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July 05 If they're the sort of recruits you wantThen I've been teaching them all year. The Chinese says "懒人"俱乐部会员招募中… ("lǎnrén" jùlèbù huìyuán zhāomù zhōng…) which means, er, "'lazy person' club members are recruiting…"[1] It reminds me of the Naughty Pet Hospital in Beijing. There was me thinking that it must be Chinglish, but that was exactly what the Chinese said. I assume the sign is meant to be comical. Must be humour with Chinese characteristics. Notes. 1. Perhaps "Members are being recruited to the 'Lazy Person' Club" might be a little more accurate; or at least idiomatic in English. The varying viscosity of the InternetLike solid concrete out of a toothpaste tube. The quality of my connection to the Internet has been variable this week. I learnt yesterday that Language Log really was blocked the other day, although at the time I gave Nanny the benefit of the doubt and allowed for the possibility that the server was dead. MSN was out to lunch or barely in the office a few days ago. I couldn't get near GB from any angle via IE 7.0, but I could with FF3; not that that necessarily means anything. The connection to some sites has been abruptly dropped or, if it's maintained, then pages have been taking far longer to load than they normally would. Yet the next day, things have been back to normal. (Well, what passes for normal here.) Blogspot really is unblocked at the moment as I find by surfing it with IE 7.0. Actually, I should have realised this because the New Humanist Editor's blog, which is hosted by blogger, is inaccessible. When the whole of blogspot is blocked, everything is accessible via the proxy I've been using; but when that block is removed, other filters then seem to kick in. I'm not even certain why the NH Editor's blog should be being blocked because China has only featured on it once as far as I'm aware. It may be because of some connection, not undeserved, between humanism and human rights regardless of the specific content of the blog, though the imperium sericum holds no special place in the editor's attention. July 02 The pain; the painThe Oxford Murders. One day Frodo Baggins decided to go to Oxford to work with Caligula (and if you get that reference, you're at least as old as I am). When he arrived in Oxford, his landlady got murdered, which made him run around the town looking very alarmed or as if he'd got a spike stuck up his bottom. But though he looked like a startled hobbit, all the girls instantly wanted him, including the mad one who'd killed the landlady in the first place. Caligula, who thought he was so clever, couldn't tell Frodo what the third symbol in the series was, but he pretended that he knew. Then the man with the weird face crashed the bus full of involuntary organ donors. Inspector Morse might've been able to do something with this, but Frodo Baggins and Caligula should've stayed in Hobbiton and Rome. Just Add Water. No, just add acid, destroy the DVD and get awarded an OBE for services to the entertainment industry. Chaos Theory. An efficiency expert's day goes completely awry. His wife thinks he's been cheating on her, but as a consequence, he learns that she cheated on him. But it all ends happily – unless you paid to watch this at the cinema.
July 01 宫bao鸡丁Bāo, báo, bǎo, or bào? I was having 宫bao鸡丁 (which will be more familiar to many of you as kung pao chicken) for tea last night, but couldn't think which bao. I thought it was 保 (bǎo), having forgotten that the receipt had the character on it, but Linda said that it was 煲 (bāo). I did a Baidu search for the name and found that it's usually 宫保鸡丁 (gōng bǎo jī dīng), but can also be 宫爆鸡丁 (bào). I was having lunch today when it struck me that 宫保鸡丁 can't be an especially old dish because peanuts come from the Americas. It turns out that it dates from the 19th century. A man called 丁宝桢 (Dīng Bǎozhēn; 1820-86), who came from Shandong Province, and who was appointed to Sichuan as a provincial administrator was the creator of this dish. What I got last night was overlarded with hua jiao (花椒) and underlarded with chicken, which included bits of bone and skin. The best 宫保鸡丁 I've had was from XXKX in Fuzhou even although, properly speaking, they weren't really dishing up the real thing. June 29 The last temple in the shop大慈寺. 大慈寺 (Dàcí Sì) is a large Buddhist temple east of Tianfu Square, and the only major temple in Chengdu which, until lunchtime today, I hadn't previously visited. It's not hidden away, but it's a little off my radar. In fact, the LP China guide doesn't even mention it. To get there, take 总府路 (Zǒngfǔ Lù; north side of Tianfu Square) east; keeping going past the Foreign Languages Bookshop (other side of the road, so you probably won't see it) and the intersection with 红星路 (Hóng Xīng Lù), and soon after you'll stumble across this wall and gate. This is actually the back gate, and some woman directed me to park back round the corner to the left (as you head back towards Tianfu Square). I parked my bike in a small bike park next to a teashop on 北纱帽街 (Běi Shāmào Jiē; 纱帽 can mean "gauze hat worn by an official in dynastic times" or "public office"), but I was probably meant to go round to the main gate which is on the south side of the temple. That's east off 北纱帽街; there are signs, but it's much more straightforward to go in the back gate. The only problem with going in the back gate is that you'll miss out on the site map and the info about the temple that are just inside the main gate. Xuanzang is, of course, the whining, petulant monk from Journey to the West. Just inside the gate is a picture of how the monastery would have looked during the Tang Dynasty. The place is still a working Buddhist monastery with monks and worshippers. As was the case with the Lantern Festival parade in Fuzhou last year, the faithful are either the elderly or the young and almost no one in between. These are pictures of the Tripitaka Pavilion. As you can see, the Veda Bodhisattva had one devoted disciple. Obviously, the plan was to develop the area in the same way it's been developed around Wenshu Temple, but it appears that the money has run out and the olde Cathay chic was looking rather dilapidated. There's a lot of waste ground around that area where there would once have been a thriving community. From what I could tell, it's probably the haunt of local homeless people. It's clear that no one's bothered with the land around the temple for quite some time and if there were plans to develop the whole area, they've been abandoned for some time. I've uploaded a selection of full-sized pictures of Daci to my Pictures of Chengdu folder on SkyDrive.
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A list of links to various sites of interest.
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