My Fantasy Girlfriend - the bass player with VOM

I stumbled upon an almost completely unadvertised gig last weekend at the tiny What Bar - with breezy pop-punk Norwegian girl band VOM.

I was rather badly smitten with the one who played bass; the one on the left in the hotdog-munching scene below. She checked altogether too many of the boxes in my 'high risk' template: tall, a redhead, dazzlingly blue eyes, great legs, plays a musical instrument, tall.... 

They're playing in Shanghai tonight. I am tempted to nip down there!

The band, alas, have very low Web visibility (perhaps as a result of their songs - and thus, I assume, their publicity material - being entirely in Norwegian?), and I haven't yet been able to discover her name. Except that the YouTube page for the video below seems to suggest that they use jokey 'punk names', and that hers is Esel Rex ('Donkey' Rex, if Google Translate is to be believed!). Not the sexiest monicker in the world! But when you're that gorgeous, it hardly matters. And her 'anonymity' is probably part of the allure. Check out the video below: it is a lot of fun.

Haiku for the week

Summer haze descends,

Choking joy, stealing sunshine,

Drowning all in sweat.

Ah, the Beijing summer - gorgeous for the first five or six weeks, and then it turns to shit. When you know it's going to happen, you really ought not to be disappointed. And yet, each year, there's some part of me that remains obstinately in denial, foolishly hoping that somehow this year will be different. Of course not, you silly boy. Oh dear. Well, maybe next year?

A sense of self-preservation (and the Chinese lack of one)

The other day, I was waiting to cross a wide and busy road up in Beijing's university district when I saw a car approaching uncommonly slowly. I glanced up at the traffic light, thinking at first that it must have changed - although the dawdling car was still well over a hundred yards short of the junction.

No, the light was still green.

I speculated that the car must have some sort of problem - gearbox frozen, run out of petrol, wires from the alternator broken...? It appeared to have slowed to less than walking speed, just barely coasting along at no more than 2mph or 3 mph.

Then I saw the driver, phone jammed to his ear, rubbernecking agitatedly to the right - evidently trying to take directions on how to find an address or a side-road nearby.

Ah, I see. And I sympathise. Really, I do. I know how exasperatingly difficult it can be to find any address in Beijing; and how difficult it can be to spot any landmark along the side of the road when the ubiquitous trees are in full leaf during the summer months. I understand how anxious you might be about not wanting to miss your turn (and have to go all the way down to the end of the block, a half mile or so hence, to turn around).

But, you know, in this sort of situation, what you should do is pull over to the side lane, and slow down to a speed that is low enough to give you a decent chance of spotting what you're looking for but is also sensibly safe for other road users. Not hog the middle lane at 3mph!!!

Really - that's what this nutjob was doing. Bumbling down the middle of a busy three-lane boulevarde almost at a standstill. And without using his hazard lights, of course. And without paying any attention to vehicles coming up behind him.

Two cars closing on him at 35mph took frighteningly late evasive action, and honked furiously at him. Our driver seemed oblivious of them.

Or perhaps he did register this at some level, and finally realised that perhaps he ought not to be in the middle lane. So - he pulled over to the side, suddenly, violently (almost at 90 degrees across the road), and, of course, without indicating.... right in front of a bus, which had to do a lurching emergency stop to avoid a horrendous collision.

The idiot driver still seemed blithely unconcerned. He was now parked perpendicular across the outer lane of the road; but he was at least at the entry point into a fulu, the 'service road' alongside the main road which is mostly used by bicycles and pedestrians and thus where very slow-moving cars would not be such an outrageous safety hazard. However, this chap didn't like the fulu option. No, he backed up into the main road (without looking behind), and then continued to pootle along it at 2mph - although at least he was now in the slow lane, so I suppose that wasn't so bad.

I was tempted to run - er, walk - after him and suggest that perhaps he should STOP to consult a map and/or conclude his telephone conversation with his friend. No sense of self-preservation at all!!

This is the kind of person I find myself wishing an early death on, just to improve the quality of life - and the chance of avoiding death in a stupid accident - for the rest of us. Is that unduly harsh of me?

Summoning the Greys?

Now, this is just getting freaky.

One of my musical neighbours has this morning been incessantly playing that infuriating brainworm of a five-note theme from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. You know the one.

I thought at first it was being played on a bamboo flute, which would at least have had the saving charm of quirky incongruity about it. But it seems that it is in fact just some sort of electric organ, much like the one the NASA guys had in the film.

Why, why, WHY??? Is there a huge flying saucer hovering above us??

Foresight (and the Chinese lack of it)

Another in my ongoing series, Why I hate working for Chinese universities...

I have just started teaching a class on Presentation Skills to a small group of mature students. It is arranged by a Chinese university (groan). It is taking place on Sundays (groan!!).

The idea was first broached to me well over a month ago, when I was so desperate for money that I felt obliged to say yes (in the time since then, I have become insanely busy, and am wishing passionately that I had turned it down).

The scheduled start date was June 5th. I didn't think anything of it at first.

Chinese holidays have a way of ambushing you - because the lunar calendar allows them to wander around so freely, often varying by at least two or three weeks, sometimes a month or more from one year to the next; and also because the government (at least until recently) would seldom decide very far in advance whether it would grant a day off, or a number of days off, for any of these holidays.

Thus, I got rather caught out by Duanwu Jie, the Dragon Boat Festival, falling on the first weekend of June this year. It's only in the last two or three years that the government has started acknowledging this traditional holiday at all - and surely it was much earlier in the year last year?

The university had evidently been caught out as well. Surely they wouldn't schedule the start of a new course over a holiday weekend?

I pointed the matter out to them.

They took two or three days to ponder it.

Then they e-mailed me back: "Monday 6th is a public holiday. Sunday 5th is just a regular Sunday."

Hello!!!! Three-day weekend?!  Do you really think our students are going to want to sit in a stuffy classroom all day long in the middle of a three-day weekend when they could, you know, be away having a trip somewhere, or meeting up with family and friends in Beijing? Why don't you ask the students what they think about this?

Reluctantly, they concurred with my suggestion.

Unsurprisingly, the students all gratefully agreed that they would much prefer the course to start on June 12th.

There, that wasn't hard, was it?

Well, yes, in China, it always seems to be.

Bon mot for the week

"The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance - under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit."

Mark Twain  (1835-1910)

List of the Month - reasons to live in Beijing

I am trying to weigh up whether I should stay here much longer. Here, a window into my ruminations...

Reasons to live in Beijing

1)  I'm here already.

Ah, inertia - always an insidiously powerful argument, but also a rather shaming one!

2)  I used to like it.

Gosh, yes, I used to like it a lot. But the shine has definitely been rubbing off the place since about a year before the Olympics. I'm feeling rather jaded with it now.

3)  It's cheap.

Well, it used to be. And it sometimes still can be. But in the last few years, it's been closing the gap with Shanghai terrifyingly fast (indeed, according to Mercer, it has overtaken her!!).

4)  It's got a fantastic music scene.

Except that there hasn't been that much worthwhile new blood emerging in recent years, while old stagers have disbanded or started to grow a little stale. And the authorities - equating music, especially open air music, with potential mass subversion - have recently been stepping up their harassment of music bars, and making it next to impossible to stage festivals within the city limits. The 'scene' at present is a sorry shadow of what it was four or five years ago.

5)  There's a fantastic modern art scene here.

Except that - unlike most rock music - modern art genuinely is 'subversive'. And so, artists are feeling the impact of the government's current anxieties especially keenly. My friend Wu Yuren spent the best part of a year in prison for nothing. Ai Weiwei has been 'disappeared' indefinitely. Many of their peers are recognising the imperative for self-preservation, and keeping out of sight while conditions here remain so oppressive.

6)  I've got some amazing friends here.

Well, I have had over the years. The majority of them - both Chinese and foreign - have left now. And a number of the longest-standing fixtures in my social set are threatening to leave within the next few months. I don't have many people to go out with in the evenings any more...

7)  I earn good money here.

Or... I used to. Unfortunately, one of my main sources of income (voice recording) has almost entirely dried up in the past couple of years. And most of the other stuff I do (editing, training) is paying no more than it was when I came here 9 years ago (while the cost of living has nearly doubled in the same time). In fact, with the increasing insistence of Chinese employers on "paying tax" for me (they don't, of course; in most cases, they're probably just keeping the deductions for themselves), I'm often earning less per hour than I was back in my early days here.

8)  There aren't any truly inspiring alternatives.

Well, I've toyed with the idea of St Petersburg and Montevideo and Buenos Aires and Cartagena and Amman and Herat and Penang and Vientiane, but.... I haven't been able to make a convincing case to myself for any of them just yet. The dread inertia in another guise.

Oh, dear, things are not looking very promising, are they? Perhaps we should all revisit one of my most positive posts on life in China 
- 10 Things To Love About Beijing.

Haiku for the week

Volcano rumbles.

Life pours salt on open wounds.

Constant rage festers.

Yep, that again. I am probably going to punch someone in the face quite soon. I just hope it's a Young American rather than a poor bloody cab driver.

CHINA RAGE moments

From time to time, just about every expat here reaches the point of complete meltdown suffered by Michael Douglas's memorable character in Falling Down.

There are just so many things about this country - and its people, and their 'culture' - that are weird, gross, inept, selfish, rude, dangerous, or just completely irrational and pointless. Hell, 'weird' doesn't begin to cover this place; it's bewilderingly, mind-buggeringly..... INSANE at times.

No matter how sensitive we are to 'cultural difference', and no matter how curious we are about it, and how tolerant of its more challenging manifestations.... there comes a point for all of us when we've had enough.

Luckily, automatic weapons are very hard to come by out here. When we reach an emotional flashpoint like poor old 'D-Fens', the very worst that's likely to happen is that we shout at an incompetent cab driver or piss on the hubcap of an improperly parked Audi. Most of the time, the extent of our catharsis is a bit of random muttering of obscenities under the breath or a theatrical beating of the palms against the forehead.

I've been muttering rather a lot myself these past few weeks. I need a break. Ten days in Malaysia at the end of February didn't do much to revivify the spirits, because it's not so far away geographically, and quite similar to China also in climate and development status; it was hardly like being away at all. Other than that, I haven't had a holiday of any kind in nearly two years. And I'm not sure that I'm going to manage to fit one in this summer, apart from a brief trip to Yunnan for a mate's wedding (nice, but still in China). I have found before that after an unbroken spell in this country of much more than a year, I start to get just a little bit crazy. After 18 months or so, I have no patience left for anything: absolutely everything pisses me off, all the time.

But there is some consolation in knowing that I am not alone. Two of my oldest friends have gone through rather more spectacular and thoroughgoing examples of the China meltdown recently, and have determined to quit the country for good (after having survived here significantly longer than I have).

And a friend recounted a story to me the other day, an overheard venting of steam that rather tickled me because it seems such an apposite summing up of the way we laowai feel on those occasions when this bizarre country completely gets on top of us. A well-dressed, middle-aged foreign male - it would seem perhaps a business traveller rather than a long-term resident here - got out of a taxi, slapped his hands against his head, and yelled (to no-one in particular), "God! It's like being in the world's biggest kindergarten!"

Ah yes, one of those days.

Bon mot for the week

"It is much easier to forget what you remember than to remember what you have forgotten. That is why it is so important always to remember."

Froog

I've just added a link to my ongoing series of posts about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen protests to the sidebar over there (down below the links about Ai Weiwei and Wu Yuren), and a separate link to the long piece I wrote two years ago on the twentieth anniversary of the crackdown.

Haiku for the week

Uneven struggle:

Behind barricades they wait,

With bricks against guns.

It's always seemed to me that June 3rd rather than June 4th should be the main focus of commemoration of the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing (and their brutal suppression). Orders to clear Tiananmen Square of protesters had been circulated during the day, and troops began to mobilize in the early evening of the 3rd - leading to a night of rioting across the capital as citizens poured into the streets and improvised scores of roadblocks to try to bar the army's progress into the city centre. The clearing of the Square was not accomplished until the early hours of the morning of the 4th, and sporadic shooting incidents took place in or near the Square - and across much of Beijing - for some time afterwards; but many of the most violent clashes had taken place relatively early on, as the armoured columns  began to move in from the outer suburbs - most notably at Muxidi in west Beijing, where troops fired repeated volleys into a crowd, killing around 200 people.

And sometimes it feels as though we're cowering behind the barricades still; but it's no longer about obstruction and defiance, it's just about hiding for self-preservation; there are mental roadblocks that people erect to prevent themselves from having to confront the truth. There's a lot of fear in this adopted home of mine - fear and apathy and denial.

Today - and tomorrow, this weekend, this week - is a time to reflect on what happened here 22 years ago. And it is a time to hope that it is not yet too late for China's leaders to acknowledge what happened, to apologise for it, to learn from it, to start to heal the wounds - and to pledge that the powers of government here will never be so abused again.

Bon voyage (and Good on ya, Sheila!)

Last weekend, my wise and talented blog-friend Cedra Wood, a New Mexico artist, departed for her summer painting trip to Australia. She'll be away for six weeks or so, I think, doing fieldwork out in the bush. Watch out for occasional updates on her blog.

Have a wonderful time, Cedra. I look forward to seeing your pictures of that astonishing wilderness.

New Picks of the Month

Some new 'best of...' picks from three years ago this month:

From Froogville I give you... the most devastating of all my 'fantasy girlfriends', Mrs Peel (from '60s TV show The Avengers).

And from Barstool Blues I suppose it has to be Marjorie Daw, an episode of frustrated romance that called to mind a literary reference.

Enjoy.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for May

The frisson of mild controversy attending the annual 'bar awards' season in Beijing, and the rather keener excitement of long-time commenter Gary claiming the distinction of becoming my 50,000th visitor (well, 50,012th!) over there meant that The Barstool enjoyed a slightly busier month than Froogville this May. However, in general, I am continuing to achieve a modest success in achieving my self-imposed target for a reduction in my logorrhoeic output.

There were 36 posts and around 9,000 words on Froogville last month.

There were 33 posts and nearly 11,500 words on Barstool Blues.

Statcounter shows recent visitors to Froogville from Georgia (the country, not the American State), Brazil, Singapore, and the Czech Republic, and to The Barstool from Greece, New Zealand, and Jamaica. It is exhilarating - and a little daunting - to reflect that my online witterings may have such a broad reach!!

I could tell you the venue, but I want to make you guess

This seems to be an astonishingly popular game amongst Chinese acquaintances of mine - particularly employers (particularly university or education-related employers, which is most of them).

Today - a recording gig.

My employer has decided to switch to a new studio (in pursuit of cost savings rather than quality increments, I have no doubt).

Where is it?  Wudaokou, they tell me.

Hm, I probably know the studio. I've done a lot of recording work over the last seven or eight years, and I've worked with most of the major recording studios in town. There are 3 or 4 near Wudaokou (well, not all that near; but it's such a major hub of the student world that everyone tends to use it as a reference point; and it probably is the nearest subway station to most of them).

We'll send you a map, they say. What a novelty! How nice!

The map appears to show that the studio is near Zhichunlu subway station. Not that far away from Wudaokou (one stop; a mile-and-a-half south), but NOT "Wudaokou".

I probably know that studio. There's a place I've worked a few times before that's right where the Google Maps teardrop appears to be hovering, or near enough.

But I'm not quite sure if it's the same place. And I haven't been to that place for a few months, so I might struggle a bit to find it again.

No problem. They'll send someone to meet me at the subway station.

And they do! Lovely!! It all works like a dream!!!

Except.... that the map they sent me is completely bogus. The place is not anywhere near Wudaokou or Zhichunlu. It's the other side of Xizhimen, about a 20-minute taxi ride away.  WTF?????

[Additional information to help casual by-passers appreciate the extreme bizarreness of this:  1) Xizhimen is a major bus and subway transport hub; 2) Xizhimen is much nearer to where I live than the Zhichunlu station to which I was directed; 3) the studio is only a 15-minute walk from Xizhimen (much less time than it took to get there in a taxi from Zhichunlu); 4) the studio is really easy to find; 5) the studio is in fact right next to a major university (one that I taught at a few years ago, so a doddle for me to locate).]

Bon mot for the week

"He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times."

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

Film List - Great Movie Songs

Now, I was going to be lazy this month, and just give you a link to the list of The 100 Best Movie Songs compiled by the American Film Institute back in 2004.

But then I thought, no, my loyal readers deserve more than this. So, here's a quick supplementary 'Top 10' (er, 18) of what I think are some of the most conspicuous omissions from the AFI list. [It's nice to see some slightly more exotic selections making their way in - such as Gene Wilder's & Peter Boyle's Puttin' On The Ritz from Young Frankenstein and Bob Hope's Buttons & Bows from the great 1948 comedy western The Paleface. But there are some very odd choices in their Top 100, I think (songs from Philadelphia and Nashville??). Some of my picks below didn't even make it into the 'Top 400' longlist. There's no accounting for taste!]

Some of my favourite songs from the movies

Highway To The Danger Zone (Kenny Loggins) from Top Gun [1986]

A great favourite on the playlist down at my favourite bar. Cheesy, yes - but the '80s were all about the cheese. There was a lot of other good music in this, notably the two classics, Otis Redding's Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay and The Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling - used to serenade Kelly McGillis in the bar, in one of the great failed cheesy pick-up attempts. (I don't think there's any problem about including non-original songs in this survey, since the AFI list includes, for example, The Righteous Brothers' Unchained Melody from 1990's Ghost, although that version was recorded in 1965 and the song itself is a decade older still.)

Eye of the Tiger (Survivor) from Rocky III [1982]

Again, all about the cheese! Not, on dispassionate appraisal, a particularly great song, and certainly not a very good film - yet, by some strange synergy, these two mediocrities combined to produce one of the most enduringly memorable film title songs of all time.

Bang! Bang! (Nancy Sinatra) from Kill Bill: Volume 1 [2003]

One of the most creepily appropriate pairings of a venerable 'classic' song with movie opening credits. Tarantino has included a lot of great music in his films - his use of the George Baker Selection's Little Green Bag for the famous slow-motion opening sequence of Reservoir Dogs might also be a contender - but I think this is the best of the lot, really rather haunting.


What's New, Pussycat? (Tom Jones) from What's New, Pussycat? [1965]

I loved this film as a kid - great to see Peter O'Toole having some fun in a light comic role for once, with fantastic support from lovely Romy Schneider and demented Peter Sellers as an Austrian psychoanalyst. And the song is classic Tom Jones.

You've Got A Friend In Me (Randy Newman) from Toy Story [1995]

Really - this was one of the most baffling omissions from the AFI list. Disney was heavily represented, but Pixar didn't get a look-in!

Money Makes The World Go Around (Liza Minelli and Joel Grey) from Cabaret [1972]

The AFI list included this musical's title song, but not the arguably even more memorable Money. Strange.

I Could Have Danced All Night (Marni Nixon) from My Fair Lady [1964]

Musicals are fairly heavily represented in the AFI's list.... but the greatest of all musicals doesn't get a look-in at all?! Something going wrong around here. (JES pointed out in a comment below that I Could Have Danced All Night is in fact included in the AFI's 'Top 100'; I somehow repeatedly overlooked it. As a more-than-worthy substitute from the same film, I pick Stanley Holloway's great singalong I'm Getting Married In The Morning.)

I Will Wait For You (Danielle Licari) from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [1964]

And of course, nothing non-American gets considered for the AFI list, so Michel Legrand's plangent - sometimes perhaps rather too gratingly unforgettable - score for Jacques Demy's great tragic romance is another of the more egregious omissions.

I Wanna Be Like You (Louis Prima and Phil Harris) from The Jungle Book [1967]

This wasn't in the AFI list??!! The best Disney song ever! Although it's a very close competition with the same film's Bare Necessities....

Shout! (Otis Day & The Knights) from National Lampoon's Animal House [1978]

The best of many, many great '60s songs (Louie Louie, Let's Dance, Wonderful World) used by John Landis in his cult campus comedy, it forms the climax of one of the greatest party scenes ever committed to film. According to Wikipedia, 'Otis Day' was actually a performer called Lloyd Williams; I don't recall seeing him in anything else, and I can't find anything about him on IMDB or anywhere else on the Net - strange.

America - Fuck, Yeah! (Trey Parker and Matt Stone) from Team America: World Police [2004]

Another great favourite down at the bar! From the same film, the hilarious Montage and You Are Worthwhiff, Arec Bawrrin! are also in contention.... as are Blame Canada!, The Unclefucker Song and the brilliant What Would Brian Boitano Do? from the guys' 1999 classic South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

Jockey Full Of Bourbon (Tom Waits) from Down By Law [1986]

This eccentric low-life comedy is probably Jim Jarmusch's most accessible work, and it is elevated to classic status by the exquisite opening sequence - accompanied by this great song from Waits's Rain Dogs album.

Ev'rybody Wants To Be A Cat (Scatman Crothers and Phil Harris) from The Aristocats [1970]

A pretty close second to the Jungle Book among the Disneys that most got under my skin when I was a child (and possibly the first one that I went to see in the cinema); I suspect this might be the song that turned me on to jazz - although it would be another 15 years before I started to discover much about the genre.

Be My Baby (The Ronettes) from Mean Streets [1973]

This song was also featured, I think, in 1987's trashy cult romantic hit Dirty Dancing, but it is Scorsese's use of it over the introductory sequence to his great early gangster pic that I particularly love.

These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You) (Jane Birkin and Jimmy Rowles) from These Foolish Things [1990]

This is a simple but - in the context of Tavernier's wonderfully understated film (aka Daddy Nostalgie) about father-daughter reconciliation and the acceptance of death - heartbreakingly poignant rendition of the jazz classic, and one which encapsulates the themes and the mood of the story more completely than any other movie song I can think of.

If I Only Had A Brain (Ray Bolger) from The Wizard Of Oz [1939]

Over The Rainbow - of course! - tops the AFI's list, and Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead! somehow sneaks in at No. 82; but the film's other great songs are overlooked (Ding-Dong! beats out We're Off To See The Wizard and If I Were The King Of The Forest??). The Scarecrow's rather poignant fantasy on the imagined advantages of an intellect is my personal 'best of the rest'. [I gather an early, rather slower version of the song was rediscovered a couple of years ago; there's supposed to be a link to it here, but I'm having difficulty getting it to play at the moment.]

When I See An Elephant Fly (Cliff Edwards and the Hall Johnson Choir) from Dumbo [1941]

Oh my god, this almost slipped my mind - definitely among the all-time top three or four Disney songs!

See What The Boys In The Back Room Will Have (Marlene Dietrich) from Destry Rides Again [1939]

A marvellous saloon singalong from one of my favourite Westerns.

Any other suggestions??

Another example of why I don't like working for Chinese universities

I've just finished a month of business training seminars for a major state-owned enterprise. Although this SOE has its own - enormous - 'training campus' to the north of Beijing, and thus could quite easily (you'd think) arrange such training for itself, it chooses to sub-contract to an outside supplier. That supplier, in this case, is a small commercial English school based on one of Beijing's better-known universities (the exact nature of the relationship with the university itself is unclear; often such commercial entitites seem to be essentially autonomous, and are merely paying some kind of fee to use the university's name and facilities to enhance their 'credibility'). Why anyone would choose this particular school is quite baffling to me; but, evidently, quite a lot of people do. It must be down to guanxi. Or because they're CHEAP.

I've worked for them many times before, but.... they are as outrageously incompetent as every other Chinese school - and especially every university or university-based school - that I've worked for here (I bitched about this course right at the outset).

Latest case in point: they've just asked me to provide a mark for each of the students on the course.

Today - after the course has finished.

No mention of any requirement or expectation for the students to be graded was mentioned before the course started, or during the four weeks that it was running. Hence, I didn't run any formally assessed exercises, and didn't keep many notes on the students' performance in class. I could come up with some marks retrospectively, but, you know, it's not easy. This is really the kind of thing that you should PLAN FOR from the outset.

But 'planning', you see, just doesn't happen in China. Not in the education sector, anyway. People just bumble along, improvising their way as haphazardly and inefficiently as possible. You are never told whether you are expected to grade students.... UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE. You are never told how to grade them (10-point scale, 20-point scale, percentage, A-to-E letter grades... Greek letters... half-marks... +++ or -?, etc.). You are never told why they are being graded. And, worst of all, you are never told the expected range of marks (if I think 85% is an "outstanding" mark, but the students or the course organisers are going to be disappointed if anyone scores less than 90%, I need to know that; and if, as here, there are several different trainers teaching different components of the course, we need to try to make our grading fairly consistent - we shouldn't have one guy giving everyone scores in the 80s and another giving a spread from 65 to 95 and another giving beta pluses and alpha minuses).

I weep and chew the carpet in frustration at this kind of mind-blowing incompetence.

Oh, and they haven't given me a mark sheet or a name list either...

Haiku for the week

Blue skies too can bore;

Perfect weather starts to pall;

Happiness fatigue!

Ungrateful so-and-so that I am - after two or three weeks of this hot-but-not-too-hot early summer bliss, I was growing impatient for a change of weather, any sort of change. Even a few days of smoggy humidity would at least introduce some welcome variety. But a good old summer downpour was sorely overdue! (There was thunder and lightning along the northern fringes of Beijing yesterday morning, but it somehow passed the city by without evolving into a proper rainstorm. Then, in the early afternoon, the dark clouds suddenly started massing again. Pity I was just setting out on a 70-minute commute to work!! But still, I was as excited as a 10-year-old schoolboy.)

I miss teaching literature, but...

There are consolations at times.... when you reflect on how poorly most of your efforts are received (or on how poor most of your efforts are?!). It is a thankless task.

[This from Graph Jam - another of the great Internet time-wasters!]

A touch of Zen

When you're trying to get to a business meeting out in the remote Western suburbs, and it's a hot day, and the bus route that was recommended to you appears not to exist, and you're starting to be in danger of running late... trying to hail a cab could well bring on a massive anxiety attack.

But, occasionally, you get lucky. Occasionally, just occasionally, you get a driver who...

... is cheerful and serene, rather than a xenophobic grump or a road-raging psychopath.

... knows how to drive, and doesn't crunch his gears painfully, or wear out his clutch, or hop madly from accelerator to brake and back again in a series of kangaroo lurches down the road.

... chooses to drive safely, indicating his lane changes, and not carving other drivers up at every opportunity.

.... doesn't quite know the way, but is honest about that, and doesn't panic about it.

... takes your mobile phone from you to get directions from your host, and then just takes the directions briskly and simply, without getting into a long argument about it (or a general conversation about the weather or the government, or whatever it is that most cabbies talk about when given the chance to converse with a stranger on somebody else's phone).

... does his best to take you right to the door, stopping frequently to ask directions from the numerous 'security guards' loafing around this huge and labyrinthine villa development out on the 5th Ringroad.

... cheerfully lets you off the 2-kuai surcharge when he sees you don't have any small change (this has only ever happened to me a handful of times before, most notably with this guy - my previous coolest cabbie).

... stops and calls back to you in friendly fashion when he finally spots the address you're looking for as he's driving away.

It was more than just a pleasant surprise or a welcome relief from stress; it was a joyous, life-enhancing experience. We don't get nearly enough of them in Beijing, but we do get some.

Not surprisingly, this chap was a 20-plus-year veteran: registration number 0039**.

We have a winner!

Silicon Valley IT guru and long-time irregular 'regular' commenter Gary has claimed the distinction of being my 50,000th visitor over on Barstool Blues.

Congratulations, and thanks, Gary.

Now.... we can get back to 'normal' on here...

[But - oh my - we'll be passing our 100,000th visitor on Froogville before the end of the year. Imagine the excitement that will generate! Well, none at all, probably...]

Still counting....

It seems I was a little over-excited in supposing that my parallel 'drinking blog' Round-The-World Barstool Blues might greet its nominal 50,000th visitor over the weekend. Traffic, in fact, was very slow these past two or three days (And a good thing too! Everybody's out enjoying the fine early summer weather instead of crouching in front of their computer screens!!).

Now, however... well, now we are very close indeed. It seems we will pass the momentous threshold at some point on Monday night or Tuesday morning (on Beijing time; it might still be daytime Monday for my American readers). 

Be my Visitor No. 50,000 over there (or the first one after 50,000 to let me know!) and claim a "prize" of considerable but as yet still unspecified wonderfulness - by leaving me a comment here. The counter-widget is now at the very top of the sidebar, to make it easy for us to keep tabs on the situation.  Ooh, the excitement....

For the booklover's birthday wishlist...

I stumbled upon this the other day on Design My World, and thought Hmm, must have! It's a pity it's five months until my birthday (and the world might be ending around then!). I want it now.

Don't we ALL feel like that poor, fragile, about-to-be-squished little man from time to time? I was reminded of this book, by the Czech satirist Bohumil Hrabal.

Bon mot for the week

"You can always brake later than you think."

Kimi Räikkönen  (1979-  )