Hi, Jack!

I know I’ve mentioned my old junior college schoolmate Jack, who plays with a band at Wala Wala on Friday nights. Turns out EIC has a website, made with a Mac, no less. It’s nothing to look at, but if you’re one of those swooning fans (and I know you’re out there), you might find the gig guide and photos useful.

I got the link from SarongPartyFrens.

I cried when I read The Stank Prank:

I’m done! Time to shut the lights off, lock up, dash home and shower, because after all the running around the office I smell like a Frenchman. And after handling all those fruity air fresheners, I smell like a Frenchman gigolo who spent a weekend servicing the Care Bears.

The only reason Neil hasn’t been pranked yet is that I live in the same flat. Otherwise…!

I got the link from lies.com.

Tomorrow marks National Day in China, and everyone is supposed to get seven days off work. Good, eh?

But. The actual number of holidays the government has thoughtfully provided is three — five, when you include the weekend. In order to encourage domestic tourism, they bump up the break to seven days, but do not actually give anyone extra days off. We have to work Saturday and Sunday next week to make up for the extra days they have thoughtfully forced on me to stay home. That means eight days of work without a break, two weeks after my trip when I worked for 15 consecutive days.

I’m lucky, though, other people have been instructed to report for work for 12 straight days through this Golden Week. And I’ve heard of others who’ve worked every day for a month.

The WHO says that human-to-human transmission of bird flu (H5N1 avian influenza) is now a real possibility, the last two cases being part of a family cluster.

Another book I scored in Shenzhen is Adorable Sock Dolls to Make & Love, picked up ostensibly because, “My sock puppets never looked that good.” Neil put up with my ooh’ing and aah’ing over the baby buddies, farmyard chicken, and moose all weekend (the baby rabbits look like peanut M&Ms with ears, and are cute in their own dismembered way).

You wouldn’t know it to look a me these days, but I was quite crafty in my Before-I-Discovered-I-Was-Deathly-Allergic-To-Glue time. One of my favourite books at my grandfather’s was a Fifties publication of activities and things to make for boys (I think I’ve mentioned this book in an old post that has since been assigned to languish in my private archives). I was itching to make myself a soapbox racer and terrorise the neighbourhood, but Singapore doesn’t make soapboxes easily available to seven-year old children (hell, they don’t make soapboxes easily available to grown adults, but that’s another post).

I made a castle out of cardboard once. It kind of fell apart after a day or so, since I used the wrong kind of cardboard, but the sense of achievement is still keenly felt.

I knitted (a little), I crocheted, I cross-stitched, I hooked rugs, I made paper flowers (this was a forced project at school, but I came to like it), I made friendship bracelets out of embroidery thread, I did all sorts of things known as ‘handicraft’. And those sock puppets made of outgrown school socks, of course.

(Sewing for Home Economics is an entirely different matter. It’s not craft, it’s Torture for the Clumsy.)

These days, I consider myself crafty if I hand write a postcard.

So, I’d like to revive my old penchant for making stuff and try to make sock dolls. I, however, have a few questions.

1. What the fuck is carpet thread?
2. If I can’t find carpet thread, what is a reasonable alternative?
3. Will I have a hope in hell of finding normal looking socks (crew and ankle in different colours, in varying sizes) in Xiamen, and not those thin nylon pieces of crap they sell in most places?

China Slams Taiwan Threat to Attack Shanghai:

Thousands of protesters marched through Taipei on Saturday, urging the government to scrap the planned weapons package that they said would trigger an arms race with China and squeeze social welfare.

“If you attack me with 100 missiles, I will at least attack you with 50. If you attack Taipei and Kaohsiung, I will attack Shanghai,” Yu said in a speech before the protest.

“If we have such counter-strike capability today, Taiwan is safe,” he said in comments broadcast on cable news networks.

I reckon it’ll be time to plan a holiday outside China pretty damn soon. No one wants an arms race. Taiwan and China are so much better off preserving the status quo, but no, political leaders have to play this game of chicken.

Triple J’s Jay and The Doctor are broadcasting the remainder of their show, right now, from the pub. This is a result of a dice game they’ve been playing all afternoon.

Internet radio rocks.

Neil will breathe easy as long as they don’t reduce the serving size of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs.

Phil Spector Compares LA Prosecutor to Hitler:

Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Spector criticized the prosecutor’s decision to seek a grand jury indictment, saying: “The actions of the Hitler-like district attorney and his storm trooper henchmen are reprehensible, unconscionable and despicable.”

Godwin’s Law says he’s lost the argument. Send him to jail!

Neil calls this “that yoghurt thing you’re doing”. I must claim not to be flexibly impaired, for a start. I was a gymnast back in the day, I’ll have you know. The fact that I have the grace of a drunk cocker spaniel puppy shouldn’t count for anything. I have long limbs and hyper-extended joints (ask anyone who knows me about my scary elbows). However, the years have not been kind, and in Neil’s words, I’m falling apart.

I tell him at least once a day how he’s stinky, so I guess we’re even.

I picked up Yoga for Wimps while I was in Shenzhen, fully intending to use it. Since I am very prone to injury, going straight into a yoga class might not be the best for me. Also, using a book at home is free, and a yoga class very normally is not. So I started doing wimpy yoga on Saturday (my favourite so far is the ‘dead bug pose’), and the first thing I noticed is how stiff my hamstring muscles are.

I’d like to use Neil’s Armani ties in the exercises, but strangely enough, he said no. What kind of supportive boyfriend is he, I ask you?

Yoghurt has so many benefits.

Some idiot comment spammer has been trying to flood my comments. I activated the Three Strikes plugin and I hope it’s good enough to keep the bulk of the fuckers out of my comment moderation queue.

(I never thought I’d see the day where I’d have to deal with comment spam.)

Vaccine Planned for Sheep, Cow Emissions:

A vaccine against three species of microbe which produce methane in sheeps’ stomachs reduced methane belches by eight percent in a 13-hour test.

Inquiring minds want to know if human trials are forthcoming.

From Joe Martin’s abso-frickin-hilarious comic strip, Cats with Hands, this is Understanding and Interpreting the Cat Psyche Week:

• Knows you’re going on a trip…
• He knows you want to take him to the vet
• Brushing another pet’s hair
• The vacuum cleaner
• Stranger in the house
• Waiting for the door to open…

• had dinner and ‘played’ a Xiamen traditional dice game (bo bing is a game of chance using six dice)
• had an after dinner snack of minestrone soup at Tutto Bene
• went to the Trance Club (and after that, everything is a mostly a blur that I don’t remember)
• watched The Passion of the Christ (wow, sure makes one dislike organised religion and people in general — what evil can men do and all that)
• watched Barbershop (meh)
• watched The Butterfly Effect (new respect for Ashton whatshisname in this Hollywood-ified version of Donnie Darko)
• had dinner at The House
• received some Russian dolls from some real Russian dolls (such sweethearts)

I’m getting ready to make a bunch of Christmas cards (I also want to continue my long-standing tradition — if two years count as long — of making up an advent calendar) this year. They will be cheap, colourful, and look as though a five-year old has been allowed into a magazine archive with a pair of scissors and paper glue. And crayons. They will not be collector’s items and your nearest and dearest will think you have an insane online pal.

If anyone wants one (and how could you turn this irresistable offer down), send me your name and snail mail address through my ever-present contact form.

I’m one of those people who moved to Xiamen and pretty much went nowhere. For one thing, I didn’t have a job, so I had no money. An afternoon spent in Quanzhou, a mere bus ride away, doesn’t really count.

Being told I was going to be travelling around China for two weeks as part of my job was kind of exciting. Two weeks! Cities I’d barely heard of! Now that is the way to see China, right? I’d get a real appreciation of what this country is really like.

I think part of what dulled my response to Hangzhou, supposedly a romantic city for its close proximity to Westlake, was the weather. It was smoggy and grey, with visibility rather low. I thought the traffic was somewhat crazy, although I’d be stuck to think of a single city in China where traffic isn’t. The especially annoying part was not being able to spend more than a few minutes at Westlake, where I was working and did not have any opportunity to see its famed beauty and tranquility. Apart from us, it did seem pretty quiet.

As we headed to Chongqing, we were told that it was the most populated city in the province. Since I took a walk around the town, I can confirm that there are a shitload of people there, many more than Xiamen. An underpass connecting two ends of a major road teemed with so much activity I thought if I went in, it would over-teem and it would burst. None of us could locate a liquor store, which, to some, was a mighty shame.

My memories of Chengdu include the bus trip out to the Giant Panda Breeding Research Facility, where we got to enthusiastically snap away at snoozing and playing pandas. Trishaws, a sight I’ve not seen since Singapore, were welcome, and most of the drivers I met seemed quite nice and willing to take 20RMB to drive me around and show me the town. Chengdu struck me as a city like any other city in China.

I’ll break here to mention that we were in Chongqing and Chengdu (in Sichuan province) just as the heavy rains were falling and the towns and villages flooding. We must have been on very high ground, as we saw nothing more than some rain.

Wenzhou and Zhengzhou were such dreary industrial cities that I can barely remember them at all. Wuhan, on the other hand, had the Eastlake, a rather pale replacement for Westlake. At least we got to spend some time there. The cheesy tourist attractions didn’t make it any better, unfortunately.

I would say the highlight for many on the trip was the time spent in Shanghai. I’d never been to Shanghai before, so I was looking forward to seeing if it was all it cracked up to be. It is, if you have a strong nose. I did not enjoy the pollution that seem to sit in the air, clogging up my sinuses and making me feel filthy. Sure, the shopping’s good, and the restaurants and bars plenty, but I’d trade that kind of lifestyle for clean lungs any day. I didn’t quit smoking to replace it with Shanghai pollution.

In the end, it must be said that for the colour and life of most of these cities, I was glad to come back to relatively peaceful and clean Xiamen. I never thought I’d say it, but it’s true — Xiamen might be one of the cleanest and best cities, environmentally, in China. Let’s hope they keep it up.

Mdvmhonpa suggests, in a comment, a reason for Chinese protests against Japan. I responded that China needs no momentous political decisions to be pissed off with Japan. For one thing, many Chinese people have never forgotten the insults of wars and invasions (see anger over the Yasukuni shrine). Second, Japanese come to China for orgies and are caught red-handed. A local rock-climbing bar turns Japanese visitors away because both China and Japan claim the Diaoyu Islands. And fourth:

Last December, Japan’s largest carmaker Toyota had to pull out two advertisements for its China-made sports utility vehicles following complaints that they were offensive.

One of the ads showed two stone lions, a popular cultural symbol, saluting and bowing to the company’s Land Cruiser Prado - an image which some Chinese said was a slight that had hurt their feelings.

Nine months later, Nippon Paint and ad agency Leo Burnett China ran into a similar controversy with an ad featuring two dragons entwined on the pillars of a Chinese pavilion. The ad depicted, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, how one of the dragons slipped down after the pillar was given a fresh coat of Nippon Paint.

International Advertising, a Chinese trade magazine, gave the ad top marks for creativity and said it illustrated the product’s quality ‘perfectly’.

But many readers and Internet users saw red, slamming the ad as an insult to the Chinese as the dragon is widely regarded as a symbol of China.

‘This is like a curse on us,’ said an angry posting on sina.com, where many readers saw the ad as another example of insensitive behaviour by a Japanese company.

China may regularly castigate The West for trying to keep them down, but never underestimate the amount of venom they store up for Japan.

Received a forwarded e-mail. Four .jpg attachments. They appear to be of a Chinese protest of some sort. How odd, I think. As I click on, I see a banner, held by two men, proclaiming, “Fuck Japanese!” The last photo is of a parent encouraging their child to join them in stomping on a Japanese flag.

I’m not sure why it was sent to me, and whether or not I’m seen as agreeing with the Chinese point of view regarding the historical and geographical clashes between the two countries.

Protest against some wrongdoings as much as you want, but I lose all respect for any protestor who would deface another country’s flag (or their own).

MH made too much noise,
He thought the rest of us were killjoys.
He wouldn’t go away,
Even though he didn’t pay,
We said, “You can’t get in on the action with the big boys.”

Inspired by the truly talented Jarmo’s TOAD.

White Shark Meal Makes History:

If the toothy Carcharodon carcharias, whose species inspired the movie “Jaws,” continues to eat and thrive, she would make history yet again by becoming the first ever great white to be kept successfully on display at a public aquarium.

In Jaws 2, the baby great white dies while in the tank, and its mommy comes looking for revenge. When will people learn?!