Froogville

Traffic Report - the blog stats for January

2012-02-01T02:32:00.001Z

A relatively restrained month on the blogs this January. Well, a sensible average level of output, perhaps.

There were 38 posts and nearly 11,000 words on Froogville last month.

There were 31 posts and 9,500 words on Barstool Blues.

We had a visitor from Vietnam the other day, who I suspect might have been my old teaching buddy Big Frank, who's holidaying down there at the moment. Nothing else of note to mention this month. Ho hum.

A fishy tale

2012-01-31T05:01:00.003Z

This is a cheap recycle of a post, but.... well, I thought I'd told the story on here before, and it deserves to be told, needs to be told.

A day or two ago on my mate JES's blog I threw down the phrase
"I can't eat fish either. I was frightened by a mackerel when I was four."
- which he kindly said was one of the funniest comments he could imagine ever receiving. But I feared he thought this was just a dada-ist quip I'd made up on the spur of the moment. No - in fact, it was quite true.

This is how it came to be....

A mackerel fishing excursion when I was a small child, in a very small boat off the south coast of England. I was both exhilarated and terrified about being sundered from the land for the first time (I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate fascination with the sea, perhaps even before this); and intrigued by this idea that we were looking for these strange elusive creatures hiding far below our feet.

But then we happened upon a shoal, and started landing them in numbers – using long, thick lines with multiple hooks on them. It hardly seemed fair: no actual skill involved. And I found fish very unsettling. I don’t think we ever ate them at home. And I’d probably never seen a live one, certainly not at close quarters – except maybe a tiny goldfish here or there.

So, when one of the mackerel squirmed off its hook just as it was being hauled onboard, it was quite a shock to me. It plopped right at my feet. And someone yelled at me to catch it, to pick it up – because, on this boat, there was quite a gap between the edge of the planking of the deck and the hull, and so this fairly small fish would easily slip through down into the bilges. It seemed to be wriggling in that direction for all it was worth.

Of course, knowing nothing about fish, I had no idea what their convulsive writhing would feel like in my little hand; or that they had such a distinctive odour, which no amount of washing would completely remove; or that they were so SLIMY, and that their translucent scales would come off all over your hand.

Yep, I was plenty freaked out enough by that moment. And further freaked out by my parents’ apparent unconcern or incomprehension of my trauma.

Then, that evening, I was woken up and frogmarched out of bed to join the dinner table to sample some of the fish that “I had helped to catch”. I was really not up for that, for so many reasons: being half asleep, being haunted by the fish’s dying wriggles in my hand, being wary of new food at the best of times. But I was forced – forced – to try a mouthful. And I nearly choked to death on a bone.

Fish – all seafood – has made me vomit spectactularly whenever I’ve tried it since. I’m sure it’s psychosomatic, but…

Who is Nat Geo, and why is he doing these awful things to me?

2012-01-30T16:05:00.016Z

I thought getting a satellite TV hookup in my new apartment was going to be a big enhancement to my life.

And it is... up to a point.

But I suppose my expectations were geared towards what regular TV was like when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. My experience of satellite channels - in Asia, especially - has been limited to watching sports in bars now and then; or occasional stays in hotels, where I would only ever watch the BBC World Service or a film channel.

So, I'd been hoping for great things from the History Channel, The Discovery Channel, The National Geographic Channel.

I find I don't in fact have the first of those two. But, judging from how BAD National Geographic is, that's probably a blessed relief.

I suppose there are two factors at play here. One is the limited amount of available programming, which prompts the schedulers to spin out programmes which last only 30 minutes or less to a full hour. The other, perhaps, is the expected target demographic of - in Asia - primarily hotel guests, who are likely to watch only in short bursts and/or channel hop a lot.

I sympathise with the difficulties, I do. But the result is that the channel is almost unwatchable, unless you have both ADHD and a goldfish memory. Every programme you watch is interrupted every five minutes or so to show you five minutes or more of promotional clips.

It wouldn't be so bad if the programme breaks were a just a little less frequent. It wouldn't be so bad if they included some commercials - but Nat Geo don't do commercials much: only for its sponsors/partners, and the WWF. It wouldn't be so bad if there were some variety. But, because of the limited amount of programming, there's a limited amount of promos: so, you get the same promos for the same shows coming up over and over and over again - sometimes repeated even within the same break!

And the thing that bugs the crap out of me the most is that a good 25% or 30% of the promos are for the programme you're actually trying to watch: yes, they are taunting you by saying, "THIS is what's going to happen next, if you can bear to sit through another 5 or 10 minutes of this promo garbage."

Ah, no, the thing that really bugs the crap out of me is the style of these promos: the rapid cutting and tricksy editing (poor old Cesar Millan probably receives death threats as a result of the nauseating scratch-mix music videos NG makes to plug his Dog Whisperer show), and the wild, jokey over-enthusiasm of the voiceovers.

Once in a while, there is something I really want to watch on the NG channel. On Monday evenings, they're currently showing a ragbag of World War II documentaries (History Channel stuff, you'd think - I don't know how it comes to be airing on National Geographic): mixed quality, but mostly quite decent, mostly stuff I haven't seen before. But, for maybe 80 minutes of documentary - tonight, about the Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima attacks - I've had to suffer 40 minutes of PROMO HELL, much of it for this very programming strand, 'Apocalypse World War II'.... which, I'm told (again and again and again and again) by the portentous voiceover guy (it might even be this guy: it does have the classic, self-consciously over-the-top style of a trailer for a Hollywood action picture), was "filmed by people who were actually there." What, as opposed to robot cameramen or satellites?? Is there now such a well-established genre of contemporary documentaries derived entirely from closed-circuit security camera footage that the involvement of on-the-spot cameramen has become something noteworthy, something we need to be specially reminded of?

No, it's just that the scriptwriting is every bit as CRAP as the voiceovers and the editing and the scheduling. (And the sound engineering - Jeez, the levels are all over the place; the charity ad for the WWF's Coral Triangle fund is TWICE as loud as most everything else, battering the eardrums, rattling the windows, annoying the neighbours.)

It's like a How Not To demonstration of how to screw up a television channel. And yet the National Geographic Channel is apparently very successful; so, they must at some level "know what they're doing"? The audience today actually tolerates, or even responds positively to this kind of SHIT??? I despair of the modern world.

Bon mot for the week

2012-01-30T00:10:00.008Z

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Film List - favourite prison films

2012-01-28T02:29:00.021Z

This theme seemed all too apposite at the moment, since poverty and ill health - and dread of the ubiquitous fireworks outside - have kept me a prisoner of my apartment for the whole month.

Also, I have long wanted to do a post on this for two particular reasons: first, to give me an excuse to mention again Cool Hand Luke, which is one of my favourite films in any genre, and did, I fear, have a formative impact on me in my childhood; and second, to exclude The Shawshank Redemption - which is a steaming pile, one of the most overrated films of all time.

Having got that out of the way, let's move to the list. Once I started thinking about this, I was a little surprised to find that there weren't that many obvious contenders. Prison films are not as numerous as one thinks (if one excludes the B-movie lezploitation genre), and most of them aren't all that good.

Looking around for a bit of inspiration on the Net, I found most selections were cheating a bit (or a lot): a few of them even included Alien 3. Look, people, the 'prison movie' is a pretty clearcut genre: it must be largely or wholly set in an institution of correction (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest might be set in a prison-like environment, but it's not set in a prison), and it must be a serious drama (not a comedy like the Jim Jarmusch classic Down By Law or Peter Sellers' Two-Way Stretch nor a quirky novelty story like Burt Reynolds' footballing yarn The Longest Yard or its Vinnie Jones remake Mean Machine) - and it must be about the struggle to live within the system and/or to escape, not about battling hideous acid-blooded predators. POW films are a distinct - and I suspect, rather more numerous - genre; so, Stalag 17, The Wooden Horse, King Rat, and The McKenzie Break will have to await a post of their own. I also exclude films which merely have a large element of prison story in them: In The Name Of The Father, Dead Man Walking, The Hurricane, American History X and the recent Stone (a difficult and deeply flawed but extremely resonant film which might well get a post of its own soon) may focus on a man's imprisonment, but most of the story takes place outside the prison. A prison film - apart from a how-they-came-to-be-here prologue and an escape/release coda - is set almost entirely within the confines of a prison.

As with my other lists of this kind, I'll avoid attempting to rank these selections (except to say that Cool Hand Luke is No. 1, obviously!) and adopt a chronological arrangement instead.

Here we go...

Froog's Favourite Prison Films

I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang

(Dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

A prototype for Cool Hand Luke, but without the messianic sacrifice motif. For its day, very bold in its portrayal of the inhumanity of the prison system.

Brute Force

(Dir. Jules Dassin, 1947)

But for Cool Hand Luke, this would be the best American film in the list - a savage noir drama about the tough-as-nails Burt Lancaster leading a prison revolt against a sadistic warden.

Le Trou

(Dir. Jacques Becker, 1960)

But the best non-American film - and arguably the best film of the lot - is this French masterpiece of suspense and claustrophobia. Just as Dassin's Rififi was the seminal heist movie, Becker's film is the seminal prison escape movie - and similarly makes great use of real time and largely dialogue-free sequences during the escape.

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner

(Dir. Tony Richardson, 1962)

A fine adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's famous novel about life in a Borstal - the UK's 'reform schools' for young offenders - with a mesmerising performance by a very young Tom Courtenay as the protagonist.

Birdman of Alcatraz

(Dir. John Frankenheimer, 1962)

A great performance by Burt Lancaster - although it's not as accurate an account of Stroud's life as one might wish (he spent half of his incarceration, and did most of his famous bird work, at Leavenworth Penitentiary).

The Hill

(Dir. Sidney Lumet, 1965)

Not a conventional prison, but a British military stockade for delinquent soldiers in North Africa during the last days of WWII. I saw this as a midnight film on British TV in the 1970s, and it has haunted me ever since. Gorgeous black-and-white photography, a brutal story, and the first proof that Sean Connery was capable of more than just being a suave superspy - something of a forgotten classic.

Cool Hand Luke

(Dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

The sweatiest film ever made? I have written enough about this before - here and here and here and here...

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

(Dir. Caspar Wrede, 1970)

Tom Courtenay again: a decade on, he has graduated to playing Solzhenitsyn's titular gulag inmate in a shamefully overlooked film, one of the bleakest and coldest ever made (shot on location in northern Finland).

Papillon
(Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)
One of the first films I can ever remember seeing in the cinema. A bit ponderous, and not nearly as good as Henri Charrière's enthralling biography about his life in the penal colonies of French Guiana in the 1930s (which I'd already read, at the age of 8 or 9, borrowing it from my brother), but the cinematography is sumptuous, and Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman make an eminently watchable pair.

Scum

(Dir. Alan Clarke, 1977)

Alan Clarke was one of the great assets of British television in the 1970s and 1980s, directing many of BBC1's landmark 'Play For Today' series of TV movies in the early '70s, and graduating on to more experimental and often very violent subject matter which could only get a late-night showing on BBC2. Many of his films, I believe, were only aired once; but they etch themselves permanently into your mind (Road, Contact, Elephant - the latter two being a couple of the best things made about The Troubles in Northern Ireland). He was instrumental in launching the careers of Tim Roth (as a racist juvenile delinquent in Made In Britain) and Gary Oldman (as the charismatic leader of a gang of football hooligans in The Firm). I think Scum - a brutal study of young offenders' institutions (with a first starring role for Londoner Ray Winstone, who has gone on to become Britain's favourite gangster) - was originally made for the BBC as well, but proved a bit too extreme for Auntie, and so was given a cinema release instead.

Midnight Express

(Dir. Alan Parker, 1978)

I don't think Parker - or Oliver Stone, the screenwriter here - have done anything better since. The bad machine doesn't know he's a bad machine.

Escape From Alcatraz

(Dir. Don Siegel, 1979)

I remember this being a workmanlike prison drama rather than anything outstanding; but it's much better than Shawshank.

Brubaker

(Dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1980)

A dubiously eligible choice, since the main focus of the story is on saintly governor Robert Redford's battles with the Prison Board to improve the treatment of prisoners; but the scenes of life in the prison - particularly when Redford goes undercover as an inmate - are pretty harrowing. My recollection of this film (haven't seen it in well over 20 years) is that it is a worthy misfire: I just didn't buy Redford as the governor, and even less as a pretend-prisoner.

McVicar

(Dir. Tom Clegg, 1980)

A gritty British prison escape drama that stays rather closer than most to the true facts of the story on which it is based. Casting rock singer Roger Daltrey in the lead, though - although he isn't bad - probably doomed it to not being taken as seriously as it deserved.

Kiss of the Spiderwoman

(Dir. Hector Babenco, 1985)

A prison love story - that's got to be a sub-genre of one, hasn't it?

Murder In The First

(Dir. Marc Rocco, 1995)

This film plays annoyingly fast and loose with the facts of the Henri Young case; but it is a very powerful story, and a superb performance by Kevin Bacon in the lead. Admittedly, this slightly strains my criteria, since much of the film is courtroom based.

Carandiru

(Dir. Hector Babenco, 2003)

An even better film from Brazil's master director, inspired by real events in Sao Paolo's notorious Carandiru mega-prison (more of a vast apartment complex that just happens to be closed off from the outside world) where police SWAT teams responded to a 1992 mass riot by conducting a massacre.

Hunger

(Dir. Steve McQueen, 2008)

Another slightly outside-the-box choice, in that rather than being a standard prison story it focuses on the special case of the 1980s hunger strikes by IRA prisoners in Belfast's Long Kesh prison, and considers the conflict from the perspective of both the prisoners and the guards. It is a strange, terrible masterpiece, hauntingly beautiful - one of the best films I've seen in the last decade. And Michael Fassbender is absolutely stunning as the leader of the protests, Bobby Sands; he is now deservedly on his way to international stardom, but he'll probably never better this.

Haiku for the week

2012-01-27T00:53:00.008Z

Firecracker rattle

Sounds just like constant gunfire -

Unhappy memories.

I fail to see what is so festive about turning your city into a warzone for two or three weeks. Too many places have suffered this ordeal for real. This city has. The continual din of background explosions during the Chinese New Year holiday becomes very wearing on the nerves.

At least we are a third of the way through this year's insanity. But, as Marvin said: "The first million years were the worst. The second million years, they were the worst as well. The third million years were really awful. After that, I just went into a sort of decline."

More abstraction

2012-01-26T02:55:00.003Z

No, it's not in fact the crappiest brickwork in the world - although Beijing does have a lot of that. The bendiness of this wall (actually just a brick effect facing) is an optical illusion created by the reflection in the - presumably rather warped or wobbly! - plate glass windows in the adjacent office block.

A veil of tiers

2012-01-25T01:52:00.032Z

I am wrestling with statistics once again.

I'm trying to write a piece on domestic consumption profiles in China, and the data my employers have given me to work with is all over the place. For example, one stat - a survey on the new importance of 'healthy lifestyles' to better-off Chinese consumers - suggests that 4.5 million people can now be considered as displaying this preference; this, I am told, represents "1 in 16 people in China". Er, not if you accept the generally agreed population total of 1.3-and-a-bit billion, it doesn't. It's barely 1 in 30. What gives? (There is, alas, very little chance that even my laowai analyst colleagues would pause to query something like this, and absolutely none at all that any of the Chinese researchers would.)

My main concern, however, is not with identifying and quantifying specific consumer segments (we all know those kinds of numbers are just made up, anyway; although it is nice if our inventions can be at least vaguely plausible), but with the broad question of the urban/rural population split - what proportion of of the Chinese are still living "in the countryside", and how is the urban/rural distinction defined?

Almost everything you read about China's urban centres refers to a 'tier' classification. Unfortunately, this nomenclature is very slippery, and there is no standard definition of what the tiers are. The most thorough discussion I could find of the issue is here; but even these suggested criteria still leave considerable uncertainties - with occasionally vast divergences as to how many cities and which ones fall within the 1st and 2nd Tiers - because they don't take into account the problem of how one gauges the population (or the geographical size, or the GDP, or any other worthwhile metric) of a given city. City governments invariably control great swathes of territory far beyond their core urban area, and most population figures (etc.) quoted will usually be for that entire area, including outlying suburbs, satellite towns, expanses of open countryside; the population of the city proper is probably rarely more than 50% of the headline figure, and perhaps often less than 25% - but it depends where you draw the line.

So, allocating cities within the upper tiers and assessing their size/wealth is a thorny problem. But I am more concerned with the lower end - the so-called Tier 5 cities, communities still so comparatively bijou that they might not be considered as "urban" at all (although they are sure as hell a lot more "urban" than an isolated farmstead or a mountain village of a few dozen people - which are the kind of places where a lot of Chinese people [15%??] still live).

The data supplied by the management consultancy I'm doing this article for alleges that this Tier encompasses more than 20,000 settlements, with a total population of around 150 million people. Hmm - that doesn't sound like cities to me.

Indeed not. No, there is a recognised cohort of 'small cities' of much larger population than this, and which most lists number at around 500 (yes, that's in addition to the 42 cities that, even by the most conservative assessment of 'core urban population', number well over 1 million people; less finicky catalogues suggest that there are now more than 100 Chinese cities of this size; and then there are another 50 or so bubbling under with populations in the high hundreds of thousands). And these very numerous 'small cities' are commonly said to accommodate not a mere 11.5% of the country's population, but a far greater proportion, something around 25-30%.

In this article, for instance, I found a table of information on the city Tiers, said to be derived from the '2008 China City Statistical Yearbook' (no publisher cited). This repeats the commonly quoted figure of 494 cities in the "small, undeveloped" 5th Tier category (since we're now three years on, you can probably bump all of these figures up by at least 10%). However, certain aspects of these figures are very funny - funny peculiar, that is. In particular, the "median population" of these Tier 5 cities is said to be 609,000. Now, it would be very odd to give the median figure for this kind of thing; and you'd expect it to be lower than the arithmetic mean (because only 10 or 20% of cities in this category have attained a higher-than-average population size). I suspect this is a clumsy translation from a Chinese source, and that 'mean' was intended; although I suppose it is just as possible that it was the original Chinese survey that made this mistake.

I was initially sceptical about that 600,000 figure - but I was myself suffering the Chinese curse of misplacing a decimal place. I suppose that would give a total of 300 million for people living in this tier - which sounds about right (not 3 billion, as it had seemed to me at first!!).

However, it still doesn't solve my fundamental problem: are these Tier 5 'small cities' considered urban or rural?

Seasonal trade

2012-01-24T03:52:00.005Z

This is my friendly neighbourhood firework stall. You find one of these temporary kiosks every few blocks or so, and they'll be doing a fairly brisk business for the next two weeks - then disappear just as suddenly as they popped up a few days ago.

I failed to catch it in this picture, but the guy in the grey parka was smoking a cigarette as he pondered his purchases.

Yes, of course there's a sign warning that you shouldn't do this. But enforcement is patchy; it's more of a guideline.

Side effects

2012-01-23T14:10:00.005Z

With the two-and-a-bit week bore-a-thon of the Chinese New Year, we expect the days on end of unquiet sleep and shell-shock; we expect the choking palls of gunpowder smoke across the city (occasionally thick enough to close down the aiport!); we expect the plethora of crappy 'Temple Fairs' (crowds and carnies and bugger-all else); we expect the subway to be too heaved out to use during the daytime, but largely deserted at night; we expect it to be impossible to travel anywhere within China (online travel agent C-trip has been taunting me with 'special offers' of hotel rooms in the 'paradise city' of Lijiang in the temperate southern province of Yunnan supposedly available for as little as 70 rmb a night; the catch being that there is currently NO WAY to get to Lijiang!): we expect all our favourite restaurants to close for a while (without usually telling us exactly how long for); we expect it to be impossible to get a haircut for a fortnight or more either side of the dratted holiday.

That's the standard shit we have to endure at this time every year.

But this year, I've noticed two other curious phenomena that I think must be indirectly related to this dratted holiday:

1) The stink in my drains is back with a vengeance.

It was a nasty annoyance when I first moved in here a couple of months back, but I managed to clear it after a week or two. I speculate that its violent recurrence NOW is connected to the dramatically reduced occupancy in my building. My immediate neighbours are still here, but every other apartment on my floor seems deathly still; and taking a stroll in the courtyard last night around 10pm, I counted only half a dozen or so lights on - in a five building multi-storey complex that must comprise several hundred units. With little water-flow through the system, the sewers on the lower floors tend to get log-jammed...

2) There's no decent fruit to be had

There were some lovely apples, oranges, and bananas around during Christmas time, some of the best I've ever seen in China. Now, my small neighbourhood supermarket and the two nearby open-air markets I often use seem to have hardly any loose fruit - and what there is is deeply crappy quality. The reason, I surmise, is that all the good stuff has been assigned to the expensive boxed gift sets of fruit that are such a popular present when making house calls on friends and family at this time of year. (I don't know why I hadn't noticed this in previous years. Perhaps I don't always eat quite enough fresh fruit.)

Only another two weeks to go....

Bon mot for the week

2012-01-23T00:17:00.010Z

"If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."

Max Ehrmann (1872-1945)

Happy New Year! (AGAIN)

2012-01-22T05:28:00.017Z

[Traditional Chinese painting courtesy of Cindy Pon]

Today is the eve of Chunjie, the 'Spring Festival', or New Year in the Chinese lunar calendar.

Another of my online acquaintances, Cindy Pon - unreasonably talented author and artist - kindly gave me permission to use one of her exquisite Chinese brush paintings as a Greetings Card for you here. Do go and take a look at her website for more examples like this.

A happy and prosperous

Year of the Dragon

to all of you!!!

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Isobel Lang

2012-01-21T06:16:00.056Z

I usually attempt to disown the idea of having any particular type of woman that I am especially susceptible to, but... Well, yes, there are certain common factors in the women who most appeal to me, namely - being clever, elegant, tall... and having red hair (I just can't help myself; I think it must be a foible I've inherited from my Irish ancestors).

These desirable attributes have perhaps never been better combined than in the person of the lovely Isobel Lang, who burst upon British TV screens in the mid-1990s as a new BBC weather presenter. I'd never previously made a point of catching the forecasts every day, but Isobel had soon transformed my viewing habits. (I gather she's now moved to Sky, which is a rather less prestigious home, but - hopefully - a much higher paying one.)

I think she made a guest appearance once on the motoring show Top Gear, wherein I discovered that she owns a Morgan - a gorgeous hand-built retro sports car. It was the +4 model, if I remember correctly.

Beautiful, intelligent, and has good taste in cars?? Swoon...

Recently, on The Barstool...

2012-01-20T05:11:00.089Z

What's been happening over on my 'drinking blog' lately? Well, quite a lot...

The end of December traditionally sees a HUGE post on my picks of the best and worst from the year's bar and music scene happenings, The Froog Bar Awards (2011). As a prelude to that, I did a couple of my 'Top Five' roundups (slightly overlapping), on the year's most interesting new openings and on the nearly-but-not-quite bars that failed to establish 'Bar of the Year' credentials for themselves.

I have huffily renounced the Blue Frog 'restaurant' and its over-rated burgers, declined to lament the passing of up-itself music bar D-22, mocked the world's worst designed business card, been briefly suckered by one of China's notorious 'Shanzhai' copycat brands, shared yet more of my wisdom on hangovers, and discovered some rather wonderful gift ideas (one of which led me, at the end of the same post, to ask readers to nominate their favourite tippling authors - alas, there has been no response so far).

Thanks to new blog discovery booksandmusicandstuff, I have in the past couple of weeks been getting very nostalgic about my long-lost record collection, and about my musical 'education' in general. I was also inspired to produce a post - likely to be merely the first in a long, ongoing series - on some of my favourite basslines.

Other musical treats have included a couple of 'Christmas songs' from Tom Waits (well, one of them is actually by a cheeky soundalike), a blast of Chicago blues guitarist Jnr Boy Jones (who played the gig of the year in Beijing just before Christmas), some Johnny Cash (on the 44th anniversary of his celebrated Folsom Prison concerts), and just yesterday a tribute to the wonderful Janis Joplin (it would have been her 69th birthday).

You see why it's worth taking regular trips over to the 'dark side'? There's lots of good stuff over there.

Haiku for the week

2012-01-20T00:51:00.011Z

Battle's constant din;

The ghosts and demons routed -

All fleeing my way.

The great annual trauma of the Chinese Spring Festival celebrations has begun. I shall endeavour to spend as much as possible of the next 18 days in the protective cocoon of my apartment. I hope I've laid in enough provisions.

Jinxed!

2012-01-19T10:00:00.000Z

Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut about the difficulty of changing light-bulbs in China last week.

Just a few days ago, the only light in my kitchen suddenly cut out.

It is a circular neon strip bulb; so, immediately I am almost certain it will be impossible to obtain a replacement... other than - perhaps - from a specialist store in the 'lighting district' (yes, we have one).

But in order to attempt that, I must first remove the bulb from its mounting. And in order to do that, I must work out how to remove the lightshade.

There are no obvious catches anywhere on the shade: it appears to be moulded solidly to the rest of the mounting. And it is near impossible to examine, since it is flush to the ceiling. And it is hazardous even to try to touch the thing, since it is bolted to the ceiling.... and the ceiling consists of a series of flimsy metal 'planks' which are secured by... well, nothing very much, as far as I can see; fridge magnets, possibly. They pop loose and sag down alarmingly when I so much as lay a finger on the rogue light fitting.

I fear I am going to have to embrace the ignominy of asking my landlord how to change the light-bulb in the kitchen. And he's off home in Chengdu for the next fortnight.

If I need to do anything in my kitchen after dusk, I have to leave the fridge door open. Really.

Another 500 day

2012-01-19T09:26:00.001Z

Yesterday's weather in Beijing was decidedly misty. Foggy, in fact.

And when the air is damp, the pollution levels go through the roof - often approaching or surpassing the 500 rating, which is as high as most Air Pollution Indices measure.

I was reluctant to set foot outside in that murk, but I had some urgent shopping to do, so braved it for a couple of hours in the afternoon.

The air in my neighbourhood stank of sulphur dioxide. Really, almost enough to make you gag at times. I don't think that can have just been the build-up of exhaust fumes in the air; there must have been a tanker spill somewhere nearby. Or something. Not nice.

Progress?!

2012-01-18T05:28:00.008Z

Over the last several years, I have griped a lot - too much, perhaps - about the widespread obtuseness and inefficiency one encounters in China, and have at times been close to utter despair as to whether this country will ever catch up to the standards of foresight, consideration, and common sense that we rather take for granted in the developed world.

But the two guys who delivered and assembled my IKEA purchases for me last week - they actually gave me HOPE.

They didn't faff around for 10 or 20 minutes discussing how to divide up the work; they just got straight down to it. They didn't constantly hassle me with trivial enquiries or requests for confirmation of instructions; I happily got on with some e-mailing while they worked quietly around me. They were brisk and efficient, completing the job in a little over 40 minutes. They didn't botch anything, and have to backtrack and start again. They didn't even have to ask where the powerpoints were. And they didn't leave a mess.

Most remarkable of all, they didn't even have to ask me where I wanted the stuff put.

I mean, it might be blindingly obvious that a coffee table goes in the middle of the room in front of the TV set, and that the tall bookcase goes in the corner, in one of the only two available bits of empty wall space, while the two smaller bookcases might go in the slightly wider stretch of wall next to my desk.... Yes, it's not exactly rocket science. But to have a Chinese workman solve such a puzzle for himself?? Unheard of!!!!!!

Maybe things are slowly moving forward here, after all....

Strange fruit

2012-01-17T07:35:00.023Z

I just noticed some strange white objects scattered all over my terrace - whitish, wedge-shaped, a couple of inches or so long.

I wondered for a moment if someone down in the street had been pelting my apartment with jiaozi, the little dumplings that are especially associated with this holiday. Maybe bombarding foreigners with unwanted surplus jiaozi is becoming a quaint new Spring Festival tradition?

No. On closer examination, I discovered these alien objects to be large cloves of garlic.

The Chinese are prone to using their window ledges as larders, and when it gets a little windy... some of the food may get dumped on people down below.

Alas, I already have a couple of bulbs of garlic in stock, so I don't think I'm going to be able to make use of my unexpected windfall.

It's happening again

2012-01-17T07:25:00.010Z

Just when I was starting to feel ever so slightly more upbeat about staying in China for a while longer, just when I was starting to feel just a little more optimistic about my employment prospects here...
I get THE SILENT TREATMENT again.

I've been in tentative discussions for a while now (ahem, two-and-a-half years!) with a large Chinese law firm about developing some kind of permanent relationship with them to co-ordinate all of their various English language needs in editing, polishing, copy writing, client liaison, marketing and promotion, staff assessment and training, and so on. And we seemed to have taken a big step forward toward that goal when they suddenly invited me in for a meeting with one of the senior partners a couple of weeks ago.

But I guess that meeting didn't go so well.

What feedback did I get from them? NONE. Even after sending a follow-up e-mail of my own to a couple of the lower-ranked partners who'd set the thing up. Not even after sending a text message reminder about that follow-up. And then a follow-up to the follow-up.

How did I know it was DEAD? Call me psychic!

Bon mot for the week

2012-01-16T00:22:00.000Z

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."

Martin Luther King, Jnr (1929-1968)

Today is the Martin Luther King Day holiday in the US.

List of the Month - Lyrics Quiz

2012-01-14T02:10:00.013Z

A simple enough challenge this week: name the song, the writer, and the artist most associated with it.

Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezee!

Except that not many people have such unduly retentive memories as I do for such trivial things as lyrics. And not many people have such quirkily diverse musical tastes. Or... do you??

Let me know how you fare down in the comments. I'll post the answers there in a week or so. Good luck!

Froog's Song Lyric Quiz

God sends his spaceships to America - The Beautiful.

They land at six o'clock, and there we are - the dutiful:

Eating from TV trays, tuned in to 'Happy Days',

Waiting for World War Three while Jesus slaves...

I got wild staring eyes

And I got a strong urge to fly,

But I got nowhere to fly to...

Since I was eight I've loved you.

Through garden gates I've shoved you.

My new purple shoes been amazing the people next door,

And my rock-and-roll 45s been enraging the folks on the lower floor.

He gives the kids free samples

Because he knows full well

That today's young innocent faces

Will be tomorrow's clientele.

With the fingers of a potter

And the laughing tale of the fool,

The arranger of disorder

With your strange and simple rules

I'm so tired of playing,

Playing with this bow and arrow.

Gonna give my heart away,

Leave it to the other girls to play.

Well, it's true that I stole your lighter,

And it's also true that I lost the map,

But when you said I wasn't worth talking to,

I had to take your word on that.

Friday night, they'll be dressed to kill

Down at Dino's Bar & Grill.

10)

Oh, I'm so nervous,

I don't know what to do.

I light a cigarette.

I only smoke when I'm with you.

What the hell do I do that for?

11)

Still, I could think of a lot of worse places to be -

Like out on the streets, or down in the sewer,

Or even on the end of a skewer!

12)

Feeling like a paper cup

Floatin' down a storm drain;

Got myself a silk umbrella,

But I can't afford a drop o'rain.

One year ago today...

2012-01-13T04:41:00.001Z

... saw the first appearance in my comment threads - the de-cloaking - of Cedra, a talented artist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. [And NO, I can't ever think of that place name without hearing Bugs Bunny's voice!]

One of the great pleasures of this blogging malarkey (which I have often fretted is a perilously addictive and self-indulgent hobby) is that it acts as a magnet, gradually winning the attention of wider and wider circles of other bloggers and blog readers with whom one can establish contact. And a few of these develop into regular commenters and/or e-mail penpals. (Cedra, in fact, hasn't been such a frequent commenter; but she has had a very busy year! Check out her website Lights All Askew in the Heavens for more details of what she's been up to.)

There has proven to be an unexpectedly rich source of new friendships in what had seemed to be a perversely reclusive activity. And Cedra has become one of the most valued of these friends. It feels as though I've known her far longer than year.

Haiku for the week

2012-01-13T00:53:00.000Z

Unease, tension, dread,

Waiting for the first firework.

Calm before the storm.

Barman Mike tells me he's heard the odd explosion already in the hutongs further south from me. But around my way, it has been uncannily peaceful: not a single bang! as yet. Usually, you get kids starting to experiment with the ordnance at least a couple of weeks ahead of the Chinese New Year holiday, but this year.... an ominous silence reigns. And we're now only 9 days shy of the annual gunpowder apocalypse. I wonder what's up.

IKEA mathematics

2012-01-12T08:05:00.012Z

If it takes two experienced workmen with power tools 45 minutes to assemble three small bookshelf units, how long would it have taken me to achieve the same feat on my own?

It really doesn't bear thinking about, does it?

Was my 106 rmb fee (about £11) for 'delivery & assembly' worth it? Absolutely.

Staring at the ceiling

2012-01-12T03:06:00.020Z

One of the most curious phenomena to be spawned by the emergence of middle-class affluence in China over the past decade or so has been an obsession with interior design.

This is an art - or a science, or a blend of the two - that has had to be created here more or less ab nihilo. So, its hallmarks tend to be complexity rather than elegance, and fiddliness rather than functionality.

Now, these light fittings in my new apartment really look rather good: quite modernist, even a bit Art Deco-ish, instead of the cod Louis Quatorze multiple sconces and chandelier arrangements that central light fittings here so often attempt. But they are still woefully impractical. Like almost all Chinese light fittings I've ever seen, they are bolted to the wall or ceiling in elaborate, obscure, and nonsensical ways, which make it virtually impossible ever to change a failed bulb.*

* Even if you do manage to dismantle one of these confounded light fittings without causing injury to yourself or it, you might not be able to find a replacement bulb, anyway. There doesn't seem to be any standardization of light fittings. Most apartments have a bewildering variety of regular incandescent bulbs, energy-saving bulbs, and neon strips, in all kinds of different shapes, sizes, and wattages, and with screw, bayonet and clip-in mounts. In my last - fairly small - apartment, I counted 11 different kinds of light bulb in use. Even the two circular neon strips, the main central lights in the bedroom and the study, which appeared to have identical fittings/shades, proved upon examination to be of different sizes and mountings. My bedroom light failed a couple of months after I moved in; and I could not find a supermarket or hardware store for two or three miles in any direction that could give me a replacement for it. Since I don't do anything in my bedroom other than sleep, this was not such a big problem; I learned to go to bed in the dark. After nearly two years of that, I am having difficulty reprogramming myself to remember that light is once again an option at bedtime in my new place.

My kitchen - a photo essay

2012-01-11T05:12:00.003Z

My new kitchen is a big improvement on my last-but-one (and the last-but-two; and my last one, in fact, although that wasn't too bad; my first apartment in China didn't really have a kitchen at all). But it's still less-than-wonderful in a number of ways.

It's quite long, yes, which gives me much more counter space than you usually find in Chinese kitchens. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of worthwhile storage space, so the counter soon gets cluttered up with your rice-cooker, blender, coffee-maker, etc.

The kitchen is long, but narrow. Very wide-hipped people would have to move up and down it sideways (particularly now that I've brought in some bookshelves for food storage on the wall opposite the counter). In fact, very wide-hipped people probably can't even enter, since the fridge-freezer prevents the door from opening more than half-way. [It's quite common in China for a fridge to be placed in the living room or dining room rather than in the kitchen. Fridges, until recently, haven't been much of a thing here. In the winter - in the northern half of China, at any rate - you can preserve food by leaving it outside, on a balcony or stoop or windowsill. And in summer - well, you can't trust that food has been adequately refrigerated in transport and storage, so it's safer to try to buy the freshest produce you can on a day-by-day basis. There's also a persistent anxiety here about how much electricity fridges consume; the ultra-thrifty Chinese will often switch them off when they're "not using them" - i.e., when they're not at home, or when nobody else is looking. This is one of the most notorious hazards of sharing with a Chinese housemate. It is also one of the biggest drawbacks of shopping in small neighbourhood stores (the lady who runs the one downstairs in my building is so absurdly cost-conscious that she turns the lights off when there are no customers) or eating in cheap restaurants.]

So, my first gripe: there's not enough room for the fridge-freezer... or for any general cat-swinging, elbow-waggling activities (I can touch both walls at the same time, without getting anywhere near to a full extension of my arms).

Chinese gas-fired water-heaters are a source of constant aggravation. At least this one isn't inside a cupboard (like my last two were), but I still have concerns about carbon monoxide emissions - and I try to leave the window open whenever I'm doing a big session of washing up. Actually, it's a pretty good heater; much the best of its kind that I've yet encountered here. But the pilot light does cut out alarmingly frequently, and the electric ignition 'jams' (requiring the electricity to be unplugged in order to 'reset' it). The temperature readout is a work of fiction (this heater can allegedly pump out water at up to 80 degrees Centigrade, even on medium settings); in fact, all of the dials have to be ratcheted up to the max to produce water that is even moderately warm. And there's an odd resonance in the water pipes that sometimes produces a high-pitched whine for several minutes at a time (usually around midnight, when I'm just trying to get to sleep). Oh yes, the real doozie is this: the gas supply is shared with the cooking rings, and the pressure is too feeble to sustain both at the same time. I found during my small New Year's party the other week that every time a guest went to the bathroom (the washbasin taps are fed by the same water-heater), the flame under my pot of pumpkin soup was extinguished. Every time. A right pain in the bottom it is.

One of the reasons I don't have much in the way of wall cupboards is that I've got this instead. It is allegedly a crockery sterilizer. I have no idea how it is supposed to work, and I don't trust it to be all that efficacious - or even safe to operate. The wall-mountings aren't secure enough for me to trust using it even for crockery storage. I imagine this is evidence that my kitchen was equipped round about the time of the SARS outbreak in 2003. This kind of unnecessary - mostly probably bogus - 'safety' appliance became all the rage for a while around then.

At least my extractor hood works - sort of. The fact that the brand name - Shuaikang - is upside down doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the appliance has been correctly installed, but... it does make loud windy noises; and burning smells disappear eventually.

Notice also that this photograph is taken more or less at my eye level. The top of the extractor hood is just below the level of my chin, which makes it a little hard to see what's going on in the pots on the stove. I suffer similar vexations with the kitchen sink. The top of the sink (and the counter work surfaces) are only a few inches above my knees; the bottom of the sink is about level with my knees; the top of the mixer tap (which, of course, only has a few inches clearance above the sink) is well below the level of my waist. I got a stiff back doing the washing up after my party. Chinese kitchens are built for very short people.

And, of course, what might be a moderately nice view looking out over the kitchen sink - my terrace, and the far side of a bustling, low-rise street - is almost completely obscured by all the landlord's junk piled up outside the window. This is China. THIS is a Chinese kitchen.

Bah, humbug!

2012-01-10T03:08:00.003Z

My new apartment came pre-equipped with a "traditional" Chinese New Year decoration - a "lucky" red lantern.

Now, the traditional decoration, I believe, would be an actual lantern rather than an ugly hunk of cardboard; it would be hung outside the house, rather than in the middle of the living room; and it would be displayed for the period of the New Year holiday only - not left up year-round.

Chinese apartments tend not to be all that generous in their allowance of headroom. Mine is better than some I've seen, but the ceiling is probably only about 7'6" high (I can touch it quite comfortably, only going slightly on tiptoe). So, this bloody great cardboard box hanging from the central light-fitting was not much more than 5' clear of the floor, and I would bash my head on it quite regularly as I tried to duck and weave under or around it in crossing the room.

I had been thinking of leaving it up for Chinese New Year (which is now fairly imminent). I quickly repented of that thought. The pointless eyesore has now been removed.

Can you guess what it is?

2012-01-09T06:38:00.009Z

I was a bit flummoxed at first. And I'd seen where it came from.

But I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this before.

It is a smell trap - to be placed into the drains in your bathroom floor. The idea is that they have a small hatched door three-quarters of the way up which can be lifted by water; so, until they're nearly full, they are closed, and provide a seal against the horrible smells (and so on) that may be lurking in the pipes below.

This is very necessary in China, because all the drains go into the same pipe - yes, the sewage pipe - and the Chinese are still largely unfamiliar with the simple miracle of the S-bend. (5,000 years of history, and they haven't discovered plumbing yet!)

Unfortunately, of course, this being China, the design is seriously flawed: the hinged door sticks, is not easily lifted by the rising water; it gets clogged by hair and dirt in less time than it takes to have a shower; and even when clean, unobstructed, and with its hinge moving freely, the opening is far too small to allow the ready passage of the volumes of water produced by your average shower nozzle. Result: the bathroom floods every time you have a shower; and you have to remove the traps at regular (daily!) intervals for maintenance, which allows the disgusting drain stench to escape into your apartment.

Ah, China.

Bon mot for the week

2012-01-09T00:10:00.002Z

"It is tact that is golden, not silence."

Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

The warmest place to hide?

2012-01-07T02:11:00.032Z

You may already have seen this, since it seems to have become one of the first big viral hits of the year on the Internet; but, having nothing else much to blog about on this dull, snowy Saturday morning, I thought I'd share it with you.

A young Brit called Lee Hardcastle (from Leeds, I suspect; although I'm becoming very inexpert at accent differentiation as a result of my diminished exposure over the past decade-and-a-half) makes rather fine, nicely grotesque 'claymation' shorts in a home studio. His latest effort is a two-minute distillation of John Carpenter's horror classic The Thing - rendered with Pingu characters. [Loyal readers may remember that I have a particular affinity for the cute penguin.]

This is surely one of the best calling cards ever made, and I fully expect young Mr Hardcastle to be working with Nick Park or Tim Burton quite soon. Check out more of his stuff on his website or his YouTube account.

Alas, it also seems likely that this video will get pulled quite quickly for infringing the Pingu copyright. So, enjoy it while you can.

My liver has been badly destroyed [War on Chinglish - 22]

2012-01-06T02:56:00.073Z

I pluck an example there from my own experience, of course.

Among Chinese English speakers, it's more common to encounter something like

My car was badly destroyed in the accident

My coat was badly destroyed at the dry cleaners.

It's an astonishingly common slip, and it always gives me a good laugh. It arises from a failure to appreciate the strength of the verb/participle destroyed.

In most cases, it would be more appropriate to use damaged instead:

My car was badly damaged in the accident.

You see, destroyed means 100% damaged: it is AS BAD AS IT CAN BE. So, it is incongruous – ridiculous – to use intensifying adverbs like badly or severely with it.

I'm not quite sure how this one comes about. I suspect it might be down to a faulty definition in a Chinese textbook or teaching dictionary.

There are several ways of expressing this sort of idea in Chinese, but I'm not sure what their nuances are, or if they all ignore the distinction between partial and total damage. One of the most common seems to be 受害, shouhai, which does have a very general range of meaning: to be a casualty, to suffer an injury of some kind; it appears to be used both of physical harm to the person and of loss of property, and can sometimes even imply a fatality. So, maybe there's our culprit...

Haiku for the week

2012-01-06T00:25:00.003Z

Energy stifled;

Succession of holidays;

Breakwater tames the sea.

Sometimes, when Chunjie comes late in the year, in early or mid-February, there is a chance of the Chinese economy - or my own modest little corner of it - reviving briefly in January.

But this year, the big holiday is coming relatively early: Chinese New Year's Eve will be January 22nd.

So, most foreign executives quit the country for a holiday a week or two before Christmas; a week after Christmas, we get the Western New Year (which has recently become a mandated day off work - two days off work - in China also); and less than three weeks after that, we get the week (or two, or three) of revelry for the Chinese New Year, and all of the massive disruption that causes (with half the population attempting to travel somewhere, and billions of dollars worth of ordnance being exploded on the streets every day).

So, I'm barely a third of the way into what is likely to be a two or three-month spell of having no work at all. And I'm going a little stir crazy already.

I ought to get back in marathon training, write my novel, learn Spanish, take a trip to Cambodia... but something is keeping me chained to my sofa. Ho hum.

Why I never answer my phone

2012-01-05T05:54:00.001Z

I never have much liked speaking on a mobile phone.

I'm not that worried about the possible link between microwave radiation and brain cancer, because I'm never going to use a mobile often enough for that to be a factor for me.

I'm rather more concerned about foisting your conversations on others in public spaces. In the good old days, we used to only have phone conversations in private - at home, in the office, inside a well soundproofed phone booth. But now we're surrounded by telephone conversations being carried on in public. They bug the hell out of me (even if the participants aren't yelling their heads off, to be heard above the background noise - which they usually are), and I don't want to become part of this social blight.

Then, there's the issue of practicality. If I'm out and about, I'm probably in a meeting, where I can't answer the phone; or travelling to a meeting on the subway, where there's only very patchy reception; or out on the street, where - in Beijing - there's usually far too much ambient noise even to hear the damn phone ring, let alone to be able to hear what anyone's trying to say to you.

And even if I'm at home, I hate the intrusiveness of a phone call. I always have, even in the days when we only had landlines. I am irked by the presumption of people who feel that you ought to drop whatever you're doing and speak to them right now. In the past, there was some excuse for this: when there were no other convenient means of communication, you had to accept that you were lucky to be near the phone when somebody happened to be trying to get in touch with you; and for the sake of that facility of contactability, you would put aside your irritation at being interrupted in the middle of something more interesting or important; you could even get over the fact that you weren't very happy to hear from this particular caller, because this was the price you paid for being available to others who you might want to speak to.

But now we've got e-mail - which will usually get my attention within an hour, if I'm working at home; and within a day, even if I'm not. And we've got SMS, which will usually get my attention within a few minutes.

You no longer have any excuse to be insisting on gaining my attention instantly. Send me a goddamn text message instead!

However, the main reason why I never answer my phone any more has nothing to do with these issues of principle or practicality; it's just that I tend to set the thing on 'Mute' (especially overnight; Chinese spammers usually call in the wee small hours, which can be a grievous interruption to your slumbers), and then forget to undo that... sometimes for days at a time.

And I realise that I've got even worse at this just lately. A few months ago, I switched to using a new phone; well, a new old phone - a little Nokia that I picked up to use with my Vodaphone service in the UK the last time I was back home. I've been using Sony Ericssons for several years here in China. And on those - and every other type of phone I've ever seen or used - there is a quick way to mute or unmute your phone: usually a single button-press from the keypad, or two-step process via the 'shortcuts' menu.

No such simplicity with the Nokia! NO. You have to select 'Menu'; then scroll down one space to 'Settings' and select that; scroll down two places to 'Profiles' and select that; scroll down one or two places to 'Silent' and select that; then press 'Activate' to confirm the selection. 9 button presses to complete one function!!

I think this may be the worst piece of user-interface design I have ever seen!

Thank you, that is all.

That's me, that is

2012-01-04T09:12:00.009Z

It seems there is no need to create anything new any more - a cartoon, a t-shirt slogan, a short story - because the Internet enables you to instantly track down a few dozen other people who've already done a serviceable job on the idea for you.

The other day - as I wrestled with my brutal turn-of-year mood slump - I wondered if anyone had ever tried to do a cartoon rendering of a 'bi-polar bear'... YES!!!

These were two of my favourites.

[This one, apparently, by graphic designer Vincent Alcivar.]

[And this one is by a G.J. Caulkins, at The Mighty Wombat cartoon blog.]

New Picks of the Month

2012-01-04T02:15:00.002Z

What were my best posts from the beginning of the year after the Olympics? Let's see...

From Froogville, I select this frippery on Actors who might play Froog on the movie screen.

Over on The Barstool, it's a particularly tough choice for this month. I think I'll go for A favourite metaphor revisited, an observation on how I view my relationship with a favourite bar exactly as I do a love affair.

[Close runners-up were this poem on Drying Out; this reminiscence of Hogan's, one of my favourite ever bars (in a suburb of Philadelphia); The Formula?, some romantic advice from a friend that I was scornful of trying to follow myself; and my pair of earth-shattering theories, the Three Pint Rule and The Three Month Rule.]

I hope you'll enjoy this month's little jaunt in the time-machine.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for December

2012-01-03T08:08:00.000Z

December has often been an excessively busy blogging month for me, with little or no work to distract me, and lots of seasonal excuses for additional holiday-related frivolity. This year, I managed to keep myself in check reasonably well. Then again, being laid up in bed for two weeks with a horrific cold probably helped.

Anyway...

Last December, there were 38 posts and nearly 14,000 words on Froogville.

There were 32 posts and around 13,500 words on Barstool Blues (largely thanks to the bumper end-of-year Beijing Bar Awards post).

Ooh, and I see that just yesterday The Barstool acquired a new reader in Aubonne, a village in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. Please say 'hi' in the comments somewhere.

A New Year's bon mot

2012-01-02T00:37:00.002Z

"We hope without even realising it. That's where all these unexpected disappointments come from."

Froog

A timely reminder

2012-01-01T02:28:00.001Z

A few of my foreign friends, I think, might well be set to spend their whole lives here.

But that has never been my plan. This is not a country I would care to imagine myself dying in... or growing old in... or even growing much older in...

This coming year might be - should be - the year of my escape...

Happy New Year, everyone!!

Review of the Year (what I've been wittering about in 2011)

2011-12-31T02:28:00.004Z

My year-end roundup last December proved to be quite a popular post, so I thought I'd attempt something similar this year.

What I was writing about in 2011

It was a year of milestones: I entered upon my tenth year of living in China; I passed my 100,000th official 'visitor' here on Froogville, and my 50,000th on The Barstool; both the blogs reached their 5th anniversaries. I celebrated this event with an account of how I came to be a blogger, and with a 'collecting box' post seeking readers' suggestions of their unusual super-power (along with an attendant 'Nemesis'). It was also the centennial of Irish humourist Brian O'Nolan, one of my favourite writers, and the 25th anniversary of Nothing To My Name, a landmark hit for the founding figure of Chinese rock'n'roll, Cui Jian.

There were dark clouds at times in 2011. My artist friend Wu Yuren went through a faltering, oft-adjourned fiasco of a trial, without any verdict being reached, and spent the first three months of the year in a detention centre - making a total of 10 months that he was kept away from his family - before finally being released. An online friend was injured in the Tucson shooting in January. I had some serious health worries of my own through the middle of the year. And, much as I try to resist getting too serious or too topical on here, I was unable to avoid making some observations on the sickening Foshan hit-and-run incident in October.

Other more earnest posts - but leavened, I hope, with some wry humour - included further denunciations of Twitter (and its Chinese version, Weibo), and the ghastly e-book phenomenon; a disturbing parallel between the last years of the Qianlong Emperor and present times; grumps about the Chinese censors' assault on Witopia (only very briefly successful) and the meltdown of Beijing's subway system; an exposé of a widespread misperception about the size of the customer base for China's Internet giant Tencent; and a Cassandra-like warning on the longer-term prospects for the Chinese economy. I also pondered dejectedly on the Jasmine Revolution's failure to materialise (although this did suggest to me a promising concept for a new bar), remained resolutely unexcited about the 90th birthday party for the Chinese Communist Party, and identified the mass exodus of the Chinese upper-middle class as one of the key safety valves that is deferring possible revolution.

Quirkier China observations included my discovery of how Beijing massage parlours are able to offer sexual services legally; a life-affirming good taxi driver experience (particularly welcome in a year in which Beijing's taxi service has declined alarmingly); a bar owner friend improvising a risky remedy for a fizzled firework fuse; the TV watchdog trying to ban time travel; and the realisation that one of the reasons Chinese universities are rubbish is that they don't encourage enough frivolity among the student body. I declined to purchase some sausages that were 5 months past their use-by date, witnessed some panic-buying of salt after the Fukushima nuclear accident, and discovered that there is a special word for the Chinese propensity to eat things you really shouldn't. I also encountered China's (possibly the world's) worst-dressed woman, observed an unusual game of cards, discovered some very odd toys, and experienced a flood of nostalgia for outdoor pool tables. I enjoyed an inflammatory cartoon about a 'rabbit rebellion', and learned that the Chinese word for 'rabbit' has a very unfortunate homophone (this has been The Year of the Rabbit, in the Chinese zodiac system). And I compiled a list of the Chinese words likeliest to gain adoption into global English.

In the realm of work, I have been dismayed at the thoroughgoing incompetence of Chinese lawyers. I have continued to be appalled (but unsurprised) at Chinese academics' inability to distinguish between different types of source, their exuberant mixing of metaphors, their transparent plagiarising, their rampant redundancy, and their hybristic belief that they can interpret subtle nuances of Western popular culture (even the jokes in South Park!!). I was particularly vexed by a chap who managed to conflate four or five different uses of the word 'enlightenment'. And I've wondered whether any of this might be helped by the introduction of a 'Causal Friday'.

I have begun to feel pangs of homesickness (or perhaps just China ennui, or more specifically a growing disenchantment with Beijing), and have contemplated trying to walk back to the UK (my restless wanderlust, I realise, can be attributed to a formative childhood influence). I've also considered relocating to somewhere less stressful in China (I've even got a house in mind); or perhaps opening a bar of my own (in Malaysia!).

In a review of my Googlewhackiness, I listed some of the unlikely search terms that will guide you to my blogs. A walk in the country nearly ended in death. One of my dreams was enchantingly musical (or musically enchanting); another was all about bars. I turned up a satirical quip about the slack morals of foreigners in Shanghai, crashed the China Potato Expo, learned how to gauge the mood of llamas, and was disturbed by an unfortunate juxtaposition of businesses next to my holiday hotel. I've shared my thoughts on barrister's wigs, reflected on all the more exotic places than Beijing in which I might have lived, demonstrated why nobody really wants to see any of my photographs, reminded you of the importance of being careful with electricity, been disappointed that The Rapture once again failed to occur, discovered some fascinating patterns in inter-disciplinary crossover in American academe, realised the disturbing fact that all my favourite films end with the death of the protagonist, and sketched out a treatment for an action film about EFL teachers starring Jason Statham.

In a surge of nostalgia for my 1970s childhood, I enrolled TV commercial siren Valerie Leon and delectable actress Jane Seymour among my 'Fantasy Girlfriends'. I also - rashly! - attempted to set out in some detail the template for my ideal woman/real-life girlfriend.

I assembled a number of different versions of Bohemian Rhapsody (bluegrass band Hayseed Dixie's was particularly enjoyable) for a video post. I was reminded that the Theme From Shaft is an irresistible cure for depression (ironically enough, Led Zeppelin's Black Dog may be an even better one; but I haven't got around to posting that yet). The song Be Like A Duck I have also found to be a great stress-buster, and to encapsulate valuable life advice. I celebrated St Patrick's Day with some classic versions of the Scots/Irish farewell song, The Parting Glass. I discovered a wonderfully strange guitar. This tribute to film composer John Williams (by Salt Lake City a cappella comedy group Moosebutter) is splendid too. And finally, I shared a list of my favourite amusing album names, and another of favourite movie songs (ones that - strangely! - hadn't made it into the American Film Institute's 'Top 100')

On the poetry front, we began the year with some painfully apposite lines from T.S. Eliot. I have also flaunted my classical education by offering up poems of my own inspired by Xenophon and Horace, and I have made a cup of tea for Mr Death.

In the world of my bar blog, I enjoyed one nearly perfect day, met Lassie, discovered an unlikely new drinking role model, and rescued the world's ugliest kitten. I have learned an interesting fact about the history of lager making, been reminded how wonderful Beer Lao is, and ventured briefly, bravely into what is in all probability Beijing's worst bar. I've mused on the important question of why all Norwegian women are gorgeous, and grumped about how obnoxious young Irishmen seem to have become in the last couple of decades. I reflected on the evolution of my bar-hopping habits in Beijing, grouched about excessive booze prices here (a call-to-arms which has gone sadly ignored!), explained why I have fallen so decisively out of love with Dos Kolegas (once my favourite music bar), and recalled some of my most embarrassing 'morning after' experiences.

Among the Barstool posts of rather broader interest, I have produced an important bon mot on the usefulness of drink, and shared more of my wisdom on hangovers. I've also discussed the etiquette of where to stand in the men's toilet, suggested how the expat magazines might improve their 'Bar of the Year' polls, advised on how to hold a successful music festival, discoursed on the essence of the stag party, identified some overlooked or unexpected failings of many bars and restaurants, and formulated some simple Rules of Drinking.

Solid gold, all of that. Well, most of it.

Do dip in at random, if you're a first-time visitor here - or if you missed any of this stuff first time around.

And don't forget: the Froog Bar Awards for 2011 are now posted over on The Barstool.

The Curse

2011-12-31T01:44:00.008Z

I had been thinking of having a small gathering - a pre-New Year's Eve warm-up sort of affair - round at my place this afternoon for a select few friends.

But a sudden spell of foggy and snowy weather over north-east China for the last couple of days may have jeopardised the travel plans of people who were supposed to be returning from visits home in time for the New Year.

And now I discover that the Chinese government has decreed that today should be a working day.

Of course!

The technocrats think:

The Western New Year is of very little interest to our Chinese people, not one of our traditional festivals. But we must start making it a holiday for them, just to show how 'modern' (though not 'Westernized', of course - oh no!) we have become. What's that? It falls on a Sunday this year? Well, let's take a leaf out of the crazy British book of workers' welfare and give our hardworking populace the following day off in lieu. Splendid! Oh, what about lost productivity? Hm, better make the preceding Saturday an additional working day, then... Sorted!

Really. New Year's Day is of no significance in this country at all. Except that, because of it, this year everyone is being forced to take Monday off work, but to work this Saturday instead.

I'm beginning to think 'they' do it just to sabotage my housewarming parties...

TODAY, over on The Barstool....

2011-12-30T02:29:00.006Z

I've just posted my annual Froog Bar Awards.

So, if you're curious as to which bars in Beijing I like most, and least... or where to find the best cocktails... or where to steer clear of the nachos... or which was the best visiting foreign band this last year... or...

Well, it's ALL there in one handy package. Go and take a look.

Haiku for the week

2011-12-30T00:52:00.000Z

Hell is nicely furnished...

Crowds become oppressive...

Exit can't be found.

I went to IKEA yesterday. Catching it at lunchtime during a holiday period was a particularly bad move: custom was close to the normal weekend peaks, but 80% or 90% of the staff had gone on a break, resulting in logjam queues everywhere. Hell on earth.

It's the struggle to find the way out that is always particularly wretched. I absolutely HATE that place.

Making a point

2011-12-29T08:25:00.016Z

Earlier this year, a Chinese businessman from Qingdao hired a team of workers to trash his brand new Lamborghini Gallardo with sledgehammers, because he was dissatisfied with the after-sales service he'd received from the car's China distributor.

Now, I've been known to suffer the odd fit of pique myself from time to time, especially over unsatisfactory service. And I appreciate the cathartic thrill of a bit of wanton destruction occasionally. Better out than in, and all that.

But I do worry that the Chinese tend to lose their rag rather more easily than most other peoples, often over the most trivial of slights.... and then to lose all sense of proportionality in their response to the perceived insult. And these bloody cars cost something like 5 million RMB, for heaven's sake! Remember what I was saying about China's new breed of tycoons the other week? More money than sense!!

At least this chap did this (partly) to help publicise World Consumer Rights Day on March 15th.

However, this is a class of consumer for whom I find it difficult to muster any respect.

A seasonal Daily Llama

2011-12-29T02:57:00.009Z

This is, I think, somewhere in China's chilly north-east. It might be Harbin...

A higher mathematics?

2011-12-29T00:52:00.003Z

The online weather forecasts never seem to work out all that well for China, and especially not for Beijing. The 5-day forecasts are, of course, particularly unreliable; but even the 24-hour ones go bizarrely astray at times.

And then, sometimes, even the 'current' news seems to be completely up the spout. This morning, for example, Weather Underground is assuring me that there is a "0% chance of precipitation" today, even though it is already snowing.

I wonder if there can be some mathematical justification of this apparent aberration: when the likelihood of precipitation tends toward infinity, does it somehow flip back to zero?

Or is it more of a semantic thing? When snow has become an actuality, there's no more 'likelihood' about it?

Enquiring minds want to know.

It really is incredibly hard to learn [Why I don't learn Chinese - 16]

2011-12-28T02:31:00.015Z

I was sent a link recently to this excellent essay (written more than 20 years ago, it would seem), Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, by David Moser, an academic Sinologist and long-time Beijing resident. It is a pretty exhaustive account of why Chinese is such a uniquely difficult language to learn (for non-East Asians, particularly; but, in fact, for everyone, even the Chinese themselves).

In this occasional series, I mostly confine myself to a more personal response to the challenge of learning Chinese - pondering my particular learning handicaps, my lack of emotional engagement with the language, my doubts about its practical utility (even for someone living in China - and certainly for anyone living anywhere else!), and so on. I haven't often attempted to address the qualities of the language itself that make it so dauntingly difficult to learn. I suppose I don't really need to; Moser has had the last word on that. [His bibliography includes a link to an article by another eminent Sinologist, Victor Mair, on the near-impossibility of using a Chinese dictionary.]

Moser warns us:

"Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. [My emphasis] Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed."

So, you see, it's not just me.

Of course, Moser may have modified his view somewhat in the interim - now that he has, I'm sure, attained a much higher level of mastery in the language than back when he was a struggling graduate student. And he was clearly being at least slightly tongue-in-cheek when he observed a few lines later in the essay:

"Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say, 'I've come this far - I can't stop now' will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes."

Nevertheless, beneath the overlay of humorous exaggeration, I think his argument is basically earnest and accurate. Chinese is, for all sorts of reasons, much, much harder to learn than almost any other language. Only dedicated translators and academics can realistically expect to ever achieve a reasonably high level of functioning in it. And, in order to do that, they must be prepared to give up many hundreds - nay, probably many, many thousands - of hours of soul-crushing effort to study and practice.

If mastering Chinese is not to be one of the central aims of your life, is it worth bothering with it at all?

Well, that's what this series of mine is about. I haven't yet found any convincing argument that it is worth bothering with - but I remain open to suggestions on the point.

Just what I didn't want for Christmas!

2011-12-27T08:35:00.006Z

Wandering around the Internet earlier today, I chanced upon humour site Gimme A Break. This collection of toilet signs was pretty good, but the real stop-you-in-your-tracks post was this one on some recent Chinese toy designs. I thought these 'sex education' (I assume? "Go on, Johnny - cut the umbilical cord!") dolls were quite bad enough....

... but WHAT on earth is going on with this monstrosity?

Don't have nightmares!

Sign your name... and again... and again...

2011-12-27T06:29:00.007Z

One of the most remarkable - and cumulatively irritating - things about the Chinese bank experience is the amount of paperwork involved.

Cancelling my lost bank card and ordering a replacement last week took getting on for 15 minutes. That was at least four times as long as it had taken me to withdraw half the money in the account! And at the end of all that, I was required to sign four separate forms - all of them in duplicate, triplicate, or quadruplicate. (No kidding! At least they were carbon copies.) That's in addition to the rather complicated form I'd had to fill in to request this 'transaction' at the outset. And on every one of these five forms, I seemed to have to sign in a different place. Even if I could recognise the relevant Chinese characters for 'Sign here' or whatever, it would be pretty difficult to distinguish them amid such a morass of other unknown characters on these Chinese-only forms (few, if any, of the banks here seem to provide any dual-language forms as yet).

And on top of all that, I was repeatedly called upon during this protracted procedure to key in my PIN at the counter - presumably to confirm that I was still present and supervising the clerk's activities. I wasn't asked to confirm or assent to any particular action (maybe the poor clerk just thought this would be too difficult to try to explain to me?); but then again, this didn't seem to be just a passage-of-time security requirement. Sometimes I would be called upon to enter my PIN again within a minute or thirty seconds, but then I might be left unbothered for several minutes. At times I was asked for the PIN just once; at others, I had to enter it twice - and once, thrice - in quick succession. I lost count, but I think I must have keyed in the PIN a total of at least 15 times, over some 10 or more separate occasions.

And you know what, I bet most of those forms were in a wastebasket by the end of the day. This is not the way to save the forests, people.

Bon mot for the week

2011-12-26T00:25:00.010Z

"Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."

Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

A Christmas Card from China

2011-12-25T00:31:00.005Z

[This image was made by an artist called El Darko.]

A holiday treat

2011-12-24T02:28:00.136Z

Thanks to the indispensable JES (who offered up a little playlist of seasonal songs for his regular readers a couple of days ago), I was led to this fascinating history of one of the greatest wintery songs, and one of the greatest of all duets, Baby, It's Cold Outside. It was composed by Frank Loesser, who wrote both music and lyrics, and is perhaps best known for the Damon Runyon musical Guys and Dolls. It seems he wrote this piece not for a show, but as an entertainment for his own house-warming party in 1944. For three years or so after that, he performed it regularly as a party piece with his first wife, Lynn, but the song enjoyed no commercial circulation. Eventually, realising that it was one of the best things he'd written and that he had to let it go out into the world, he sold the song to MGM who used it in an Esther Williams vehicle called Neptune's Daughter. It won the Oscar for Best Song in 1949, but apparently his wife wasn't best pleased about him having given up their private treasure.

I grew up with the classic version by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jourdan on the Ella and her Fellas anthology. More recently, I have come to like this Welsh transposition (they have the weather for it!) by Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews. [There are some fun live performances by this pair out there as well, of which this one seems to have the best picture quality.]

This version by Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell in Elf is rather sweet, too.

However, courtesy of that first link from JES - to the American Songwriter website - we can enjoy an extra special treat. This is where it all began: a rare recording from National Public Radio of Frank and Lynn Loesser singing their song. (Audio only, but magical.)

If you are still eager for more, the Songbook blog has a fairly comprehensive collection of videos of the numerous other recorded versions of this duet, and of a number of other seasonal favourites too - some hours of pleasant distraction.

Happy holidays, everyone!

A cash-strapped Christmas

2011-12-23T02:30:00.012Z

There is never a good time to lose your bank card. Especially in China, where replacing one is an absurd and galling rigmarole. But Christmas - a time of no work and much partying and heavy cash expenditure - is probably just about the very worst time for that to happen.

So, yes, I know, it's my own stupid fault.

At the Bank of China, you have to pay a 15 rmb administration charge to get a new card issued - a trivial amount, but irritating nonetheless. What's more annoying is that they insist you pay in cash; for some reason, they can't just deduct it from your account balance. This could be mightily inconvenient if you happen to have lost your wallet as well as your bank card, but fortunately I hadn't. It is mightily inconvenient for the bank, too, since people carry mostly wads of 100rmb notes, and are going to be asking for lots of small change back.

Then you have to wait 10 to 12 days for your new card to be issued. What the hell???

When you open a new account, they give you a card immediately; every bank clerk has a stack of them under the counter. Chinese bank cards aren't personalised in any way: they're not printed with your name, or any number specifically connected to your account. So, assigning a given card to someone's account is all done on the computer. A new card could therefore be issued on the spot. Even if cards had to be individually crafted from fine jade and engraved with a unicorn's horn, you'd think they'd be able to turn one out for you in 3 or 4 days. Two weeks??!!

Ah, but the icing on the cake is this: while you are waiting for your new bank card to be issued and activated, your account is completely frozen - you can't even take money out using your pass-book. (I'm not sure if it's 'frozen' against inpayments as well; but, this being China, it very well might be!)

The only positive element of this latest bank experience of mine was that the clerk who served me was astute enough to point out that my bank account would be useless until some time in January before she filed my 'lost card' notice. If she hadn't done that, I really would be having a Pot Noodle Christmas. I think I got very lucky there.

I think a Chinese banks are CRAP! series may be appearing on here in the New Year.

Haiku for the week

2011-12-23T00:18:00.000Z

More dark days ahead

Hope yet finds some room to grow

After the solstice

We do get some very pretty light at this time of year. I am itching to get out and take some photographs; but I fear my state of health dictates that I should cosset myself at home for a few days.

No EFFIN way?!

2011-12-22T02:56:00.063Z

My pal The Choirboy, an avid consumer of Oirish news, kindly sent me this link to an Irish Times article a week or so ago. We learn that Marie Kennedy is aggrieved with Facebook for refusing to let her list her tiny hometown of Effin, Co. Limerick as her location, on the grounds that it might be found offensive.

It appears that a number of other uses of 'Effin' - clearly intended as an oblique profanity - have been allowed elsewhere on Facebook. I have discovered, for example, that there's a recently launched guitar dealership in Butler, Missouri called Effin Guitars. So, it's not clear exactly what Zuckerberg's drones are taking issue with. Perhaps they simply don't believe the place exists.

As we can see from the Google Earth view above, it only just barely exists. Effin, in fact, seems to be a solitary large farmhouse. Its satellite community of Lower Effin, a couple of hundred yards down the road, appears to be a rather more developed hamlet with possibly two or three distinct addresses.

I remember a holiday in Ireland about 20 or so years ago when I came upon one such community during a Sunday afternoon stroll with my girlfriend. It was rather more substantial than Effin appears to be. For a start, it straddled a T-junction, where one minor road met a slightly less minor road. In fact, the less minor road led all the way to Dublin, and there were occasional buses; so, for rural Ireland, this was quite a bustling transport hub. Well, back then - Christmas 1990, as it happens - this community consisted of a small petrol station (which appeared to be in mothballs), a church (Church of Ireland rather than Catholic, long since closed), a village shop (closed when we passed through), two or three or houses.... and two pubs. A very generous provision for a local population that might well have been in single figures, and probably not more than a few dozen if you included all the farms for quite some distance round about. But it always seems to be so in Ireland: every village, no matter how unsubstantial, must have at least one pub, usually two or three. On this occasion, by some strange cosmic coincidence, the pub to the left of the junction bore my family name and the one to the right bore my girlfriend's. "You go to yours and I'll go to mine," I quipped. She was not amused. We went to 'hers'. I've always wanted to go back and try the other one some day.

There is an acronym for it

2011-12-21T03:29:00.004Z

I learned a new term the other day, while writing about China's burgeoning luxury sector for a business consultancy: HNWI.

That's High Net Worth Individual - defined as having investable assets of US$1 million or more. There's also an Ultra-HNWI classification, with assets in excess of 30 million dollars. China is reckoned to have around 10,000 of the latter. And they're migrating into the Renminbi billionaire echelon (assets over US$160 million - nearly 2,000 of them now!) at the rate of several hundreds per year.

I've always preferred to think of them as China's Unscrupulous Nouveau-riche Tycoons.

Passing on

2011-12-20T02:38:00.008Z

It's a strange coincidence that two such prominent political figures should succumb to mortality in quick succession.

And I find it rather unfortunate that the exaggerated geo-political prominence of North Korea may result in news of the transition of power there distracting some attention away from proper remembrance of the much-worthier-of-attention Václav Havel.

I'm not without a certain grudging respect for Kim Jong-il. He appears to have been an intelligent and cultured man, and a dauntingly shrewd political operator. But he was also a dictator, a murderer, and a self-indulgent bon viveur who gorged himself on the finest food and drink - even while tens of thousands of his people starved to death.

Havel was an inspiration for the ages, rather than an object of fear and ridicule for a few decades. He's been a hero of mine since my school days. President Obama noted in his initial tribute on Sunday:

"His peaceful resistance shook the foundations of an empire, exposed the emptiness of a repressive ideology, and proved that moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon."

He was, by all accounts, an exceptionally warm and generous human being as well. And a pretty funny writer. There's a good obituary on Bloomberg's Businessweek.

I rather fear KJ's funeral arrangements will be getting more coverage here in China, where there's an odd sentimental reverence for a country that is a cherished 'ally', and is perceived as a heroic last outpost of full-on Communism and Cold War ideological simplicity. In fact, Communism doesn't really have that much to do with it any more, and possibly never has had; in practice, it's just a gangster state, much like China is. Senior party officials sell their influence, or directly grasp the reins of the country's most profitable trading and industrial sectors - creaming off money to make themselves obscenely wealthy, while the majority of the population is kept artificially impoverished.

Chinese tourists love to visit the DPRK, treating it as a sort of Cultural Revolution theme-park, to remind themselves how far they've come in the last 40 or 50 years. If they looked a bit closer, they'd realise they haven't come all that far after all: the political cultures of the two countries are depressingly similar.

The Chinese are still waiting for their Havel. So are the North Koreans.

A new job possibility?

2011-12-19T09:28:00.003Z

I've just been writing a business article about the growth of China's super-rich elite over the past decade.

It comes as no surprise to learn via the San Francisco Chronicle that China is now becoming a major market for British butlers (originally a Bloomberg piece by Colm Heatley, but the pagelink to that is mysteriously, maddeningly unstable). I recall Jonathan Watts of The Guardian, an occasional partner-in-drink out here, wrote a similar piece just before the Olympics. Ah, here it is, on the teaching website One Stop English.

This could be an exciting new opportunity for me. I've always fancied myself as a Jeeves-like model of shrewdness and suavity. Perhaps I should enroll in butler school?

Mind you, it can be a backstabbing profession....

Bon mot for the week

2011-12-19T00:18:00.012Z

"Am I really eccentric, or am I just wearing a funny hat?"

Tom Waits (1949- )

As so often, I am indebted to JES for sending me a link a little while ago to an extended interview with Waits on NPR's 'Fresh Air' programme, in which this line came up. It was said to have been first used in an interview with The Guardian a few years ago, but I haven't been able to find that. However, there has been another very fine interview with him in that newspaper just recently, to mark the release of his latest album, Bad As Me, at the end of October.

I hope somebody is going to get me that for Christmas....

An especially topical 'Sunday Poem'

2011-12-18T05:17:00.004Z

Well the wind has relented today; but for most of this week it has been howling down out of the north-west at 15, 20, 25 mph. And every one of those miles represents a degree or so of windchill.

Feverish with a cold, and struggling to sleep anyway through the ominous resonating of my building, fragments of this piece by Ted Hughes kept popping into my mind.

I think I'd first come upon it as a teenager. I then chose to use it a few times in poetry classes I taught myself when I became a schoolteacher for a while a few years later. Wonderful how obstinately poetry resides in the memory, when so much else is lost! I hadn't read this poem - or even given it a thought - in at least a dozen years; but I found I could recall it almost word for word.

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up -

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guy-rope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

Film List - pleasant surprises

2011-12-17T06:35:00.007Z

The 'Film List' comes early this month - since next week is Christmas, and then I plan a little year's end review for the final weekend of December.

I have been living quite quietly the past few months, staying in a lot, watching a lot of DVDs (and, latterly, a lot of HBO). Many of the films I've sat through have been fairly awful (for instance, I finally got around to watching Scorsese's Gangs Of New York - and realised why'd I'd been avoiding it all these years!).

However, in amongst all the dross (most of HBO and Phoenix Movies, alas), and amongst the classics I'd seen before, and amongst all the so-so and the near-miss and the mildly disappointing... I have stumbled by happy chance across a few things which gave me unexpected pleasure. The pleasure was unexpected in two ways: first, I hadn't heard anything about these films before I began watching them; and second, my expectations of them based on their apparent budget and genre were extremely low - but they turned out to be very good indeed. Watch out for these. [Beware: a few mild SPOILERS here and there.]

Centurion

(Dir. Neil Marshall, 2010)

The kind of straightforward action adventure tale you didn't think they made any more. This film addresses the story of Rome's 9th legion, vanished without trace on a punitive expedition against the Picts of Scotland, from the perspective of a small group of survivors trying to fight their way back home from deep behind enemy lines. It was made for a negligible budget by contemporary standards, but it assembles an impressive cast: the excellent Michael Fassbender as the dashing young hero, and stalwart British character players Bernard Hill and David Morrissey, who actually make you believe in and care about the two gnarly veterans under his command. Director Neil Marshall (who cut his teeth on low-budget horror flicks The Descent and Dog Soldiers, and is now busy working on the TV mini-series Game of Thrones) handles the action scenes very well (lots of the intricate choreography and stop-start editing perfected in 300), and also produces some stunningly photographed vistas of the Scottish Highland locations. The story is nothing very substantial, but for what it is, it is executed just about perfectly.

The Warrior's Way

(Dir. Sngmoo Lee, 2010)

I'm not usually a big fan of the comic-book style in movies, but this zestful marriage of the ninja and Western genres won me over. It's done with exuberant style, and its tongue firmly in its cheek. And the bizarre background details and lurid, painterly colour palette give it a surreal, dreamlike quality (it's mostly set in a virtual ghost town on the edge of the south-western desert, where a group of washed-up circus performers are attempting to build a giant ferris wheel, seemingly in the delusional belief that it will revive the local economy). Once again, the film benefits from an excellent cast: Kate Bosworth (an actress I hadn't seen before), very appealing as the feisty young heroine (unfortunately, she rather has to carry the film, since the male lead, Korean actor Dong-Jun Jang, is a little too determinedly expressionless to be at all engaging; a common problem with ninjas!), the always watchable Geoffrey Rush as the obligatory alcoholic ex-gunslinger, and Danny Huston as the unspeakably nasty villain (this is my one major misgiving about the film, in fact: you can establish 'evil' without setting up an attempted child rape - that just doesn't sit well in a film that is essentially a light-hearted romp).

Meek's Cutoff

(Dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Less surreal, but even more captivatingly dreamlike is this unorthodox Western about early pioneers making their way west on the Oregon Trail. Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a crusty old mountain man full of bombast and tall tales and disdain for the Native Americans, has been hired as a guide by a trio of families in their wagons, but appears to have become hopelessly lost. They take prisoner a solitary middle-aged Native American they encounter, hoping he will be able to lead them to water and to safety; but it's not clear that he is any less lost than they are. The film is sparse in incident, sedate in tempo; and there's no resolution - the party just blunder around the wilderness, trying to remain calm as they face the spectres of thirst, starvation, and despair. And yet it is quite mesmerising: beautifully photographed, tautly scripted, very well acted (Michelle Williams, especially, as the most spirited of the young wives in the group, dominates the screen in every scene she's in).

Ninja Assassin

(Dir. James McTeigue, 2009)

Apparently conceived by the Wachowski brothers, who are co-producers, this delivers fast-paced thrills and stylish gore. Korean pop star Rain is extremely buff in the lead role of Raizo, a rogue ninja being hunted down by his vengeful 'family', and, though conventionally expressionless, does manage to be modestly engaging. The rest of the casting is the film's weak point: Ben Miles (an incompetent Interpol detective) is a British TV actor better suited to light comic roles; and Naomie Harris (a resourceful researcher who gets herself into trouble for turning up evidence that ninjas are real) is very pretty but lacks screen presence, leaving the impression that the producers probably wanted but couldn't afford Thandie Newton or Zoe Saldana for the part. The relentlessness and implacability of the ninjas, and their ability to materialise out of shadows, is well rendered - genuinely creepy and scary at times. And the script has a certain mordant humour, doesn't take itself too seriously.

Carriers

(Dir. David and Alex Pastor, 2009)

I found this on HBO late at night a few days ago, and am annoyed to have missed the first 20 minutes. It's a post-apocalypse tale about a handful of young people in America struggling to make their way across country in the aftermath of a global pandemic. The focus is on the pervasive fear of the deadly disease - which is pretty obviously going to get everyone eventually - and the way in which ties of community, friendship, family, even basic morality are eroded by the imperative of survival. I gather it bombed at the box office in the US, after being misleadingly marketed as a routine horror film. In fact, it's a compelling human drama, often very suspenseful and ultimately very poignant.

[I'll leave this post at its originally planned time of Saturday afternoon. I ran out of electricity before I'd finished writing it, and so was cut off from my Internet connection. Finishing it off late on Sunday night, I discover that it's been leapfrogged by a poetry post I'd done earlier. Oh well, it's not as if anyone notices most of what I post anyway!]

Haiku for the week

2011-12-16T00:38:00.009Z

The wind goes through us,

Hollow men, struggling homeward

Without thought or feeling.

The last few days have been brutal here. A couple of times I've actually been woken up, an hour or so before dawn, by the din of the wind raging around my apartment building.

I usually manage to leave the longjohns in the drawer until January, but they've had to come out early this year.

Favourite posts from the 3rd quarter of 2010

2011-12-14T03:20:00.030Z

I've fallen a little behind schedule again on these roundups of last year's highlights. I usually aim to get them out only 12 months or so after the end of the period covered, but it's now over 14 months on - oh dear.

Pick of the Archives:

Favourite Posts, July-September 2010

1) Jumpers for goalposts - 3rd July 2010

The approaching climax of the World Cup makes me nostalgic for my '70s childhood spent watching football on the BBC; and comedy genius Paul Whitehouse perfectly captures that feeling with his 'Ron Manager' character.

2) What's in a (footballer's) name? - 9th July 2010

Some amusing names among the Chilean players in the World Cup remind me of a couple of crude accidental puns that have cropped up in the field of sports commentary.

3) If I ruled the world... - 11th July 2010

And, of course, I had to greet the World Cup Final by picking my 'team of the tournament'.

4) My Fantasy Girlfriend - Daisy Sweetgrass - 17th July 2007

Daisy is the stage name and alter ego of a delightful singer-songwriter called Christine Laskowski, who lived in Beijing for a couple of years but has left us now. Elevating her to the ranks of my Fantasy Girlfriends provided an excuse to plug her website and the CD All That Glisters, just released by her bluegrass band The Redbucks.

5) Hip? - 23rd July 2007

In a very short post - primarily intended to plug a favourite website I'd just discovered, cartoonist Hugh McLeod's Gaping Void - I managed to ruminate on the distinction between 'hip' and 'cool', reminisce about The Fonz, and quote a favourite line from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

6) Between the lines - 24th July 2010

An impassioned post about the unlawful detention of my artist friend, Wu Yuren. (He was finally released on 2nd April this year, after 10 months in prison.)

7) Makeover - 28th July 2010

Contemplating shaving my head, I reflect on the first time I did so, a dozen years earlier.

8) Proclaiming it 'a digging instrument' - 29th July 2010

My very negative review of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner leads me to wonder morosely what's becoming of literary taste in the modern world.

9) Another piece of Friday frivolity - 30th July 2010

A favourite in my occasional series of cartoon puns, most of them, like this one, raided from Viz magazine's repository of 'Crap Jokes'. (Two more great ones here and here!)

10) A China-inspired Sunday poem - 1st August 2010

Billy Collins shares my delight in the poets of the Tang and Song dynasties.

11) Democracy isn't everything - 7th August 2010

But it is a hell of a start! For my latest 'List of the Month', I consider some of the other elements of an advanced society that China is sadly lacking.

12) Beijing Taxi - 10th August 2010

My review of this documentary about taxi drivers leads to some broader musing on the shortcomings of Chinese documentary-making.

13) The Beijing I miss - 23rd August 2010

An afternoon's walk restores some of my enthusiasm for living in this city.

14) Who are you calling 'strange'? - 25th August 2010

I am amused to discover that some social psychologists have coined the acronym WEIRD to remind themselves how unrepresentative their typical experimental subjects are of the wider human race.

15) A memory fragment - 26th August 2010

A poignant recollection of the period of my thwarted infatuation with a lady I dubbed 'Madame X'.

16) Short Animation Festival - 28th August 2010

For my end-of-the-month Film List, I offer a selection of great animated shorts.

17) How not to do it, in Powerpoint - 1st September 2010

Some tips from a recent training session on giving presentations.

18) Elements of Englishness - 4th September 2010

Another offshoot of my business training work: an attempt to summarise the 'national character' of the people of the land of my birth.

19) Desert song - 5th September 2010

I have an uncannily vivid dream - apparently set in a futuristic version of Amman, Jordan. I wonder if this might be a 'cosmic hint' that I should consider moving there.

20) Things Word won't do for you - 6th September 2010

A suggestion for a new feature I would like to see added to Microsoft's Word program - to make it a bit more fun.

21) Don't underestimate the Daily Llama - 7th September 2010

Two funny pictures: a baby llama playing rugby.... and Jesus playing gridiron football!

22) A familiar story? - 11th September 2010

Another of my dream stories (a scene you might recognise).

23) Sunday Linguistics Corner - the teaching of English

- 12th September 2010

One of my longer and more thoughtful posts (provoked by a British Council lecture I attended, given by Dr Chris Hall, most of which I'd found myself rather violently in disagreement with; I had meant to return to another topic he touched on - 'Chinese English' - but haven't got around to it yet).

24) An e-commerce idea for China - 16th September 2010

How about a website where you can haggle over the price? Why has no-one done it yet??

25) My Fantasy Girlfriend - Rachel Manija Brown - 18th September 2010

This month's pick is a very amusing writer, who I discovered in a particularly serendipitous way.

26) The most important lesson of The Tank Man - 20th September 2010

A long gripe about this country's terrible driving standards, and the hazards of trying to cross the road.

27) You are old, Uncle Wang - 22nd September 2010

I have a particularly good Beijing taxi experience - with one of the city's most venerable drivers. This reminds me of my longstanding 'collecting box' post for examples of uncommonly low taxi driver registration numbers.

28) Strange foods - 24th September 2010

Another amusing picture post. Garlic-flavoured ice cream, anyone?

29) China snapshots - 28th September 2010

I happened to notice quite a lot of odd and quirky things (more than usual!) about my adopted homeland in the previous week or two.

30) Futility - 30th September 2010

I reminisce about my experience of playing the strategy game Risk, and in particular about the brutal 'Ontario Incident' - which very nearly ended one of my closest friendships.

I am a classicist [Why I Don't Learn Chinese - 15]

2011-12-13T05:45:00.002Z

I studied Latin and Ancient Greek at school and university - to a very high level.

They are reputedly hard languages: very different scheme of grammar from English, and an alien script for Greek. In terms of the workload, at any rate, they constitute almost certainly the most demanding Arts subject* at Oxford... and one of the most physically demanding sets of exams in the world (11 or 12 three-hour papers in a little over a week, for both the mid-point and final classification in the undergraduate degree; it was commonly said that only the entrance test for the Japanese Civil Service was more gruelling).

In short, I think my brain is full; or more properly - since I have, to be honest, forgotten nearly all of the Latin and Greek I used to know - worn out by that exceptional language-learning effort in my younger days.

Even more to the point, Latin and Greek are dead languages. Nobody speaks them any more, and, in learning them, little or no attention is paid to speaking them aloud or attempting to use them as a medium of daily communication. (Some folks have experimented with 'communicative method' teaching, attempting to develop skills in these languages by adopting the same language teaching methodologies used for modern languages. That approach, though, was pretty much unheard of in my day, and is still, I think, a bit of an eccentric minority interest.)

And I was quite happy with that. I learned these languages with a focus on the literature. I was thrilled about the prospect of being able to read great authors like Horace and Homer and Tacitus and Thucydides in their original language. It seemed a much more worthwhile objective than being able to mount a fumbling conversation with a shopkeeper on a summer holiday in France - which was about all the modern linguists at my school ever seemed to achieve.

I liked French, and pursued that to quite a high level too. I did a supplementary literature-based exam in it (on Voltaire's Candide) when I was 15, and continued studying in my own time during my 6th Form days - reading quite big chunks of Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola (more, probably, than most of the French specialists among my contemporaries), and trying to force myself to watch my favourite French films without referring to the English subtitles. Trouble was, my focus was solely on the literature. I never went to France for a holiday as a kid; and when I finally visited for the first time as an undergraduate, I found myself embarrassingly tongue-tied. I had liked to think I could maybe have discussed Flaubert or Baudelaire with someone, but in practice I could scarcely buy a baguette.

I'm afraid my interest in Chinese is much the same. I'd love to be able to read Chinese, particularly some of the classical literature: the Analects of Confucius and the great poets of the Tang and Song dynasties. But that damned writing system is just too much of a barrier to entry. I know I haven't got a hope in hell of cracking it, coming to the study in my weary middle years, and when I have so many other interests and distractions in my life.

You don't really need the language to buy a baguette - or a mantou.

[* I suppose Chinese is probably even harder. But in my undergraduate days, nobody really paid it much attention. I'd guess there were probably only a few dozen people in the whole of the UK studying it back then.]

Bon mot for the week

2011-12-12T00:28:00.010Z

"As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life."

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Jane Seymour

2011-12-10T05:12:00.018Z

Luckily, I now have HBO Movies to keep me company through the dreary and impoverished months of winter. Well, I say "luckily", but it's something of a mixed bag. For every classic like Dangerous Liaisons, there are two or three appalling straight-to-video comedies. However, for December, they're doing a complete run of of the Bond films (well, excluding Connery's Never Say Never Again and the recent Daniel Craig reinvention, I think), which is nicely nostalgic of a 1970s UK childhood - where a Bond film was always a staple of Christmas afternoon.

For me, the series peaked with You Only Live Twice, which HBO screened a couple of days ago (best villain's hideout, inside the volcano; and best villains - the People's Republic of China hiring Blofeld to engineer a war between America and the Soviet Union!). The action sequences got better and more elaborate during the 1970s, but the increasing reliance on improbable gadgets and big special effects took the stories to a comic-book level of unreality that started to become more risible than genuinely exciting. And I never warmed to Roger Moore's Bond - too smug and effete for a stone killer.

However, I liked Moore's first outing in Live And Let Die (on HBO tomorrow - but alas, I have other plans for Sunday night). I suspect it was partly that this was the last one I was able to enjoy with the naive innocence of childhood; once I hit my 'tween' years, my cynicism developed apace - and I outgrew Bond. Undoubtedly, it was also very largely down to the speedboat chase through the swamps (I forget now, is that Louisiana or Florida?) - possibly the best chase sequence in any of the Bond films, certainly much the best up to that point. But mostly, I think, it was down to Solitaire, the foxy voodoo priestess with a gift for reading tarot cards, played by the lovely English actress Jane Seymour.

Not, perhaps, the sexiest of the Bond girls, but surely the prettiest: a prime exemplar of the 'English Rose' type, of which Kate Beckinsale - already honoured in this series - is a more contemporary embodiment. Jane, I think, has an even deeper place in my heart than Kate; not only because she dawned upon my consciousness when I was still a young boy rather than an adult, but also because of that amazing, lustrous long hair of hers - almost down to her waist in many of those early and mid-70s roles from which I most fondly remember her.

Jane always seems to be mentioned at or near the top of lists of favourite Bond girls; and she is of the few to be honoured with her own Barbie doll....

[Hmm, Christmas present wish-list?? Actually, although I wasn't such a fan of her as a Bond girl, I have to say the Pussy Galore one is particularly stylish, and a good likeness of Honor Blackman.]

However, I recall (perhaps inaccurately) being more miffed than aroused by Jane's appearance in the role. I'd feared it would spell the end of her career (in later years, the Bond producers would shift towards hiring more established actresses as their principal crumpet, but up to then it had been up-and-comers, mostly known only through TV or modelling; and most of them had failed to shake off the burden of becoming known primarily or solely as a Bond girl, and had subsequently vanished without trace - at least as far as a significant film career was concerned). And it did entail her premature departure from The Onedin Line, a wonderful, long-running BBC1 potboiler about merchant sailing ships in the Victorian era, which was a Sunday night viewing highlight throughout my schooldays. Jane had played Emma Callon, the beautiful young niece of a ruthless rival shipping magnate. It was as a result of her appearances as this character in the first couple of seasons of the show - when I was only about 6 or 7 years old - that I first became smitten with Jane Seymour. [I think this might be a picture of her in that part, the only one I could find. But it might also be from Somewhere In Time, the time-travelling romantic drama she made with Christopher Reeve in 1980.]

Jane continued to work on British TV and in small British films for a few years, but then... well, she was lost to us not through the 'curse of James Bond' but through American TV's growing obsession with the mini-series. After she relocated to Hollywood in the late '70s, I didn't see much more of her: I suppose she's now best-known for her '90s TV series Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman - in which she apparently managed to make 19th century frontier life seem sexy - but I've never seen a single minute of that. She's never had much of a career in mainstream cinema, but must have set some kind of record for the number of made-for-TV movies she's been in.

Like Jan Francis, another favourite actress of mine from my childhood, Jane had trained as a dancer. I mentioned in that post on Ms Francis how I've always been especially attracted to dancers for their poise and grace and air of self-confidence. I was therefore pleased to recognise Jane a few years ago (from the most fleeting of glimpses) in Richard Attenborough's Oh! What A Lovely War - her first, uncredited screen appearance, when she was still in her teens, and possibly the only time she's been asked to utilise her dancing skills on film. She's one of the chorus girls (but you'll have to be very sharp to spot her) in this music hall recruiting scene wherein Maggie Smith belts out a saucy I'll Make A Man Of Any One Of You.

In her busy and diverse - if not exactly stellar - career, Jane has also played the Biblical Bathsheba, Wallis Simpson (most improbable piece of casting ever?!) a bride of Frankenstein, Winston Churchill's first girlfriend, and an Arabian princess (in Sinbad and The Eye of The Tiger, in which she memorably played chess against a Ray Harryhausen-animated baboon).

And she's still looking stunning at the age of 60 (maybe the baboon had to sacrifice his pituitary gland to her for losing the chess match?).

I have learned during my online meanderings this morning that Ms Seymour's real name is the much less stage-friendly Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg. She took her professional name from the ill-fated third wife of Henry VIII - little anticipating what difficulties this would cause for people attempting to research her personal history in the age of Google.

Another unexpected tidbit of trivia I turned up is that her eyes are of different colours (heterochromia iridum, as the doctors term it). Now, I've never been fortunate enough to gaze into Ms Seymour's eyes for real. But you would think, wouldn't you, that I might have noticed this after so many years of admiring pictures of her? I take this as further evidence of the notorious male inability to notice or remember anyone's eye colour. (I've always had to make a conscious effort to memorise the colour of a girlfriend's eyes. And it is a fact which has always rapidly dislodged itself again from my brain after parting with one of them.)

And now, gentlemen, carry on swooning.

Recently, on The Barstool...

2011-12-09T07:35:00.003Z

What's been happening over on my drinking blog over the last 6 or 7 weeks?

Well, not that much, since I've been too preoccupied with moving house to go out very much, and The Barstool was particularly constrained by my frivolous experiment with a narrow word-limit on every post during November.

By way of compensation for the relative lack of witty commentary on Beijing nightlife recently, we have had a rich run of musical posts: versions of You'll Never Know by Alice Faye (the original appearance of the Oscar-winning song in an obscure '40s movie) and the great Ella Fitzgerald; Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now sung in the Khmer language (it's still good, but weird); British blues maestro Peter Green playing Need Your Love So Bad (with a link in the comments to another performance of the song by Gary Moore); the Cowboy Junkies covering Bob Dylan's If You Gotta Go, Go Now (no video, unfortunately; but it's a superb version of the song); and a farewell tribute to Beijing's favourite blues-rock band Black Cat Bone, who have just announced their retirement (this post includes a list of links to other excerpts from the same gig - a mini festival focused on blues harmonica, with all of the city's finest players joining in).

I've also indulged in a wistful reverie over proper bars, prompted by my discovery of the Powers Irish whiskey manufacturer's online poll on Ireland's best snugs: there are hundreds of gorgeous pictures - it fair brings a tear to the eye.

A rather alcoholically excessive birthday (it was my first day drinking again after four weeks of sobriety) goaded me into doing one of my 'Top Five' lists on the other most memorable (or most memory-loss inducing) celebrations of the event I've enjoyed while living in China.

More recently, I did another 'Top Five' on disappeared landmarks of the Beijing drinking scene.

I rehashed an old article I'd written ages ago for a travel website, warning against one of the world's nastiest drinks.

I have commented bitterly (but briefly: this is a topic that merits expansion at some point) on the oppressiveness of Chinese drinking culture in its insistence that you can't just take a sip whenever you're thirsty but must always share a toast with someone else.

And some pondering on trivia quizzes led me to post a particularly taxing question - which roused the competitive instincts of a few of my regulars.

Quite a bit to keep you entertained there, if you missed any of this the first time around.

Housekeeping

2011-12-09T03:37:00.002Z

It had slipped my mind during the horrendous November I just suffered (SORRY), but I have finally got around to posting the answers to my end-of-October Film Quotations Quiz.

And CONGRATULATIONS are due to my old friend - and sometime China resident (Zhengzhou, of all places!) - Caren, who has claimed the distinction of being my "100,000th visitor" (zuoyou) here on Froogville. A commemorative gift will be on its way to her shortly (I was thinking maybe a model of the Temple of Heaven made out of 100,000 matchsticks...).

Haiku for the week

2011-12-09T00:15:00.014Z

Clean air and clear sky

Its blueness hurts our tired eyes

Wind from the cold north

The toxic air we've been suffering - filled with grit and sand and construction debris and smoke - for most of the past six or seven weeks is suddenly scoured clean by a brisk wind out of the north. Unfortunately, that also gives us ten degrees of windchill, so it's painful to go outside. Swings and roundabouts.

I was going to go shopping for bookshelves today, but my resolve is faltering...

Another milestone looms

2011-12-06T02:36:00.005Z

Gosh, look at that! The visitor counter over there in the sidebar, that is.

In a day or two, it seems, we shall be passing our 100,000th visitor here on Froogville (at least, according to Sitemeter; other traffic monitors already put the number much higher, but this is the system I chose to display, so this is what we have to go with).

If YOU see that widget displaying 100,000 (or very close) when you next drop by - please leave me a comment here, and I will try to contrive some kind of 'prize' for you (or at least a heartfelt paean of gratitude). Oh, the excitement....

Community policing the Chinese way

2011-12-05T04:11:00.006Z

I finally got around to going to my local cop shop to try to complete my 'change of residence' registration this weekend (the landlord usually needs to accompany you the first time you register at a new address; he's been too busy to come and do that for the past week or so).

And they demanded an on-the-spot 'fee' of 5% of the annual rent.

However, they did couch this in terms of Well, you don't have to register. But if you do, you have to pay your 'property income tax' via us. Obviously, this policy is not encouraging anyone to comply with the law by registering their addresses.

I have never heard of anyone else being asked for money in the police station like this before. I'm asking around to try to find out if this is a 'new policy', or just a scam that this particular station is trying on.

Of course, there are no mechanisms in place for trying to verify the relationship between landlord and tenant, or the actual amount of money changing hands. So, we could just knock up a dummy contract suggesting that my rent is fairly nominal. In fact, I have gathered from Chinese friends in the past that it is fairly standard to claim that you are "a friend of the landlord" and staying in an apartment rent-free, and this is never challenged.

However, this question is usually only raised by the Tax Bureau, not by the police. Since when have the police been appointed 'collection agents' for the Tax Bureau??? Is this really another piece of Chinese administrative lunacy? Oiveh!

Bon mot for the week

2011-12-05T00:16:00.003Z

"That which cannot be taught is talent."

Froog

List of the Month - more 'swings and roundabouts'

2011-12-03T03:18:00.012Z

I've now been in my new pad for two weeks, and - despite the hassles of having no Internet connection for much of that time, while I have found myself with rather a lot of work I have to do online - I have almost knocked it into a liveable condition. I need to go out and buy some bookshelves, so that I can start to unpack some of the dozen or so crates of books, CDs, and DVDs that are still crowding my living room and office. And I need to do a lot of cleaning. But I've made more progress towards unpacking and settling in than I did in two months after my last move.

Since this is the dominant obsession of my life at the moment, I'm afraid the year-end 'List of the Month' is going to be a rather tediously domestic rundown of the pros and cons of my new environment. Overall, I'm very happy to have moved - but it has not been an unmixed blessing.

The pros and cons of my new apartment

The pros

More space

It's actually, if anything, just a smidge smaller than my previous apartment, but the space is better used. The old place had a couple of short corridors and a rather pointless alcove (supposedly a 'dining area', but too small for that) off the side of the living room, which were basically wasted space: barely a quarter of the 75 sq m area was given over to the living room. Here, thanks to a much smaller bedroom (no loss), the living room is very nearly half of the total area.

More light

I'm on the corner of the building, so I have windows in every room (except the bathroom). Many Chinese apartments seem to be built in a strip right through the middle of the building, with the windows at front and back devoted to the main bedrooms, and, sometimes, the kitchen. At least the living room in my old place had a small skylight window through to the kitchen, but the kitchen didn't get very much light from one small window behind the fridge/freezer - so, much of the apartment was wretchedly dingy.

No neighbours

Being on the corner, I only have shared walls in the kitchen and bathroom, and no noise ever seems to penetrate through there. I think one of the adjacent apartments is currently empty, and the other is rented by a childless young couple who live very quietly. Downstairs is a commercial space; upstairs, who knows? I never hear any noise from anywhere else in the building (well, apart from the corridor outside the front door sometimes) - which is a very welcome change from the awful hawk-and-spit of the old guy downstairs at 6.30 every morning, or the jet-engine whine of the plumbing as his wife spent 20 or 30 minutes watering her plants before going to bed late each night, or the really bad piano practice of the neighbour's kid that would plague my late-afternoon/early evening downtime every day at the old place.

'Wood effect' floors throughout

OK, it's only lino, but it is so much nicer - quieter, warmer, easier to clean - than the ceramic tiled floors that Chinese apartments generally favour. The mock-wood flooring is usually a 'luxury' reserved for the main bedrooms.

High level of equipment

OK, two or three of the light fittings don't work due to dodgy wiring; that's inevitable in a Chinese apartment. But the light fittings are - amazingly for China! - not hideously ugly, and most of them do work fine. Some of the equipment is foreign: a Bosch washing-machine and a Siemens fridge/freezer. The shower-heater and the toilet are Chinese, but they seem to work very well (it is quite a revelation to be able to heat twice the amount of water in half the time - I may suffer for this in my electricity usage; or perhaps it really is more efficient??).

Kitchen workspace

Chinese kitchens typically have only 18"-24" of usable counter top. I hardly know what to do with 7 feet of it! I may have to, er, start cooking seriously again....

A terrace

This was the main thing that sold me on the place, and encouraged me to commit to a rather higher rent than the apartment on its own would really justify, and rather higher than I can really afford.

A nicer walk back from my regular bar(s)

It is just a smidge further - but only a matter of minutes, and the time just seems to fly by. I had been getting a bit stale on a walk that I've been doing several times a week for years now.

A funky neighbourhood

I've always liked the area immediately outside the North Second Ringroad: it's relatively untouched by the crazed modernization drives that have torn the heart out of so much of the rest of the city; still mostly older apartment buildings, lots of small shops and restaurants, a relaxed pace of life, a sense of community. I lived on this same street before, but in a bit of a dead area: newer apartment developments and big government/SOE office buildings - I had to walk 5 or 10 minutes to get to a restaurant or supermarket. But here, the street is teeming with life right outside my door.

An English-speaking landlord

His English isn't wonderful, but it's serviceable enough that it obviates the need for me to resort to friends to mediate for me, and this makes the relationship much less stressful for both of us. He's a younger guy than my previous two landlords, and - though I am wary that perhaps we are just in a honeymoon period - he does seem genuinely helpful and conscientious too. His wife is also delightful, and speaks even better English. I really feel they might become friends, rather than just the people who will try to steal my deposit in a year or two.

Too good to be true? Well, yes....

The cons

No storage space

The last place didn't have all that much, but the new place has NONE (apart from in the bedroom). I'll either have to spend a small fortune on cupboards and shelves, or resign myself to living out of boxes indefinitely.

Less privacy

I'm on a low floor, so more light also means more possibility of neighbours spying on me. It's probably not too much of a concern, since there aren't any other buildings all that close, telescopes are not common here (although one of the recording studio entrepreneurs I used to work for kept a pair of binoculars on his balcony...), and most Chinese have terrible eyesight anyway. But I feel I have to be more circumspect than before about walking around my apartment half-naked.

Street noise

I'm not bothered by neighbour noise at all any more (I'm sure I might be, if there were anyone living in the apartment upstairs, but it's probably empty), but I am looking out on to a rather busy street. It's usually fairly quiet at night; and I'm finding that a familiar array of background sounds soon becomes oddly soothing - provided they are not too loud or strident. The automated announcements on passing buses are a real pain-in-the-arse, though; they, more than anything else, make it pretty much impossible to sleep in beyond 7am (not that I often do, anyway; but sometimes, a lie-in would be welcome). And there's currently some road maintenance going on, which involves heavy plant rumbling up and down outside between 11pm and 2am every night. Hopefully this will not go on too long. Hopefully...

Only one eye-level cupboard in the kitchen

Rather than two in the last place. I have lots of under-the-counter cupboards, so this shouldn't be a terrible problem, but... I have inadequate space (none, really!) for food storage. I'm probably going to have to use one of my bookshelves... or start colonising some of that vast expanse of counter space.

No balcony

The terrace comes at the cost of a balcony. Balconies in Chinese apartments are usually enclosed, and so are not much fun for sitting out on, but... they do provide valuable storage space for boxes, suitcases, etc. And they are an essential space for drying your clothes. I suppose I'm going to have to try to hang wet clothes up in my bathroom now - and maybe put a heater in there. Drying clothes outside is just not an option in Beijing: they'd soon be more dirty and smelly than they were when you put them in the wash! And for the next two or three months, they'd be freezing on the washing-line.

No drainage on the terrace

Mosquitoes breeding in the mini lake covering the east side of the terrace are going to be a problem in the summer. I fear it's possible my office could flood, if we get a heavy snow and then a rapid melt over the winter. I think I'm going to have to buy an electric pump of some sort to address the problem of the solitary drainage hole being above the level of the floor.

The smelliest drains in the world

The stink in my bathroom is absolutely foul. Even my landlord is embarrassed by it. The building management have been informed, but they seem to think there's nothing to be done about it. This is just what you get for being near the bottom of a 14-storey block with Chinese plumbing.

The daily dice-with-death

Although, in general, my walk towards bars/restaurants is now rather pleasanter, it does entail crossing the 2nd Ringroad service road every time. Coming back later in the evening, this is usually pretty quiet; but when I'm heading out during the day or the early evening, it can often take two or three minutes before there's enough of a gap in the homicidal traffic for me to scoot across.

So, like I said, overall it's a major improvement. But there are problems.

New Picks of the Month

2011-12-02T02:10:00.004Z

What was I blogging about three years ago this month?

Well, from Froogville, I suppose I should go for the very seasonal Christmas shopping blues - a gripe about the sorry dearth of parsnips in Beijing.

And from The Barstool, I choose Alas, poor Sammy's - an appreciation of one of the city's great dive bars, which, unfortunately, survived only for a scant 6 or 8 months.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Haiku for the week

2011-12-02T00:55:00.001Z

Sugar-frosted fences

The sky a woollen blanket

First snow of the year

Gosh, yes, it's come very early in the season this time. But it's been a rather unsatisfying, invisible snow. It started in the early hours of this morning, and looks sets to continue for much of the day, but it's so thin and wet that you can scarcely see it falling. A little, though, is settling, building up over time.

There won't be any snowmen on my new terrace today, but I think I'm going to be able to make one at some point over this winter. I have a hunch this is going to be a cold one, and - occasionally - a snowy one.

Payment - the Chinese Way

2011-12-01T05:29:00.009Z

The Chinese Way is threatening to become a major series on here, I know. I will try to contain my curmudge, but... there's just been an awful lot of This is China! weird shit happening to me just lately.

The latest instalment...

One of the academic publishers I work for just paid me for a couple of articles. I queried why they had apparently still not paid me for one of the ones I'd edited for them three months or so back (originally, I'd been told that this was intended for a different journal, with a later publication date, and so I wouldn't be paid for it for about three months - this now appears to have been a complete lie). My contact there went ominously silent on me for a while. Then she confessed that - owing to some strange botch-up by their accountants, nothing at all to do with her - it appeared that this fee had been paid to another of their foreign editors.

Straightforward solution, anywhere else in the world: authorise a new payment to be made to me; reclaim the inadvertent payment to the other editor via a deduction from their next set of fees.

The Chinese Way: ask the other editor to pay me the money.... and give them my bank account details so they can do that without asking me first.

I am absolutely LIVID, and am in danger of blowing another long-term job out of the water with an effusion of scornful complaint. (They don't take criticism well, the Chinese; they sulk and pout and convince themselves it was really your fault; and decide they don't need the hassle of working with someone who states their opinions honestly...)

The fires of my wrath were further stoked by the fact that my contact - a young woman who acts as a sort of supervising editor - attempted to pacify me by explaining that it is "perfectly normal in China" to give away people's private bank account information to third parties without their consent.

Unfortunately, I fear, what this equates to is that bad manners, lack of common sense, and crass incompetence are perfectly normal in China.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for November

2011-12-01T03:52:00.017Z

Well, that was a strange month - probably my lightest month ever in volume of verbiage, but still awesomely regular in the tempo of posting.

Totting up the wordcounts this month is a relative doddle because the quirky challenge I set myself at the beginning of November was to write one post a day on each blog (giving myself a day off on Sundays; and excluding Monday's Bon mot of the week feature, most of which I 'pre-cook' some way in advance), and to keep each of those posts to exactly the same length. Exactly.

Obsessive compulsive? Moi?!

I had originally planned to take 200 words per post as my guideline, but the first couple of posts - the regular information-only Traffic Report and Picks of the Month notices - I found I could barely spin out to 150 words. So, that became my word-limit for the rest of the month. (I did occasionally find it rather frustrating that I was having to leave a thought unfinished. Towards the end of the month, I allowed myself to vary the experiment with a few posts of 200 words, and this one on The Barstool of 300. And I sometimes made use of the comments to provide supplementary links and so on that I hadn't had room for within this very narrow constraint. In general, though, I soon found that I was naturally conceiving of posts to fit this size, and was only having to make a few small edits to bring the wordcount to exactly 150.)

Thus....

Last month, there were 30 posts and a little over 4,000 words on Froogville.

And there were likewise 30 posts and a little over 4,000 words on Barstool Blues.

Oh, the symmetry of it!

And lookee over there in the sidebar: Froogville is about to pass its 100,000th "visitor"* at some point in the next few days. I can't very well retire at a moment of such high excitement, can I?

[* According to Statcounter, Froogville has already passed 150,000 visitors, and humble Barstool Blues is closing in on 100,000. Different metrics - confusing, isn't it? My favourite traffic-monitoring site, that one - more fun, as well as more flattering! This month, it informs me that we have added Lithuania, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, and Mozambique to the list of countries which have found us here.]

Why blog?

2011-11-30T05:10:00.004Z

I’ve been asking myself that question increasingly often of late.

I’ve been finding it hard to think of things to write about, and the very urge to write seems to have diminished.

Admittedly, I’ve been operating under difficult constraints this month: huge amounts of time devoted to househunting/packing/moving, attendant stress and shortage of sleep, being cut off from the Internet for a week, and striving to observe a self-imposed word-limit on my posts.

But I fear I may have burned myself out on this blogging lark.

It probably doesn’t help that so much of my work these days – virtually all of it over the past two months – is writing. If you’re bound to the keyboard for 5 or 6 hours a day to earn a crust, writing starts to lose its appeal as a restorative hobby.

Or maybe I’m just running out of stories to tell??

Don't stand so close to me!

2011-11-29T03:16:00.001Z

And don’t look over my shoulder, either!

A year or so ago, I was doing a course on “cross-cultural awareness” for a bunch of Chinese engineers, and started to compile my own set of notes on those quirks of Chinese behaviour which most bug the crap out of foreigners. It soon got to be rather a long handout.

A recurring keynote was China’s prevalent lack of respect for privacy – whether in regard to personal space, personal information, or personal property.

One of the things that I have against hiring a Chinese cleaner is that they don’t just clean, they routinely rifle through your drawers trying to find that embarrassing ‘white-eared elephant’ photograph from your college days.

In a classroom, students always come up and rummage through the papers on your desk during a mid-lesson break.

At the office, colleagues always take up position right behind you for an extended gawp at whatever’s on your computer screen.

When my old landlord summoned the building management flunkies to read my water meter the other week, three of them showed up – one to read the meter, and the other two just to go snooping around my apartment!

Cruel and unusual

2011-11-28T10:12:00.000Z

Having just moved into a new apartment, I am making rather too much use of the 7/11 just down the street. I haven’t stocked my larder very fully yet, I’m too exhausted by the cleaning-and-unpacking process to fancy cooking much anyway, and I haven’t yet had time to suss out the more substantial eating and shopping options in my new neighbourhood. So, I find myself dropping into the 7/11 a couple of times a day to stock up on basic household items (toothpaste, shampoo) or for impulsive snackage (potato salad, Garibaldi biscuits).

What turns welcome convenience into excruciating torment is the fact that they’re going so overboard on Christmas this year. They’re advertising a range of special items, including Christmas cakes, chocolate Yule logs, and what appears to be a 5kg hamburger.

And they’re already playing a tinny Christmas muzak selection in there - very loud, around the clock.

Bon mot for the week

2011-11-28T00:16:00.002Z

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it."

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

"Ability makes people jealous. Motivation intimidates them. Attitude pisses them off."

Froog (from forthcoming business book, The Secret Of My Unemployability)

Film List - how not to impress a date

2011-11-26T05:39:00.005Z

I’ve only ever been on two blind dates.

One of them was back in the mid-90s, at the end of my round-the-world backpacking year. I’d been given an introduction to a young lawyer in New York by someone I’d met in Hong Kong several months earlier. I didn’t know many other people in the city, so I decided to look her up.

Things didn’t start off well: it rained, she had to come across the river from Brooklyn, there were no cabs, she was very late. However, she had nominated a rather cosy little bar to meet in, so I was passing time happily enough. And once she showed up, the evening went extraordinarily well: we found we had a lot in common.

The only hiccup was when she asked, over dinner, what some of my favourite movies were. I considered fibbing, trying to ingratiate myself with some well-known, accessible, uncontentious, female-friendly examples. I considered that strategy for about half a second, before blurting out… Dark Star, Harold and Maude, and The Hairdresser’s Husband.

She hadn’t heard of any of them.

But she respected my honesty and my passion.

[I’ve repeated that selection on here once before (OK, twice), but without mentioning this story.]

The weekly haiku

2011-11-25T00:19:00.002Z

The wind howls like wolves

And bites as cruelly, sharply

Winter bares its teeth

Oh boy, we’ve had some brutally cold days here in Beijing this past week, with an icy wind raging down from the north-west. Soon the lakes will be frozen again, kicking off our annual frost-fair.

The little roof terrace outside my new apartment (my main reason for choosing it) has already become a miniature skating rink. It rained at the end of last week, and the terrace has only one drainage hole in the wall around its edge; and that – of course – set rather higher than the lowest point of the floor (‘the Chinese way’ yet again!!), so it’s impossible to get rid of all the water that collects there, and I now have an inch thick sheet of ice over half of it.

I wonder where I can buy myself some skates?

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T02:37:00.006Z

No Thanksgiving for me this year, I fear. After the ordeal of last year’s aborted plans for a big meet-up, I lack the willpower to attempt any such organisational challenge again. And most of my American friends have quit China anyway. In fact, just about everyone I shared the holiday with two years ago – including folks of several different nationalities – is gone now. Such is the nature of expat life.

The fact that the only places I’d trust to put on a good spread of holiday fare are way over on the east side of town also discourages me from indulging in a turkey dinner today. I’m probably going to be having a quiet evening in.

What I have to be thankful for: my new apartment now being just tidy enough for me to cook in it, and satellite TV.

A Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!

Return Of The Son Of The Revenge Of The Chinese Way

2011-11-23T02:35:00.004Z

I spent very nearly two hours last Saturday in the offices of China Unicom attempting to arrange the reconnection of the telephone and Internet services to my apartment.

And after all that protracted wrangling, the unhappy outcome was: phone, yes, Internet, no.

Turns out Unicom’s Internet wing, China Netcom, can’t give me an account at this address because the previous tenant had omitted to cancel his account there.

You’d think the landlord would be able to cancel an account registered at his property. But no. Because my predecessor had his Chinese wife pose as the landlord to authorise his setting up of the account, the real landlord is now unable to cancel it.

I have to wait until it expires of natural causes, through repeated non-payment – “two to three months” (assuming he didn’t pay a year or half-year in advance!).

Crossing the line

2011-11-22T03:31:00.003Z

I have just become a Dongcheng boy for the first time.

Well, nominally, I was a Dongcheng boy in my first year here too, but that always felt phoney. Dongcheng – the ‘East City’ – is plainly distinguished from the western half of central Beijing, Xicheng, by the meridian running through the nearby Bell and Drum Towers and on south to the Forbidden City, which it neatly bisects (oh, those fengshui-crazy Chinese urban planners!). There might be some sense in shunting the boundary sideways a little bit for administrative purposes, since the nearest major north-south road – Jiugulou Dajie – is 100 yards or so to the west of it. But my first digs were to the west side of that. The city fathers chose to steal the first row or two of houses on the far side of the street from Xicheng as well.

But now……. I’m definitely an eastsider.

The Chinese Way Strikes Again

2011-11-21T02:29:00.003Z

My moving day got off to the worst of all possible starts. In fact, it all started going pear-shaped the evening before.

I’d switched off my fridge-freezer to defrost it. When I came home that evening, I found that it was leaking its noxious-smelling coolant all over the kitchen floor.

I discovered one of the tubes had got badly kinked and developed a micro-crack in the middle of the fold. This had evidently happened long before I ever moved in, because someone had thought to try to seal it…. with a bandage of Sellotape. This obviously wasn’t the most secure sort of fix; but it seemed to do while the tube was also heavily crusted with ice. Once the ice melted, the Sellotape disintegrated and the leak got going again.

Ethical dilemma: should I volunteer this information to my landlord, and so forfeit my deposit?

Bon mot for the week

2011-11-21T00:11:00.001Z

"The art of using moderate abilities to advantage often brings greater results than actual brilliance."

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Lucy Akhurst

2011-11-19T02:15:00.007Z

I nearly said ‘Sophie’ – the imperiously sexy executive assistant to a comic book baron she played a decade ago in Spaced. I haven’t seen Ms Akhurst in much else.

I wasn’t that much of a fan of the series, but I happened to re-watch it on DVD a couple of weeks ago, and found that it brought back a lot of dewy-eyed memories of my last days in England (this is one of the last TV shows I can remember watching back in the old country, sometime around the end of 2001 or early 2002), and, more generally and more powerfully, of those wonderful Friday night comedy line-ups on Channel 4 that kept me company – and kept me at home, away from the pub – at the end of the week for a nearly a decade.

Simon Pegg’s wastrel artist would never have got this lucky!!

Haiku for the week

2011-11-18T00:12:00.001Z

Clutter fills the room

It will take hours to empty

A life in boxes

Moving day.

The packing is done. It was more or less done with 40 hours in hand, but…. the packing process is the ultimate exemplar of Parkinson’s law – the work expands to fill the time available. Last-minute ‘tidying up’ chores consumed the whole of yesterday, and are still not yet quite done only an hour or so before the moving men are due to show up.

My present landlord, alas, has just gone all uncommunicative on me. So, I don’t know if he has informed the building management that it’s “OK” for me to move out. And hence, there is a danger of an angry confrontation between the moving men and my gate guards in an hour. This is a depressingly common scenario for laowai, but I don’t know that it ever happens to Chinese tenants.

On yer bike

2011-11-17T02:36:00.002Z

It’s amazing what people will make websites about, isn’t it?

The other day, I discovered a Copenhagen-based “fashion” photoblog called Cycle Chic, devoted to pictures of people on bicycles. Apparently, it’s the work of passionate cycling advocate Mikael Colville-Andersen, also founder of the urban planning consultancy Copenhagenize, which stresses the value of cycling and pedestrian facilities in cities (see also the Copenhagenize blog).

Many of the photographs are rather good.

And even the more mundane ones are often quite appealing because… well, Denmark boasts an above-average concentration of beautiful women.

A recent post, though, has made me glad to be avoiding the northern European winter. Beijing gets fiercely cold, but it’s mostly very dry. Those shots of the snow in Copenhagen look thoroughly miserable.

Cycle Chic has achieved quite a high profile - written up in The Guardian, and supposedly named one of The Times’s '100 Best Blogs Worldwide'.