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July 01 Once again, transmissions will be resumed as soon as possibleDon’t say “Goodbye”; just say “Auf wiedersehen”. As the time for my departure from Chengdu has been approaching, I’ve found myself in that awkward temporal limbo which precedes such things, which has meant that I feel disinclined to write entries partly because my mind is elsewhere and partly because there’s been little or nothing worth mentioning. I’ve been filling in my time with diversions – Neverwinter Nights, although I grow bored with it, and editing the track titles of all my music, which I’ve almost finished apart from the album of works by Satie. Officially, my old job has now ended. The results at the end of this term were, in the main, the same as they were at the end of last term, but only a few improved or worsened. I’m hoping that the pupils in the new programme will be more receptive because they’re going overseas and they aren’t doing any Chinese subjects. I restricted myself to commenting on my students’ English rather than their general behaviour in class. But there are only so many ways to say, “You’re an ill-mannered little bastard.” I installed Firefox 3.5 last night. There was the usual hype about the browser being significantly faster. Er, perhaps. It has one or two new features which I might use such as tear-off tabs. I get perpetually annoyed when I try to use alt+tab switching to move between tabs and end up on the desktop instead. I keep thinking that I ought to open sites in a separate window because although I use ctrl+tab to switch between tabs, it doesn’t come naturally. The alt and tab keys fall beneath my thumb and index finger whereas ctrl and tab are a rather awkward combination. I don’t leave for Wuxi until tomorrow evening. I know that all my kit has arrived and that there should be some sort of accommodation for me to look at. I’m guessing that I’ll probably be out of the zone until early next week. I’d prefer not to have to leave at all. I’ve got quite comfortable in Chengdu in a way I haven’t been comfortable anywhere else in China. That’s why this isn’t goodbye, but merely, “Auf wiedersehen, 蓉城.” June 28 When You Are Engulfed in FlamesBy David Sedaris. This is a collection of short to medium length autobiographical vignettes as Sedaris narrates different parts of his life in, it seems, roughly chronological order. Sedaris is a readable writer as he chronicles episodes such the babysitter from Hell, the New York neighbour from Hell, various stays in Paris and Tokyo, and his attempt to give up smoking. I suppose the articles appeal because they’re readable, and because Sedaris has the knack of taking the mundane and doing something with it that makes you feel vaguely interested about him and his life. About the only miss in the book, I thought, was the final part, The Smoking Section, about Sedaris trying to give up smoking once and for all. It’s the longest part of the book and, I felt, the least interesting, although perhaps that’s because I’m not a smoker. The more interesting parts of The Smoking Section were about life in Japan, which resembles life in China more closely than I already thought. However, as I read the book, I wondered where the money was coming from as Sedaris and his boyfriend, Hugh, jetted off around the planet to live in France or Japan as if the expense didn’t matter. Sedaris seemed to have no actual job during these periods and yet he was never short of money for booze, fags or dope. Did writing pieces for Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker etc. really earn him enough money? I’m just a bit curious. All right, I also admit I’m a little irked that here is yet another person with no visible means of support who’s still able to fly off to exotic locations for a life of apparent leisure. Overall I did enjoy the book, and that’s the main thing. I ended up reading most of it during the more interminable parts of Neverwinter Nights. Now, on to Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. June 26 70s babe and barking loon dieAn excellent day for burying bad news if I had any. The news is (apart from the deaths of Farrah Fawcett – no surprise – and Wacko Jacko – uh-oh! hype tsunami; I see The Guardian has a picture of him when he still looked normal) that the boys from CRE came round yesterday and packed up my kit. Twenty-five boxes this time, not all of which can be blamed on trying to take as little with me as possible when I actually depart. Out of ¥2000 I get ¥98 change. This is why goods and chattels such as chests-of-drawers, heaters and bookcases aren’t really a good idea. Two years ago when I arrived in Chengdu I had eighteen boxes and the move from Fuzhou cost ¥1100. I’ve read that id software has been bought by ZeniMax, who own Bethesda. Various informed people have suggested the ties between Splash Damage and Bethesda’s new project were probably a hint of some such alliance. Perhaps id will now be forced to do it when it’s done a little more rapidly because somebody is standing over them with a big stick +2. Also, it’s been announced that EA has merged its various RPG franchises. I’ve been making a little more progress with the weird and wonderful world of the music industry. I got my Dad to send me scans of various albums by Telemann. I looked through the rest of the music to see what else I needed. I discovered that the tracks from the fourth disc of Telemann’s Tafelmusik had labels for Wassermusik and that the names of the tracks and titles of one album by Vivaldi were totally at odds with each other. On the other hand, I managed to find a listing of the tracks on Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. I’m sure that the album should’ve come with a list of tracks and the lyrics. In fact, I’m sure it did. The hit count for GB has gone a bit wild this week, with over 1200 visitors so far. The overall hit count for the blog smashed through the 56,000 barrier without blinking. I don’t know why I’m suddenly Mr Almost Perceptible Popularity again. Most of my hits are come from Windows Live searches (unless this actually means Bing), but I have no information about what’s bringing most of them here. June 25 What’s shaped like a chickenAnd is being even more retarded than usual? No, oddly enough none of the kids in my classes, but that’s a good guess. No, it’s the imperium sericum mucking around with Google. I tried to reply to a mail message my sister sent me yesterday, but when I tried to send my response, nothing happened. I thought gmail might be in one of its moods, but when I happened to drop by Danwei last night, I learnt that Nanny had probably blocked Google. It seems that the block is a little quirky. I was able to read a mail message from my Dad later last night and this morning when I tried to reply to my sister again, gmail repeated yesterday’s trick. It’s being suggested that this is all related to the stupidly named Green Dam Youth Escort, which is being indirectly hyped because Nanny is claiming that Google is serving up porn by the supertanker – and we must prevent the nation’s woolly-brained youth from having the sexual thoughts [sic!].[1] In fact, as I’ve read elsewhere, it seems a little odd that such a claim is being made because if I did a search for anything of an adult nature, the search would get blocked, or the results. But this is a real nuisance for a lot of people. My gmail address is my main e-mail address, which is important at the moment because I’m in the process of moving, although I’m sure there are plenty of others (mainly foreigners, I expect) who are being seriously inconvenienced by the latest prank from the mentally unstable old loon. Notes 1. Either that or some government-run factory somewhere has produced a glut of pirated Japanese AV on DVD and they need customers to buy the stuff. June 21 Skateboard SquadVehicula quadrirotata. The self-propelled vehicle of 2009 has been this two-wheeled skateboard-like contraption which seems to be propelled like a Venetian gondola by wiggling the aft wheel from side to side. I have no idea exactly what they’re called, but as a former skateboarder, I feel compelled to regard them as rather risible. They seem to be a skateboard designed by overanxious parents. You know the sort – they’re busy ensuring their children’s obesity by ferrying them to and from school because a.) you should see the amount of traffic on the roads (that’s all those parents taking their fat brats to school) and b.) the streets are crawling with perverts (it was in the Daily Mail or some other reputable fish-and-chip wrapper read by the credulous). It was with some surprise that I saw a couple of kids with skateboards earlier this afternoon. If I have seen kids on skateboards in China, it’s been so long since I’ve seen one that I’ve forgotten the last occasion I did. But this is not a skateboard-friendly country outside of parks where the surface might be flat, smooth and unobstructed. The pavement here would give you average council in the UK nightmares because of the unevenness of the surface. But a couple of skateboarders was nothing when a whole horde came thundering down 总府路 this evening, perhaps numbering about twenty-five to thirty. I noted that not one of them had a helmet, knee pads, elbow pads or any sort of protective kit. One of them turned to video the others on a stretch of road which is reasonably smooth, but has various manhole covers which might topple an unwary skateboarder. I managed to pass them all just ahead of the next intersection where they did a little chant. Anywhere else, the police would probably have stopped them because what they were doing was dangerous to the skateboarders themselves. On that stretch of 总府路 there are only barriers between the cars and the cycle lane as you approach the intersection. After that, I don’t know what happened to them. When it comes to taking off, I’m normally first across the road when the light goes green and I was anxious not to find myself negotiating my way through the horde along the cycle lane to 天府广场. June 20 IdahoAchtung, baby! Two T-shirts spotted in Hotwind this evening. The first one says “Idaho. It is incumbent upon us to do so”; the second, you can read for yourselves. I can only assume that Idaho is some weird reverse rendering of Adolf Hitler in Chinese. I don’t know whether this is something Hitler said, but a quick nose in Google yields nothing immediately. The phrase is fairly generic. Oh well, I suppose Chinese people go into clothing shops in the west and see the weirdest things in Chinese. June 19 The endThe complete full stop. This has been one of those weeks when on those occasions I’ve had leisure time, I’ve felt disinclined to do anything that might require my brain to make some effort, hence no updates for the past few days. Quite a lot of this week has been taken up by preparations for the final exams; in fact, more time than I was expecting. I had my last actual class two days ago when most of Class 5 (my original half; Glen and I swapped back) did some work. Yesterday when I saw them formally for the very last time, I decided it was a good occasion for a media studies lesson. I was less impressed when Class 5 indicated that they didn’t want to see more of Arrested Development because, instead, they wanted to watch the end of Shrek II, another of that great collection of sequels that should never have been made. And today was the final exam itself. I ended up watching over my half of Class 6. Like the exam at this time last year, the day was horribly humid. As I should’ve known, the usual idiots violated exam protocol, but they’ll probably get such bad marks that it’s not worth giving them zero. That would be an improvement. There was also the kid who rushed through the reading exam in about 25 minutes flat. This is an IELTS reading exam, which takes me, a native speaker, 40 minutes to complete and get 98% - 100%. But that, I think, is a symptom of the deeply flawed education system which, unwittingly, encourages pupils to do absolutely as little as possible to an absolutely minimal standard. The clown in question thought he’d then be allowed to leave the room, but you don’t get to do that in an IELTS exam and I didn’t let him on this occasion. So I’ll never see these smug, arrogant little bastards again, except in passing next week perhaps. Hopefully I’ll never see them again. Thus this week marks the end of seven years of working for the programme and the same thing year in, year out – obnoxious spoilt brats who lack the wit to appreciate the knowledge you’re trying to impart to them. The era comes to an end but it engendered no particular emotional response in me except that anxiety you feel when the end is nigh and you wish it’d arrive a little sooner. But things should be different next term because I’ll be teaching obnoxious little brats who are going abroad and who don’t have us as the extra class they don’t want. June 14 Music is painfulI don’t want my MTV. I discovered that the reason why my MP3 player is so contrary about the order in which it plays music is because it does it by title instead of the more reasonable folder and file name. As a consequence, I’ve been going through the music that I ripped off my CDs and editing the title information so that I’ll get the tracks from each album grouped together and played in the right order (sort of). When I ripped the albums in the first place, I found one or two oddities such as information listed in Chinese or Japanese or some other language when I might’ve expected English. But such linguistic quirks were only the half of it. When I reached disc 2 of Corelli’s Op. 5 (violin sonatas), I noticed that the tracks all seemed to have the same file names as those from the first disc, although the music was different. Fortunately, the Hyperion website supplied a listing of the tracks so that I was able to edit them and their titles. François and Louis Couperin were this morning’s pains in the arse. Under artist information for each track, the latter had the name of the former. I have two different editions of François Couperin’s Concerts Royaux, one of which has them in their due and proper order (but the track names are generic), the other of which does not. One also has a couple of extra harpsichord pieces which I can’t identify. Whether you can find a listing of the album tracks is a bit hit-and-miss. My attempt to find information about Louis Couperin’s Pièces de Clavecin played by Bob van Asperen revealed that it seems to be a back catalogue album which has probably been superseded by another performed by van Asperen which was released in 2007. What information I could find did not include a detailed listing of the album contents. I wasn’t even sure whether I’d found the right album. In fact, trying to find information about Louis Couperin’s works listed par ordre (or whatever the correct French phrase is; apparently en règle) seems impossible. When I found the a site selling the sheet music, it had the table of contents from the book in which the works were listed according to their key. On the other hand, I found a good listing for the tracks on the album For Lute and Base Viol by the Geneva Baroque Duo. wikipedia has also been hit-and-miss. For example, it give precious little information about the Music for the Royal Fireworks by Handel. The album I have is the one with that work and Concerti a due cori (no.s 2 and 3) which was released in 1985. The re-release I’ve been finding online is for a 1997 album. But because I’m more cunning than the Count of Cunning (I’m sure this is a name which Shakespeare used for an exceptionally obscene pun in some play of his), I use Amazon to find the current album by Trevor Pinnock and The English Concert which has the two Concerti a due cori (no.s 2 and 3 – if I haven’t already mentioned that), and find the information I need. The titles for the Water Music are a little better, but I need to do some editing to ensure they’re in the right order. Bugger. More tedious, repetitive work. And now, having listened to Bach’s French Suites and then the Complete Harpsichord Concertos this afternoon, I find myself listening to the French Suite in E flat major for some reason. More editing required. Ugh. [Later.] Turns out that the tracks were merely on the album, but not actually part of the French Suites. [Even later.] I thought I’d see what actual classical music I had on CD only to find that I have both Water Music and The Music for the Royal Fireworks, but played by the Academy of Ancient Music. I thought I’d already ripped the disc, but when I checked, I could only find the content of the second CD, which had apparently been ripped over the content of the first. I changed the folder name and ripped the first CD again, but as I was editing the title information, all the tracks, apart from the first one, suddenly disappeared. I found them in the original folder as the tracks as they had been ripped not as I had edited them. My suspicion is that WMP was behind it, but I don’t know. The discs of the concertos by Vivaldi were the same in that ripping the second disc wrote over the firs, but this time, at least, there was no unexpected moving of files from one folder to another. In fact, I’ve gone so far as to separate the concertos into individual folders for tidiness if for nothing else. June 12 On Secret Service East of ConstantinopleBy Peter Hopkirk. Hopkirk’s book is about the activities of the Allied and Axis powers in Central Asia during World War I. The Turks were trying to re-establish the Ottoman Empire; the Germans were waiting for it to collapse so that they could take control of it; the British were trying to protect India; and the Russians were hoping to take control of Constantinople among other things. The new Great Game was marked by marked by heroic events such as the trek Niedermayer and von Hentig made to Afghanistan, and their subsequent trips back to Germany; disappointments – the German embassy to Afghanistan; the bravery of the soldiers on both sides in the face of extreme odds; and murderous internecine rivalries among the various indigenous peoples in the region. Hopkirk’s book paints an interesting picture of a region which seems little different today. It’s the same complex ethnic patchwork in which no one seems to be able to get on with anyone else, where the Great Game continues mostly with the same old players and a few new ones. On the other hand, I sensed that this was a book written by an elderly journalist (he was born in 1930, I see from wikipedia). The language is often repetitive and emotive as if Hopkirk had forgotten what he’d written a couple of sentences previously and had forgotten that it was the 1990s not the 1930s. Nonetheless, the book is more enjoyable to read than those books by academic historians whose attempts at producing something populist never quite seem to work. June 09 Back on the menuCyberian life sort of returns to normal. Spaces is viewable once again, and Twitter and Flickr may both be back as well (according Danwei). blogspot is not back, but Live Journal is. (I don’t believe it. Actually, saying that you don’t believe something when you can see it’s true is a little stupid, but I’m too surprised to say anything sensible.) I need to find a wordpress blog. I’ve found one. It’s probably blocked, but Nanny is being dilatory about informing me of this and I can’t be bothered waiting for the inevitable disappointment. I spoke to my parents on Skype yesterday afternoon, although my Mum had taken a funny turn earlier in the day because she’d forgotten to take the medicine which thins her blood. But she’s all right now and has been to see the doctor. After two glorious days, yesterday turned seriously grey and gloomy, although there wasn’t any major rain until later in the evening. Today, on the other hand, was mostly bright and sunny (enough to get burnt), and fairly light this evening in spite of some cloud. Today’s expedition was to the computer centre to see whether I could get a new toner cartridge for my aged laser printer. I could, but it’d cost ¥500, which is about quarter of the price of the machine when I bought it six years ago. In fact, for the equivalent model today, I’d be paying about ¥1000. Since that’s the case, I’ll wait until I get to Wuxi before I buy a replacement. I suspect that I may still need my own printer because the ones we use at school aren’t always reliable, which is why I bought a laser printer in the first place. In fact, neither of the two we had in our office have been behaving, but they are cheap crap. While I was talking to my Dad yesterday, he showed me his new Sony MP3 player, which prompted Linda to buy one for herself today, although a more basic model. When I bought my Aigo player at about the same time as I bought my laser printer, it cost about ¥1600, I think, for a model with all of 256Mb of memory. From a quick search online, Aigo products seem to be a little on the expensive side in general (even more expensive than Sony). I don’t know whether I’ll buy something to replace my old MP3 player, which is a decent enough piece of kit even although it’s a little feeble in the memory department. My main reservation is that I never listen to it because I’m seldom in a situation where I might want to listen to some music while I’m away from my computer. One thing that I like about Linda’s player is that it’s rechargeable. Mine takes an AAA battery, which adds to the weight. June 08 Neverwinter Nights 2Sword of destiny. When you were a child, someone decided to leave a shard of a broken magical sword in you, which didn’t kill you or even inconvenience you in the slightest. Until now. Your village of West Harbour comes under attack from Grey Dwarves, githyanki and their allies. That sends you to Neverwinter where you find a job with the local police routing out corruption in the force before making sure that some local orcs get their names on the endangered species list. In Chapter 2, you’re accused of committing a massacre (no, not of the orcs) in the village of Ember. Don’t worry, they make you a squire and you get off on a legal technicality after you fight a duel against Black Garius’ chief minder. You even get knighted and a castle, which might sound nice until you find out that the previous occupant, Black Garius, wasn’t too keen on maintenance, leaving you saddled with a massive mortgage and recruitment problems. In Chapter 3, when you’re not crippled by debt repayments, you’re a diplomat forging alliances and a sword, which happens to be the one weapon that can vanquish the King of Shadows. (Handy, eh?) And then it’s off to war. You start as the Captain of the regular infantry before joining the SAS to whack Black Garius (who must be a Diarrhoea Demon – he keeps coming back) and the King of Shadows. Unfortunately, the ceiling caves in and kills everyone – probably. The place must’ve had the same builders as the keep. Unlike NWN, you actually get to run a party of PCs, although I still have a preference for the way things were organised in BG 2. The game seems to be trying to preserve some vague semblance of the grid-and-miniatures version of D&D as it inexorably shifts towards becoming a full-blown third- or first-person RPG like Morrowind or Oblivion. Although the final version of the game is less buggy than it was on release, there still seem to be a few hiccups such as occasions when PCs would become all shy, hang around doors, and refuse to come when called. They also seemed to display the usual sort of behaviour, either running off the leash or doing nothing. My character was quite good at doing nothing even although you’d think that the main character would move on to the next monster within a reasonable distance. Game play was the usual sort of thing – pausing, trying to organise the troops and attacking. It seemed to generally ensure that no matter what choices you made, you kept going in the right direction, although there were times when a little more guidance was necessary. Some of the battles seemed to suffer from Custom Level Syndrome™ which states
In the battle against Black Garius, who’s merely a level 14 wizard (by this stage of the game, the party is about level 19 or 20), a balor (CR 20) appears along with a whole bunch of monsters. Out of curiosity, I checked the DMG to see what sort of odds the PCs might face. The answer was five or six CR 14 monsters or one CR 20 monster. Even with the larger party in the final two battles and a wand of resurrection, the Encounter Level is ridiculously high. Unlike the traditional form of D&D, the game runs too quickly to take any reasonable action. Start quaffing healing potions and you’ll probably be cut down. Go to heal some other character, and someone’s going to die because you can’t be in eight places at once. On the other hand, while the action in the game can be overly rapid (even if the entire battle sequence drags on), the cutscenes can be tediously long at times. Anyway, my next stop is the original version of the game which I started a couple of years ago, but failed to complete partly because my old laptop was persistently overheating even in the depths of winter and partly because I was getting bored with the game. My main motivation this time is to find out what life is like beyond level 20 in the expansion packs. This will hurt me more than it does you, boyElectoral thrashing. The news this morning is that Labour got about 16% or 17% of the share of the vote in the European elections, putting it behind Ukip. Not exactly unexpected, considering recent events, although it seems that everyone’s conveniently forgotten that the Tories are no better than Labour. It’s more surprising that the Lib Dems didn’t do better. The BNP have also won their first two seats, although how are their MPs going to cope with having to mingle with a bunch of foreigners? The wins were condemned, but even although the policies of the BNP may be odious, the result is democracy in action; the people have spoken. You have to wonder what they were thinking, though. In non-electoral news, Spaces is still unavailable for direct viewing. I see from my Live home page that I have a network invitation, but I can’t respond to it because that page is off the menu as well. I was hoping that things would be back to normal today, or perhaps Spaces is following in the tradition of blogspot and wordpress when it’s been immune from Nanny’s capricious behaviour in the past. Oddly enough, typepad blogs now seem to have developed some sort of immunity from unreasonable prosecution. A Welsh View is still visible, although the blocking of YouTube and Flickr diminishes its value to some extent. According to a report in The Guardian, C4 is going to make its whole back catalogue available online. I’m guessing that like the BBC’s video content, it probably won’t be available outside the UK. Pity. I wouldn’t mind getting the chance to see Father Ted again or some of the telly that I’ve missed over the past seven years. It’s about time the pirates here got some new series in because the selections in the DVD shops have been somewhat stagnant in recent weeks. Well, months. I went to the Foreign Languages Bookshop yesterday less from some plan to buy something (I don’t really need any new books right now) than from the need to get out of the house. I ended up buying On Secret Service East of Constantinople by Peter Hopkirk, which is about Germany’s role in the Great Game, when it tried to foment rebellion in the British Empire during World War I. I suppose the book is the prelude and main series to Lawrence’s epilogue, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I hope the book will be interesting, although I keep seeing the word “evil” being used, a term which I’d avoid no matter how reprehensible the person, place or activity to which it’s being applied happened to be at the time. After two or three days of brilliant weather, the sky was especially heavy and grey yesterday. There was a little rain in the early evening, but not heavier until later last night. It was a little dull this morning, but has now brightened up, I’m pleased to say. However, there does seem to be a correlation between rain and cockroaches, which seem to appear when it rains. I found one scurrying across the bench in the kitchen, which I terminated with extreme prejudice. I gave the bench a good clean afterwards, but I’m careful not to leave anything which might entice these disgusting creatures. The fly spray was seriously lethal, though. It only took a couple of seconds to take effect. I keep being sent multimedia messages. I was outside the Post Office on Friday when I got the first of them. Linda said she’d got the same thing as well, and I’ve just had another. There. I’ve deleted it. June 06 Some of this, some of that, some of the otherEl Gordo survives. For the moment. When I got up this morning, I was half expecting to find that Gordon Brown had finally bitten the bullet and resigned, but it seems that he’s going to limp on. From a political perspective, it’s probably better for him to stay than for him to go and be followed by a fight to replace him. It wouldn’t look good for another change of PM without a general election. But whether that happens sooner or later, it seems that NuLab is in for a drubbing. Yet it’s also a pity that the Tories will benefit when, it seems, they’re no less culpable as a group with respect to the expenses claims scandal. The only way we’ll know whether the great British public has the brains to work that one out is whether the next parliament is more mixed and, say, the Lib Dems become the opposition. The night before last after tea, I went and bought a mosquito light in Carrefour. I should’ve checked it, but because I didn’t, I only discovered that it was broken when I got home. I took Linda back to Carrefour with me yesterday at lunchtime. On the way, she wanted to do some shopping at Watson’s and we parked our bikes on the corner of 梨花街. The man who watches the bikes told Linda that there’d been some explosion on a bus in Chengdu, which had killed twenty-five people. Linda said she’d see what else she could find out about it, but we forgot. I haven’t been to ESWN much for the past few months, but I happened to go this morning, where there were translations in connection with this particular story, which sounds like a tale of negligence. Apparently, someone on an electric bike tried to warn the driver, but was ignored; that person contacted the emergency services who were slow to respond; there was a hammer to break the windows in case of an emergency, but it was difficult to find. My guess is that there was some sort of fault with the bus, which caused a fire to start, and that eventually caused something to explode. The death toll is no surprise because in my travels around Chengdu, I seldom see buses that I wouldn’t describe as crowded. The weather yesterday was amazing. [Welcome to the trivia zone. –ed.] It was clear – absolutely clear – all day. It was also hot, like some of the days we had in Fuzhou. When I went off for tea last night, there were some clouds in the sky, and the temperature in places seemed unusually hot, as if I was inside an oven. It’s sunny again today, but there’s a little more cloud in the sky. I went to Zoe’s for tea last night. The place is even less accessible than it was, and I had to return home by a more circuitous route. I saw last week or the week before that SP2 for Vista has been released – allegedly – but that, it seems, has been overshadowed by the announcement of a release date for Windows 7. I also read somewhere a few weeks ago about how Vista handles graphics (badly; incompetently), which seems to explain why UTIII kept locking up on me until I downloaded new drivers from nVidia. Speaking of MS, I’ve also been reading that we’re in for a lot of patches this Tuesday, and I’ve just seen that Adobe’s getting in on the act as well. It was a bit annoying to find that having bought the upgrade to Acrobat 8 a couple of years ago, Acrobat 9 appeared about a week later. As far as I can tell, the new home version of Acrobat merely seems to be the pro version of the previous release. I noted that Acrobat 8 had features that were found in Acrobat 7 Pro. This weekend is four days long thanks to the College Entrance Exam. I just hope that some of the more annoying specimens I’ve had to deal with, both this year and in the past, have sat down to do the English exam and found themselves wishing they’d paid attention in class and done the work. At the end of this term, we’re really only going to be measuring what mediocre progress most of our little darlings have been making in their Chinese English classes. I see that Spaces is still off the menu. Come along, Nanny, Tank Parking Day has been and gone, and behaving like an ostrich longer than necessary is merely childish. And switch blogspot, wordpress, Live Journal, etc. back on as well, you mange-ridden old bat. Speaking of Tank Parking Day, I was curious to know what happened in Hong Kong, hence my visit to ESWN this morning. Quite a few people turned out to celebrate the occasion, although I don’t know whether it’s significantly more than in recent years. Actually, Orlando Furioso or The Faerie Queene would provide better material for a sword-and-sorcery game than L’Inferno. In the former, for example, your character (Astolfo?) would be on the quest (by the command of Charlemagne) for Orlando’s wits. In the end, you’d have to fight and subdue him so that you can put his sanity back where it came from. Angelica could be recast as a more active enemy instead of being a pawn in her father’s plans. June 04 AftershocksIt’s that time of year again. It’s reached that point in the year when I’ve had enough of the little shits in one class or the other. Again, the catalyst is the arts class, namely Class 5 who did absolutely bugger all yesterday. By the end of class I was so infuriated that I beat up some of the desks after class, and last night I woke up (2am or 3am?) to find that I had something like a migraine splitting the right-hand side of my head. I think it was a tension headache rather than a migraine, and having taken a couple of Panadol for it, I went back to bed and seem to have fallen asleep. The headache had abated by this morning, but because I hadn’t slept well, the rubber band had been stretched to breaking point. As a consequence, Class 7 got it with both barrels this morning. Then when I resumed playing the tape, and because I could see Tony’s mouth moving, I paused the machine and told him to shut his mouth. That got a response in Chinese, which is all I’ve ever had from Tony. But he wouldn’t let it go and we got into a confrontation from which I was not going to back down. But because he’s not responding in English, I have no idea what he’s saying and only learnt afterwards from Linda that he claimed he wasn’t talking. But even although I couldn’t hear him because he was using the sound of the tape recorder to mask his voice, his mouth was moving in that way suggested speaking, some aside to Young, who sits next to him. Admittedly, I may have been mistaken (he might’ve been talking to himself or have said, perhaps, one word), but he doesn’t get to talk back, and if he does, and I can’t understand it because it’s all in Chinese, then he’s doing himself a disservice because I’ll assume that he’s using some inappropriate diction. He’s typically late to class, usually pays no attention, chats away or plays with his mobile phone or both. In other words, it’s hard not to expect the worst out of him. He’s the very epitome of an arrogant 小皇帝. I’ve seen him in a fruit juice shop up the street on odd occasions in the evening where, on one occasion, I observed him sounding off as if what he had to say was ever so important. Well, pupils in my classes now and in the past, in a nation of 1.3 billion, what makes you so special? None of this would’ve happened if some of the bratlings in Class 5 had actually done something yesterday and not made me feel as if I counted for nothing. I was nice enough to explain the features of Band 5 writing. No one paid attention. I was nice enough to go through the writing task to help them understand the topic, how they might structure their answer, and what their main points might be. No one paid attention. That left about half the class for them to do something. That’s not enough time to do the whole of writing task 2 in the IELTS exam, but they could’ve done something. No one did anything. IELTS is rather difficult when you’re only Band 4 or 5. It’s not just the level of the English in the exercises, but also the language of the instructions – by native speakers, requiring a higher level of comprehension. The Chinese education system does no one any favours by generally overloading pupils with school work to do as little as possible to complete an exercise. Because of this, it means the moment they’re faced with actually having to put some effort in, to understand a text beyond simply reading the words, they don’t bother. As I said in a post not so long ago, my Classical Greek is far less competent than their English. I’m much more dependent on notes and a dictionary, yet I still make an effort to understand writing that’d be classified as IELTS 9. It’s a hobby rather than an imposition, but I don’t start bleating, “Lots of new words” or “It’s too hard”. But I enjoy pursuits of an intellectual nature, whereas the kids in my classes are the ones who are academically sub-standard and who have merely bought their way into the school. I would deserve my salary just as much if I didn’t bother doing anything in class since trying to teach my little darlings something achieves just as much as doing nothing. Ironically, we had a mail message from Central Command yesterday about the coming end of the term and how our pupils would remember us for years to come etc. I’ve probably taught about 400 students in my principal classes since I came to China. I’ve positively affected 1½ of them, I’d say, and positively affected another 1½ who were never in my classes. As for the rest, I’ve never had any further contact, although that doesn’t bother me. June 03 Problem 101The meaning of life. The final philosophy problem sees prominent guest star, Mr Megasoft, return. he’s been reading a book about the purpose of life being the continuation of the species through the production of children. People are then driven to look after their children in order to ensure their genes have a future. Mr Megasoft agrees with the explanation of the “selfish gene”. And genes determine all the rest about us, too, right down to dying once we’ve done the reproducing part, our duty having been done. Mr Megasoft has a secret lab set up so that his DNA can be implanted in an egg donated by his girlfriend, Charlene, and then shot into outer space for eternity. Mr Megasoft is thus ensuring that his genetic code will last longer than anyone else’s, and now that he’s done that, the human race no longer needs to continue. But there’s one problem. If our purpose in life is to pass on our genetic code, what’s the purpose of the genetic code? My answer is that it doesn’t have one per se. It’s a bit like saying that water doesn’t harm us unless it’s decided to or that poison does harm us unless it decides not to (though one man’s meat is another man’s poison). It’s all a bit Panglossian. Only humans might think that there’s something more to life than eating, sleeping, and reproducing. The rest of the animal kingdom does what it does without leaving monuments of one sort or another, and if they produce music or art, it’s all part of the mating game.[1] As I believe I’ve said before, most of us come and go and merely leave children behind as our legacy. A few people are famous well beyond life. Unless I delete this blog or something else happens to it, I expect that it’ll still be around long after I’ve gone, possibly archived, and almost certainly forgotten. And if it doesn’t survive and little else of mine survives, my PhD thesis will continue to moulder, best forgotten, on the shelves of the John Rylands Library. But it wouldn’t surprise me, because irony and I are old friends, if I were to become famous after I die, although I hope it might be for the right reasons rather than the wrong ones. And that’s the last of the philosophy problems. It leaves a hole in the means by which I can bore you, although I am continuing, sporadically, to translate Crito. Notes 1. If that’s even the case subliminally for humans, prolific composers such as Vivaldi and Telemann were either getting some all the time or desperate for it. June 02 This is a test postEven Spaces is off the menu. I’ve just been to Danwei, where I find that Windows Live and Hotmail have fallen victim to Nanny’s hysteria. I’m posting this as a test to see whether, unlike blogspot on this occasion, I can still post to Green Bamboo even if I can’t view it afterwards. It seems that there’s always some new depth which this paranoid regime can plumb. What pathetic, ostrich like behaviour. Danwei also mentions that Twitter and Flickr have also been added to the proscribed list. It won’t make the events in Τιάνανμεν Σqυάrε go away. Quick update. It seems that I can still post to GB. So, Nanny, go f_ck yourself. Later. At least I’m also able to retrieve posts from GB. It looks like the Beeb has been crippled probably because the filtering level on Nanny’s chastity belt has been set to “Extreme paranoia”. I wouldn’t be surprised if the BBC gets completely blocked or becomes so difficult to access that it’s not worth the effort. I also wouldn’t be surprised if The Guardian suffers a similar fate, but at the moment I’ve just learnt that Jacqui Smith, the Home Gauleiter Secretary, is to quit – according to reports. wikipedia’s still viewable, although I’m expecting that to be another victim. My current prediction is that quarta die di giugno (apologies for being macaronic, but that’s the way things have to be), access to anything outside Chinese Cyberia may be blocked. Anyway, whatever else happens, all this Pope-like refusal to admit fallibility merely highlights the anniversary. May 31 The meta-problemTo cut to the chase… Because philosophy problems don’t have proper solutions, is that a problem with philosophy problems? What is the purpose of the problem? If we’re trying to find an acceptable solution to something that has no proper answer, I think we’re missing the point of the problem. Yet some of the early ethics problems were of the sort to which we wish there was some solution because we wouldn’t want to be placed in a situation where we must sacrifice at least one human life directly or indirectly to save one or more others. The discussion at the back of the book has much to say about the Logical Positivists who would, it appears, classify a lot of philosophy problems as nonsense just as various utterances (e.g. How much does philosophy weigh?) can be nonsensical. That was Problem 100, which means that tomorrow’s problem is the very last one – the problem of existence. The Matrix problemI think, therefore I am. Presumably. Indeed, today’s problem is what underpinned The Matrix. Human beings were being used like living batteries by the machines, but all the while believing that they were living out their lives in the real world. (Of course, you have to wonder why the machines went to such lengths and why they’d care about humans seeming to have lives.) Thus we can’t really be certain whether any of this is real. For all I know, I may be the one being deceived or deceiving myself. I doubt it, though. I’m sure (though how can I really know?) that reality is as most people perceive it because if we were all being deceived, there might be inconsistencies in the world. We can, of course, deceive ourselves. I know that I can misinterpret information such as the time when I was going to school one day and thought I saw my Mum’s car. The car turned out to be the right make, but wrong colour (it was hard to be certain of the colour in the morning light) and wrong driver, who happened to live across the road from us. But although my initial perceptions were wrong, it was a matter of misinterpretation not a gross violation of reality. It also seems rather pointless to worry about such matters because we’re always having practical demands made of us by others. I could say that none of this is real, but if I did that, I’d soon be out of a job, have no money, and be out on the street. It wouldn’t help me on iota to sit on the kerb repeating the mantra, “None of this is real.” Next thing you know, I’ve starved to death and found out the hard way that whatever we might think of reality, there are some things we can’t avoid such as eating and drinking. If Descartes said that he thought, therefore he was, he might’ve observed that hunger wasn’t something you could pretend not to have. As our long journey through problems in philosophy comes closer to its end, we find ourselves faced with the issue of the meta-problem, but that’s for tomorrow. May 29 It’s a different country down thereTrueblood. Vampires are out in the open with the invention of trueblood, which mean they no longer have to prey on humans for food. Sookie Stackhouse is a telepathic waitress working in a Southern diner. Bill Compton is the hunky, slightly dated vampire who comes to live in the town. Sam is Sookie’s hunky boss, and he can turn himself into a lovable dog. What’s a girl to do? Be shrill and huffy, that’s what, and make out with both of them. Meanwhile, her brother Jason, a screwed-up sex maniac and drug addict, finds himself suspected to be a serial killer until it’s revealed that the psycho is some minor character pretending to be cajun. I’m not sure what the vampires are meant to represent. The gay community? Coming from HBO, Trueblood is as adult content as you’d expect it to be. I’m not sure who the target audience is likely to be. Buffy-istas looking for their fix of vampire, but being well out of the original Buffy demographic? I didn’t find the series that appealing. It seemed to be a little clichéd – everyone’s a weirdo or a redneck with lots of secrets which they all know about; that sort of thing. Sookie was not an appealing character, being, as I said, shrill and huffy, and somewhat humourless. Probably the most fun character was the good Christian girl who Bill had to turn into a vampire and who came back as a ill-tempered, foul-mouthed Nosferatu. Defiance. Defiance is the story of the Bielski Brothers (sounds like a circus act) who hid out in the forests of Belorussia during World War II and gathered together a small community of Jewish refugees. They fought the Germans alongside Russian partisans with whom they had an uneasy alliance at best. Not a bad film, but it dragged a bit and my attention wavered. If…thenOr then not perhaps. I’ll quote the book’s definition of validity directly:
The book asks, “Is this a good start for solid, rigorous thinking?” Mr Bamboo’s spidey sense says that this has to be a trick question. (And later he started thinking that he hadn’t understood the definition above at all.) Where, exactly, is the problem with this definition? “A(T)+B(T)=C(T)” is true, but “A(T)+B(T)≠C(F)” is an invalid argument where A and B are true themselves. Are the sceptics about to pop up and claim that since we can’t know anything, there can be no such thing as a valid argument? (Mind you, if nothing can be known, how can the sceptics know they know nothing?) If I understand the book correctly, the validity of the argument doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the content. For example,
is a valid philosophical argument because anything can follow from inconsistent premises. Or the conclusion is necessarily true as in
Thus validity is one thing, but its reliability is another because it’s separate from the content. As one final example, I used Fergus Duniho’s silly syllogisms generator[1] to produce
which is valid even although it’s surreal. If there were doubts about validity today, there will doubts about reality tomorrow. There really were; there really will be. Don’t doubt it. Or perhaps you should. Notes 1. It appears that Duniho’s website where I got the generator from several years ago has gone, but the generator can still be found here. Are Vulcans logical? After I watched the latest Star Trek film, this question, which I’ve pondered before, popped into my mind again. For example, in the latest film, the Vulcans were prejudiced against Spock because he was half-human. But if the Vulcans are logical and this entails the rejection of emotions, then this invalidates that claim because prejudice is an emotional response to difference. A logical mind, it seems, would be objective and detached on such matters. Also, I quote from Memory Alpha:
It may be, but it’s a proposition from ethics, not logic. I’m not even sure it can be expressed in logic as an argument of a sort. It may contribute to an argument not to undertake a specific course of action, but there’s no inherent reason why the needs of the many should be placed ahead of the needs of the few. It’s merely a reasonable assumption. In addition, if the needs of the many are so important, why is it that the needs of the few in power would be placed ahead of them in, say, the event of a nuclear war? I can only deduce that there must be at least one argument which renders the statement above invalid. It might’ve been better if the Vulcans had been portrayed as being guided by reason and simply not given to emotional displays rather than allegedly deeply emotionally repressed. |
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