officials who actually understand the germ theory of disease, university officials reversed themselves and allowed the Almost-Infected to return to school.

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, therefore, the student population disappeared behind a deluge of cheap, completely useless surgical masks. Lecture rooms looked like casting calls for Scrubs. Hallways throbbed with youth who appeared to be en route to a late-era-Michael Jackson fan club convention. Faculty members awaited the inevitable call for all lecturers to don masks themselves, resigned to a week or more of dressing like a Halloween punchline.

Yet once again, logic, or at least a close substitute, prevailed. For reasons probably having more to do with public relations than modern medical enlightenment, RMIT International University has locked the doors and barricaded the entrance (literally) until the morning of Monday, August 3.* (Updated) It’s hard to complain about an extra-long weekend. But it’s also hard to imagine we won’t be here again in a week or two weeks or three. In the meantime, I see 28 Days Later is showing this evening. One good thing about global pandemics: they’re always entertaining.

RMIT Vietnam extends Saigon South closure to Monday 3 August

24/07/2009

RMIT International University Vietnam has decided to extend the temporary closure of its operations at Saigon South until Monday 3 August.

RMIT Vietnam’s President, Professor Merilyn Liddell, announced the measure today following an initial decision yesterday to close the campus until at least Monday 27 July.

“We have consulted further with local health authorities over the past day, and the good news is that the number of people so far affected by H1N1 has remained very small.

“The total of students confirmed to have this influenza remain at only three, with one staff member also diagnosed. We expect that this number may still rise in coming days, but we believe the quick action we have taken to curtail the spread of the virus will give us every chance of keeping the total number small.”

Professor Liddell said the decision to extend the closure for a further full week, to Monday 3 August, was taken to allow time to consider assessing whether or not the small outbreak has been fully contained.

“We believe it is sensible to continue our precautionary approach for a longer period, and the local health authorities agree with this approach.

“The early action we have taken to minimise the spread of H1N1 appears to have worked to this point, so we believe it’s prudent to continue this approach for a further seven days to provide the maximum opportunity to ensure all sources of potential infection are fully cleared from the premises.”

Professor Liddell said the university placed the highest priority on the health and safety of its students and staff.

The Saigon South campus will maintain a skeleton staff of essential personnel only during the coming week, and senior management will continue to monitor developments and advise students and staff of developments as necessary. General telephone calls will be diverted to the Hanoi campus, which remains open as usual.

“We are encouraging all of our students and staff to keep checking their emails and the RMIT Vietnam website for regular updates through the week, prior to the resumption of all classes from the morning of Monday 3 August,” Professor Liddell said.

“We know there will need to be some rescheduling of examinations and other student activities. Those affected will be advised of what they need to know during the coming week.

“We will be working to ensure that no students are disadvantaged by this temporary closure.”

Technology’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Each new advance seems to come with a factory-installed downside, just to keep the world from becoming too nice a place. It’s always been thus. Take fire, for example. Great for cooking, keeping warm, and keeping wolves out of the cave, but surprisingly unpleasant when applied directly to the skin, plus your hair smells like smoke all the time. The wheel? Ideal for carrying stuff around and getting quickly from point A to point B, but it also gave rise to the backseat driver and unicyclists. Nuclear power? Perfect for ending world wars in a hurry, but then there’s that inconvenient international arms proliferation thing and the ever-present possibility of species-wide extinction.

But few technologies have spawned as many drawbacks and foul consequences as the cell phone. Scientists talk about the possibility of us someday creating superintelligent robots who, if we’re not careful, will enslave us and turn us into bleating livestock. I say that day has quite clearly already arrived. People wonder how we got anything done before the arrival of instant and ubiquitous voice communication. The real question is how we manage to get anything done despite it. It used to be you could get by perfectly fine without a cell phone. Now – forget the debate over their usefulness – people look at you as if you’ve got a third leg growing out of your forehead if you tell them you don’t have one. You’re ostracized from society. “You don’t have a cell phone? How are you supposed to text message anyone?”

I’m not coming down on cellphone users. I’ve been using since 1998, and my most recent regular fix was coming from a Blackberry 8703e. For better or worse, Sprint does not provide service in Japan. So my Blackberry is gathering dust in a drawer at the moment. But back in the U.S., I could SMS with the best of them. Yet I also never crossed the line to the dark side, by which I mean yakking at top volume on my phone in public.

For many cell phone users, a short, quiet conversation is no conversation at all. For them to feel that they’re getting their technology’s worth, they have to share long, outrageously stupid conversations with not just their friend on the other end but with the entire room – or train, or movie theater, or restaurant, or bar, or elevator, as the case may be. This is not news to anyone who’s left their home in the past nine years, of course. What is news, however, is that there’s a solution available to us victims. Unfortunately it’s illegal. Technically.

The New York Times wrote yesterday about the growing black market for cell phone “jammers,” tiny, cheap devices that with the push of a button can shut down cell phone signals in a small area and silence those chatty Kathys.

The jamming technology works by sending out a radio signal so powerful that phones are overwhelmed and cannot communicate with cell towers. The range varies from several feet to several yards, and the devices cost from $50 to several hundred dollars. Larger models can be left on to create a no-call zone. Using the jammers is illegal in the United States. The radio frequencies used by cellphone carriers are protected, just like those used by television and radio broadcasters.”

The problem, according to some, is that it turns everyone’s cell phone into a temporary blinking paperweight, not just the abuser’s. Naturally, the Verizon spokespersons of the world are screaming bloody murder, as if civilization will collapse instantly if anyone, anywhere is kept from using their cellphone for even a moment. And what about emergencies, they insist? But you know what? That’s exactly how we got into this mess. (Remember the “phone in a bag” you kept in the car for “emergencies”?) I hate to break it to the good people at Sprint, but emergencies pre-date cell phones. We’ve been solving them just fine for millions of years. And as someone who’s recently been freed of his dependence on said technology, I can testify to the fact that my world has not yet crumbled into ashes.

Though people do look at me funny. Still, you can bet I’ll be asking Santa for one of these doodads this Christmas.