Beastly numbers

I came upon an intriguing - but rather disturbing - fact in the article I just mentioned in that little rant on statistics a moment ago.   How many new jobs were created in China in the first half of this year?  6.66 million, according to the official government figures.   It's rather too suspiciously round a figure, isn't it?  Let's not get into all the 'Book of Revelations' imagery associated with it!   As I've observed before, one can't really trust any official statistics coming out of this country - partly because people will lie so freely to promote a desired image, and partly because statistical methodology is so slapdash.  (I rather suspect, also, that there may be a problem with the Chinese language itself - or at any rate with the culture of thought that has grown up here - that fosters an extreme conceptual woolliness, which often seems to swamp analytical thought or attention to detail.  People often just don't seem to notice that the statistics they're quoting are implausible, impossible, inconsistent, undefined, devoid of crucial context, meaningless.)    You see, they don't actually explain what that figure is.  How are 'new jobs' counted?  And are they counted in isolation (I rather think so!), or offset against the number of jobs lost?   Even if this really is the total of jobs added to the Chinese employment market, the surplus of newly created jobs over lost jobs.... well, it's still not very much, given the size of the country.  And given the fact that the 'official' figure for the annual increase in job-seekers (probably assessed very conservatively, if not wilfully misrepresented) is 20 million.   Any way you look at it, there are a lot of folks without jobs here at the moment.

War on Chinglish (12)

According to statistics....     This aggravating tic in Chinese writers of English is, I suppose, just one of the more common examples of the general tendency to inappropriately transfer over into English the Chinese language's predilection for beginning every sentence with an utterly redundant but context highlighting phrase or clause, sometimes called a 'topic clause'.  I assume this is deemed necessary in Chinese because the language is so replete with homophones that one's meaning often slides into ambiguity without such frequent heavy-handed 'signposting'.  In English, however, it's just clunky, inelegant, unnecessary.   Our example today typically manifests itself in academic or technical writing where the author wants to introduce objective data to support his argument, and will invariably say something like...   "According to statistics, 88.8% of Chinglishisms make Froog tear his hair out."   or...   "According to statistics, only 11.7% of central government spending this year has been applied to major infrastructure projects."     You see, those figures are statistics.  That is immediately obvious.  So, to introduce them with the word 'statistics' is entirely redundant.   One might also object that there is a rupture of logic here, since the statistic quoted is not "according to statistics": it is not derived from itself, but from some kind of survey or official report.  One might use this phrase to give the origin of the statistics (e.g. "According to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization, malaria infections increased by 8% worldwide last year."), but to say "According to statistics..." on its own is just ridiculous.   PLEASE stop doing it.     At least I got a new variation on this in the latest article I've been editing (much better than yesterday's):   "According to relevant statistics...."   Well, that's nice.  So much better than using the irrelevant ones, as so often happens with my Chinese authors.  Or the ones that are just completely made up.

Recently, on The Barstool

Continuing my occasional series of plugs for the brother blog....     I've already given this a brief shout out on here a couple of weeks ago, but I think it bears dropping on your living-room carpet once again, in the manner of an attention-seeking cat displaying a mangled mouse for your perusal.  I have recently committed to print for the first time ever, after long years of gestation, my important, possibly world-tilting theory (I expect to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Economics in 4 or 5 years) of the Beer Equivalence Index - a method of calculating the cost of living in terms of the number of beers you could buy instead of something.  Shortly afterwards, I produced an addendum on round-the-world Beer Equivalence, demonstrating how you can use the 'Beer Equivalence' concept not only as a method of price comparison within one country but also as a means of gauging the relative cost of living/quality of life between one country and another.  Then, last week I threw in the related but supplementary concept of the Beer Spread Index, which - rather in the manner of the Gini coefficient - provides insights into the state of development and the social cohesion of a country by measuring the breadth of the price gap between the cheapest and the most expensive available beers.     And then, just the other day, I penned - in conjunction, it must be said, with my dauntingly polymathic friend The Weeble - this piece entitled Shit happens, which encompasses reverence for the works of Mr K. Vonnegut, the occasional usefulness of the French language, and some gratuitous alliteration.  Also worth a look.

Plumbing the depths

Of naivety and ignorance in Chinese academe, that is. I've been editing for the think-tank again. All day. The English, actually, wasn't all that bad for the most part (at least, until we got into the last quarter of the paper, where it is obligatory to mouth convoluted amalgams of meaningless CCP-speak platitudes, which seemingly cannot be rendered into English sentences of less than 50 or 60 words in length). But the levels of scholarly acumen - and even basic general knowledge - were so dismal as to beggar belief. Today's topic was international health policy - disease prevention and control as an aspect of 'non-traditional security'. Hm, potentially quite interesting. And a topic on which I am perhaps slightly better informed than the average man-in-the-street. I would not, however, have expected to be better informed than the writers of a "leading academic paper" on the subject. But then..... I can be bothered to use the Internet to check on stuff I'm not sure about. It seems Chinese academics can't. The authors of this paper early on made the astounding assertion that this was a field that had "scarcely been studied before". Egad! Well, I suppose it might be true in China, but in most of the rest of the world it's been a key focus of research for at least the past, what, 20, 30, 40 years? I mean, what the hell else does the WHO and the CDC do? That was a pretty strong indication of the sloppiness that was to follow. Amongst the egregious factual errors I corrected (and correcting facts is not really part of my remit; I'm supposed to be just rendering the English more intelligible): An outbreak of Oropouche fever in Belém, Brazil, in 1960 was said to have killed 11,000 people. According to my researches, this disease is rarely fatal, and the 11,000 figure in this instance was the number of reported cases, not the number of fatalities. The outbreak of plague in India in 1994 was twice placed in 1996 (despite the quoted source having '1994' in its title), while the location of the outbreak was elliptically referred to only as "a city in India". And the disease was called 'bubo' (which is, of course, only a symptom of the disease). Malaria was said to be a viral disease. No, it's caused by a single-celled organism, a protist. Hepatitis was said to be caused by a bacterium. No, the pathogenic forms of hepatitis are all caused by viruses. Yellow fever and 'blood fever' were listed as examples of viruses that have crossed over from animals into humans. 'Blood fever', as far as I can discover, does not exist. I assume they meant haemorrhagic fever - but that's a group of diseases categorised by the dominant symptom, not a single disease (Marburg fever - given later in this list, without any apparent awareness of the repetition involved - would have served as an example). Yellow fever might have originated in other animals (well, I think all viruses do); but it's been in the human population, with humans virtually its only host species, for 500 or 600 years now, so it's not a very apposite example in the context of a discussion of newly emergent disease threats. And, oh yes, China's handling of the SARS crisis was held up as a shining example of transparency and co-operation, giving blamelessly full reporting to the WHO and other international agencies and providing necessary information to its own populace. Choke, splutter.... (I managed to excise that bit, not because it was objectionable nonsense, but on the [more tactful?] grounds that these sentences were so mangled in their English as to be almost irredeemable, and were embedded in the midst of a hugely long paragraph to which they had absolutely no relevance whatsoever.) Also, the poor authors clearly had no idea of the distinction between 'security' and 'securitization' (and this is, arguably, an even more complex matter in international relations than it is in the world of finance), despite the fact that this was the crux of their thesis. Oh yes, and they were rather confused by the fact that the foreign academic whose work they were principally ripping off had a double-barrelled surname. They chose to separate the barrels, referring to him in all the footnotes (well, at least they were giving him citations) and the text as if he had a middle name ending in a hyphen, and then giving the bibliographical references under the last part of his surname only. Whoops. Hm, what else? Well, there were scores of figures quoted (mostly monetary amounts: GDP, health spending, estimated economic losses from disease outbreaks) - with no indication of the relevant timeframes, and often with no currency specified (you can't really assume that it's US dollars - even if they say 'dollars'; and that was the most they ever said; quite often they didn't say anything at all - when they're talking about Hong Kong and Singapore). They were rather light on citations. And the citations they did have were almost entirely for secondary sources. You know, when they're quoting WHO reports, it's really not that hard to go to their website and download the original documents - rather than citing a passing reference in an article in Science Now 4 years later. And while a few heavyweight print publications like The Economist and The Washington Post might have sufficient respectability to be quoted as sources in an academic paper, I don't think Sina.com (China's leading web portal, but hardly an internationally respected news purveyor) or even CNN really quite cut it. Honestly - there were a couple of citations from Sina! Ah, but that's only my Pet Peeve No. 2 about this particular article. Yes, really. Are you ready for this? Make sure you're sitting safely in a comfy chair and have removed all choking hazards from your mouth. This article is taking AIDS as its main example of an emergent disease having a major impact on international security considerations. Fair enough. But there isn't a single reference to a source later than about 2000. Most of the citations, in fact, go back to the early or mid-90s. We shouldn't judge too harshly. It's probably another one of those areas of "cultural difference". A society as ancient as China perhaps doesn't revere being up-to-date as highly as we do in the West.

Haiku for the week

The white world dazzles, And the city's clamour's stilled. Snow hush eases sleep.     Yes, the best thing about the snowfall in Beijing this week is the uncanny, unfamiliar quiet that attends on it.

IT Purgatory

My esteemed blog-friend JES has for the past week or two been suffering one of those ultimate computer nightmares where his attempt to upgrade to the latest version of Linux has unfathomably disabled his PC.  Fortunately, he is tech-savvy enough to bear these slings and arrows with a modicum of composure.  I think I would long since have taken a sledgehammer to the computer in question, and then perhaps gone up on the roof with a hunting rifle to start taking cathartic potshots at my neighbours.  He is a better man than I am.  But I hope he soon finds a resolution to his vexing issues.   My own inability to get Flash to run in Firefox rather pales into insignificance by comparison.  (Terrifying as it is to acknowledge it, you can get used to life without YouTube again.)   As does the latest glitch with Yahoo Mail wherein the 'Browse' button does not appear in the 'Attach Files' screen.  This seems like such a small compromise in function, yet its effects can be exasperating.   It has, for example, rather put the kibosh on my plans for another Photo Week series.  I can still manage to attach things to e-mails (yep, still posting to Blogger via e-mail...), but it takes a fair amount of floundering around to find out the exact location of a file and enter it manually in the 'select file' box.  And the address strings are often so cumbersome (Users/Froog/My Documents/My Pictures/For the blog/Llamas...) that I've taken to transferring files I want to attach on to my flash stick first (to reduce the addresses to something more manageable, like F://Two slightly distorted llamas.jpg).  I am rapidly losing patience with this workaround.   In fact, I find myself cleaning my rifle....   Yahoo, please get this sorted - QUICKLY.     It just so happens that a little earlier I posted a little piece called Shit happens over on The Barstool, which elaborates a whole new vocabulary for use in these situations.  Do check it out.   And good luck, JES.  I feel your pain.

Slip-slidin' away

Making my way to work through the snow early yesterday morning was a bit of an ordeal.  I knew there'd be chaos on the roads, so I thought I'd take the subway - but that left me with a mile or so to slither along slushy roads and uncleared sidewalks.   The trek, however, was made rather more tolerable by a surprising outbreak of courtesy and good humour among my fellow Beijingers.   I first noticed something was up on the subway: people on the platform were standing to the side of the doors, to let people out of the carriages first.  Almost unheard of!  Well, perhaps, I thought, this is a recently learned behaviour, and founded on self-preservation rather than good manners.  In the morning rush-hour, if you stand in the middle of the opening doors, you're likely to get bulldozed to the far side of the platform by the ruck of people exiting the train.  The trains going north on Line 13, though, weren't very busy; yet people on the platforms were standing to the side anyway. I fancied I even saw one or two of them making deferential eye-contact about it - and not with me, but with their fellow Chinese commuters!   Eye-contact!  Whatever next?  It was the same story out on the streets.  Where there was only a narrow path through the snow along the sidewalk (a "goatpath" produced by early morning pedestrians; there hadn't been any snow-clearing at all up in the Wudaokou area), people were actually stepping aside - putting one foot into the snow - to let others pass.  You may think that there was really no alternative, but I have often seen similar situations (minus the snow) where people would just blindly walk into each other, or get involved in an obstinate face-off where both were reluctant to yield priority.   And again, there was eye-contact between people passing like this.  Even the occasional smile.  And a couple of times I saw people put out a steadying hand when someone lost their balance on the glassy compacted snow - yes, some people were helping complete strangers to avoid a fall.  That just doesn't happen in this country; or only very, very rarely.   Perhaps I exaggerate the significance of a few, untypical instances.  Perhaps the only really unusual thing about yesterday morning was that people were actually looking where they were going, for once.  And perhaps, again, that is a necessary act of self-preservation: when things are so perilously slippery underfoot, you have to show more awareness of what's around you.  And if that means that you give a bit more attention to your fellow citizens, that is just a fortuitous by-product.   However, I really do think that there was some rarely-seen human warmth about interactions on the sidewalks yesterday morning.  Maybe it's a kind of camaraderie, born of shared suffering, shared challenge: we were all sharing the common difficulty of a long, cold, wet trudge to get to work or school, and circumstances like that perhaps engender a sympathy, and even on occasion a helpfulness, that is absent in more routine conditions.  Maybe, indeed, it's an emanation of the old communist spirit: most people here, most of the time, behave as though they wouldn't throw water on their neighbour's house if it were burning; but give them a community-threatening event like a flood or an earthquake and they all happily pitch in together to overcome the difficulty as quickly as possible, humming revolutionary songs the while.   I rather suspect it's mostly, in fact, down to an endorphin-rush.  However inconvenient the snow may be, everybody feels a little buzzed about it - especially with one of the first big falls of the season.  I think it was that childish snow-ecstasy that was breaking down people's barriers yesterday, making them behave more amiably and considerately towards each other.   The effect didn't last very long.  By the end of the day, Beijingers on their way home from work were as dour and solipsistically bloody-minded as ever.  And they were standing in the middle of the subway doors again.

Relief - or apprehension?

I was so dreading my landlord's reaction to news of my impending move that I'd put off telling him for a few days.   Perhaps I needn't have worried.   He has not complained.  He hasn't threatened me.  He has not demanded compensation or penalty for the premature termination of the lease (yet).  He has not demanded that I move out immediately (as he did when our rent renegotiation stalled three months ago).   He hasn't even objected that I have given him slightly less than the one month's notice I'm supposed to under the contract.   And he says I can have until the end of the month to move out.  (In fact, I'm only paid up until the 28th; and I'm planning to hand the keys back on the 29th.)     Who knows - perhaps I'll even get my deposit back from him?   Although, given his incessant money-grubbing over the past 5 years, it's difficult to be sanguine about this.  He tried to get me to pay for a replacement water heater, when the element in the - crappy - old one burnt out a few months after I'd moved in.  He tried to get me to pay for replacing the lock on the front door, when it seized up (this was a fault with the lock design; within the space of a few months, every apartment on my staircase had to have these locks replaced) - even though the cost was only about 50rmb.  This guy really is tight as the proverbial duck's ****. And I don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting their deposit back from a Beijing landlord.  But I'm damn well going to try!     I still can't quite believe that he's being so docile about things.   "It's quiet."  "Too quiet."

Daily Llama clique

They may look quaint and harmless, but they're fomenting terrorism and conspiring to "weaken China" - oh yes.  Beware.  One llama - bad.  Multiple llamas - insurrection!

Grey days

Winter should soon be here.   And winter is mostly quite a good season.  The cold can be a little sharp at times, but we get lots of vivid blue skies, dry air, and relatively low pollution.   At the moment, we're suffering a continuation of foggy, smoggy late October.  Today didn't really happen: the peak light levels were little better than you get in the last hour before dusk.   This is not good for the mental health.  I may need to get myself a UV lamp.

On the move

Finally, I have committed to a change of domicile.  At the end of this month, I will be moving into a new apartment.   It's hardly a big leap geographically (the new place is less than half a mile due south of my current location) or in terms of lifestyle (the standard of decoration and fittings is pretty much identical to my current place; it's just a bit smaller, and therefore cheaper).    Nevertheless, it will be quite an upheaval for me.  I've been in the same place for just over 5 years and 3 months now; and I've accumulated a lot of stuff in that time.  I figure the packing up is probably going to take up every spare minute of the next three weeks.   Phew!  That is the longest I've ever lived anywhere, by quite some margin (since the house I grew up in, anyway).  There haven't been too many places I have lasted even one full year in.   But that has been the problem, I think.  I've got stale about this place.  It bores me now.     And, lately, it's been making me ill.  The traffic noise on the 2nd Ringroad at night has become much worse since I've been living here, and is now impossible to sleep through without earplugs.  And now the annual curse of the clacking and creaking of the central heating pipes has started up again.  So, I'm not sleeping well at night.  And a never-ending round of renovations in the apartments downstairs means that it's tough to catch up on sleep during the day either.   The new place is, I hope, going to be much quieter.  If it is, I may spend my first two or three weeks there asleep.

These are not the pay scales you're looking for

I am still struggling to get any straight answers out of the dipshit employers who so incensed me 5 or 6 weeks back by oh, so casually underpaying me by about 30%.   One of the things that has been bugging me about them is they have been telling me for about a year now that a new pay scale was either due imminently or had just been introduced.  But they never actually notified me what this pay scale was.  And when I asked them to confirm what pay scales were in force, and to send me the up-to-date numbers, they ignored me.  Repeatedly.  Over the last several months.   When I got into a big dispute over my pay with them, I demanded some information about the pay scales rather more urgently - as you might expect.   And they finally sent me some new information.  Well, slightly different to that which I'd been given when I first started working for them nearly three years ago, anyway.  Unfortunately, they still didn't explain what exactly these figures represented, or when they had come into force.   Now, these figures - though slightly less (in one particular instance, significantly less) than the amounts I thought I had been due under my original agreement with them - did at least tally with the payment rates being used on the disputed payslip (it wasn't the rates themselves I had the main problem with; it was the fact that they had arbitrarily decided to reduce the number of payable hours on my claim form).    However, this "new" set of figures did also include a provision that presenters working for this company are supposed to be paid an additional "2 hours" whenever they deliver a seminar for the first time (an allowance for the additional preparation time needed, I suppose - eminently reasonable).  Only one of the events I'd done for them in the meltdown month had been entirely new material.  But still, an extra 2 hours' pay would console me somewhat for the 1.5 hours they had unjustly docked.  But, of course, they didn't pay me this extra allowance either.  And I am naturally curious as to when this provision was introduced, since, over the previous year or so, I've done 8 or 10 other seminars for them - which might all have been eligible for this extra allowance.   But, of course, I've never been paid this amount for any of the new seminars I've delivered.  And I don't suppose I ever will be.  Probably the other presenters who work there aren't getting this pay either.   I'd like to think that someone on the Chinese staff there is pocketing all this extra cash for themselves.  Really.  I find straightforward criminality far preferable to dumb stupidity and incompetence.  But I rather fear it's just the latter.   And do you know what's really bugging me now?  It's not the money.  Even 20 hours of pay witheld (at the miserly rates this outfit offers) is hardly a major sum.   No, it's the continued dithering.  The evasiveness.  The lying.     My contact there is now trying to tell me that this pay scale is not the current one, but an old one. (Not true.  At least, it is plainly different from the only "old" one I was ever familar with.  And it does appear to accord in every detail - but one! - with the amounts I was actually getting paid in recent months.)  I reiterate my exasperated questions: Why was I told this was the current pay scale?  What, in fact, is the current pay scale?  When did the changeover happen?   Of course, they don't provide the answers.  But I do get a doozy of an extra-special super-duper new lie on top of all the other bullshit they've already given me.  Now, they're telling me that the pay scale they've shown me does not apply to me, because actually they loved me so much that they put me on a 'premium' pay scale all of my own.  So, I was actually getting more than these published rates - and I should be grateful.   Er, NO, I wasn't getting paid at a higher rate.  And if there were two pay scales, I'd like to see them both, thank you.   And I'd like that information right away.  I have been asking for it rather urgently for four weeks now.     WHY?  Why are they behaving like this??  Do they think it's FUNNY??!!   Well, they're not going to be laughing for much longer.  They have messed with the wrong guy.

Bon mot for the week

"Ability is of little account without opportunity."

Napoléon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

Further reflections on a Classical education

Whereas most young boys dream of being train drivers (I did too, when I was very young; but the enchantment faded when I realised I'd missed the Age of Steam) or astronauts or footballers, for a while back in my early teens I had a pretty serious fixation on the idea of becoming a Classical scholar.  I think it was probably this poem that saved me from self-incarceration in an Ivory Tower.  Thank you, Mr Yeats.   [By the by, there's a 'Poetry Sunday' offering over on The Barstool today as well.]       The Scholars   Bald heads, forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter Beauty's ignorant ear.   All shuffle there, all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?   W.B. Yeats  (1865-1939)

Possible opening for a novel

I cheekily put the first of these paragraphs up on my Good Beginnings post at the start of this week, to see if anyone would play the "Can you guess what it is yet?" game.... but no-one noticed.   So, I thought I'd trot it out more prominently here, and see if it garners any reaction.   There's a curious story behind this, how it came to be written.  When I was working in Toronto a decade or so ago, The Globe & Mail ran a short story competition.  I produced this tale of a sniper, which I called Watching, with a view to entering, but..... well, I didn't.  I can't now recall if it was a crisis of confidence, or if I just missed the submission deadline.  I rather think it was a problem of length and/or content.  I think the word limit might have been something like 5,000 words, and I'd gone considerably over that, and didn't want to prune it back too much.  Also, I think the subject matter was supposed to be "reflective of Canadian life" or somesuch, and this story was pretty obviously set during the civil war in Yugoslavia (although I wanted to avoid specifically identifying the locale, to give it more the mood of a timeless fable); having the central characters emigrate to Canada after the war was a bit of an unsatisfactory ploy to try to meet this requirement.   Anyway, I rather liked it.  It was, I thought, one of the best things I'd written.  It was - is - in fact about the only substantial piece of fiction I've ever written (at least, since my school days).  It was also the first thing I'd written on a computer.  Ah, computers - bane of the modern world!  I tried to copy all of my personal files on to floppy disks when I left the job, but most of them got corrupted.  This story was a victim of the cyber-gremlins.  And I lost my one-and-only hard copy of it as well.  Vanished, as though it had never been.   However, I still retain a pretty vivid memory of it, and the other week I thought I'd try to recreate the opening of it.    I have been wondering if the idea is strong enough to expand into a novel.  My initial interest was in examining this perspective of someone who holds a god-like power of life and death over people - what does a sniper think about, crouched in his nest for hours at a time, waiting for the right moment to shoot, just watching people?  I was also fascinated with the possibility that in a civil conflict like this there might not always be rigid demarcations between the feuding communities, that people from either side might be able to mingle with their "enemy" and for much of the time conduct relations with them in a more or less normal way.  So, the narrative idea developed of an odd love story where the sniper becomes infatuated with a young girl he sees through his sights by day; and at night he starts crossing over into her community to try to meet her and develop a relationship with her.  Eventually he is successful in this; but as they become lovers, he is increasingly tormented by guilt about the people - her people - that he has killed, and by the fact that he must try to keep his role in the war a secret from her.         Already he had a reputation.  Even those unschooled in the finer points of his art would have realised that he was something out of the ordinary.  The people here, schooled by painful experience, were all now connoisseurs.  And they knew he was the best of the best.  There was something else, though, beyond his technical skills.  He excited a superstitious awe.  You needed exceptional eyesight to do what he did; but they were starting to say he had a 'second sight' as well, that he could see inside people's bodies, perhaps even look into their souls – and that was how he made his choices. In less than a week he had a reputation, and a nickname.  They were calling him The Angel.  Not an 'Angel of Death'.  That would have been too obvious; all snipers were that.  No, it was short for Angel of Mercy.  There might have been some irony in the naming, but there was also a gratitude.  People sensed something good in him, and they clung to it.  It wasn't the people he spared.  They could never know how many of them he'd watched through his telescopic sight, or what deliberations he'd gone through when he refrained from pulling the trigger.  It was the ones he'd killed, the pattern people thought they saw in this: only the old and the sick, as if he were trying to take as little life as possible. Most of his early victims, in fact, had not been especially old; yet none of them had had much longer to live.  This was how the belief grew that he had some uncanny insight.  People were soon convinced that he could see better than an X-ray, better than a doctor who would live and who would die – and he was just hurrying the process along, accelerating their end by a few years at most, sometimes only by a few months or a few weeks.  It could be seen as a kindness: he was sparing them their final suffering.  His victims were not all obviously frail, but, people said, he could always tell; he looked at the men and women in his sights and he knew which tumours were operable and which had run out of control; he knew which coughs were just a passing winter cold or a heavy smoking habit and which were signs of chronic emphysema or TB.  He knew, they said.  He always knew.

Haiku for the week

Bare details linger - Phone numbers and address books - Unhappy reminders.     I received some sad news this week about the sudden death of a young friend.  Her number, of course, is still recorded in my mobile phone.  It is very hard to delete it.

Whatever happened to the courtesans?

While scouring the Web for more information on the great "lion on the cheese grater" mystery, I turned up this interesting article on courtesans on Salon, and thought it worth sharing.   I'm still looking for my Aspasia.   (Or should that be Aphasia?)

Ah, he's back!

I have muttered on here numerous times before about how almost ALL the scripts I record for English listening exam practice in Chinese schools and colleges get endlessly recycled - but you probably thought I was exaggerating a bit.   But no.  Further striking proof yesterday.  The talented "Mr Green" made a reappearance - nearly two-and-a-half years after I first encountered him.  Yes, that's right - he's the next-door neighbour who knows how to clone monkeys. (Probably.  The kids aren't sure, but they decide to go and ask him.)

A tale of two exams

There are two leading examinations in 'business English' that non-native speakers may choose to take: BULATS (the Business Language Testing Service) and BEC (the Business English Certificates).  Both are administered in China by Cambridge ESOL Exams, a not-for-profit offshoot of the University of Cambridge which develops English language testing for non-native speakers, and for which I used to do a bit of work occasionally (I don't work there any more!).   I think BEC is the more recently developed of the two, and certainly only a fairly recent introduction into China; therefore BULATS has something of a head start on it.  Whilst there are a number of significant differences in the attributes and the format of the two exams, it is not readily apparent how a foreign student of English (or a company looking to assess the English abilities of its employees or its prospective hires) would be expected to choose between the two.    When you have two similar products directed towards essentially the same clientele, you need a differentiated marketing strategy.   Is there one for these two exams?  Not as far as I have ever been able to discover from Cambridge ESOL in Beijing.   Now, this may be the fault of the headquarters back in the UK.  I get the impression that a lot of time and effort and expertise is devoted to developing and administering the various exams, but much less to their marketing (academics all too often tend to disdain the 'commercial' aspects of such an operation).  Although its English for Speakers of Other Languages exams are world-leaders, Cambridge ESOL comes across as distinctly amateurish in much of what it does (much of the material they have provided to me to present in promotions and seminars, for example, has been abysmally poorly put together).   However, I fear there are special problems with Cambridge ESOL's operations here in China.  They seem to employ an exclusively Chinese staff - some of whom are indeed very bright and pleasant people.... but very naive about business.  Most of them wouldn't know a marketing plan if you slapped them around the face with it.  It is entirely possible that there is a joint marketing plan for these two exams (and accompanying promotional materials and presenter's briefing notes), but that the staff here are unaware of it.... or have forgotten about its existence.... or just fail to appreciate its importance.   One of the main reasons I've just broken off my working relationship with these people - after nearly three years - is that I had finally got fed up of continually being asked to go out and deliver "promotional" presentations.... without ever being told what exactly it was I supposed to be promoting, or how, or why.   At one of the very last events I did for them, I asked one of their more senior staff about this BEC/BULATS conundrum, and she simply did not understand the point of the question.  At first, she just gawped at me.  Then she unthinkingly rattled off the list of different features between the two exams.  "Yes, but how does that help us to choose which one we want to take?  What kind of people take BEC, and what kind of people prefer BULATS?"  More boggling.  Then she offered the relevant but not massively useful tidbit of information that BEC was mostly being taken by students still in college; the problem with this was that it was entirely circular reasoning - this is happening because the China office has chosen to market the exam primarily to students, but there's still no rationale as to why this is appropriate.  When I continued to press her for some compelling reason why this exam was better suited to college students, she offered - in all apparent seriousness - that it was not time-limited.   I was flabbergasted.  I was amazed to discover that that was the case.  But even if it is, it is not appropriate - it is not ethical - to market the exam on that basis.    Most ESOL exams are time-limited, I suppose, because principal stakeholders demand it.  With IELTS (the International English Language Testing System - the main English exam used to support applications for higher education study in English-speaking countries other than the USA), for example, the main 'consumers' of the test results are colleges and universities who know full well that such assessments of English level can become unreliable after just a few months (students may get much better or, more often, much worse) and are pretty well irrelevant after 2 or 3 years, at most.  The business community is perhaps less astute about this limitation of English language testing, and has - thus far - failed to insist on a time limit for the validity of the BEC test.  But anyone with half a brain - anyone, certainly, who knows anything about language education - must realise that an English test result is worth nothing after a couple of years.   But not the people who work for Cambridge ESOL in China.  I don't know whether it's ignorance, obtuseness, naivety, or slovenliness - but they seem not to have a clue about either business or education.  And, worse, they seem not to care.

The dream returns to haunt me...

After a long period of having mislaid my phone number, my well-meaning but mostly incompetent tame letting agent has suddenly got back in touch with me.... and has shown me a nicely modernised siheyuan property in my neighbourhood that is - sort of, almost - within my price range.  As chance would have it, it's right next door to the Froogly dream house that was so tormenting my hopes back in June; so I had a look at that again as well.   I find I'm getting over my infatuation with that very big house (the L-shaped courtyard is massive, but the rooms - perhaps chiefly through unfavourable comparison with the yard outside - seem a bit dark and poky; and the dipshit landlord has still done nothing about tidying up or redecorating the place - the emptiness/tattiness factor is taking a good 25% off its rental value, as far as I'm concerned).  The smaller one in the adjacent hutong is very appealing (apart from some damp problems in the wall of the main bedroom), but, given the current torpid state of my employment, it would be a huge gamble for me to take on the extra rent.   Then again, perhaps I'm just being a wimp, and hunting for excuses not to move into a siheyuan just as winter descends on us (even with the new electric storage heaters recently installed in almost all the hutongs to replace the former coal-brick stoves, these places get extremely damp and chilly: and you almost invariably have to walk outside to move between certain of your rooms).   I have, however, found a rather enticing alternative to either of these 'fantasy homes': an apartment rather like my current one - a fair bit smaller (though I never use half of the space in my present pad anyway), but quite a bit airier (large, unobstructed windows in both the bedroom and the study), in a rather more interesting neighbourhood (inside the 2nd Ringroad rather than outside), very slightly cheaper (a major consideration in my times of penury), and - best of all - with a very pleasant landlord (a professional erhu player).   I am pretty thoroughly fed up with the place I am now.  I will probably be making the big decision within the next two or three days.  Fancy siheyuan beyond my means, or frugal but sunshiney regular apartment??  It's a tough one.  Wish me luck.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for October

Wow - October was something of a bumper month!  Hardly surprising, perhaps, given that ill-health and under-employment kept me at home for so much of it.     There were 52 posts and 17,000 words on Froogville.   There were 40 posts and very nearly 12,000 words on Barstool Blues.     And that's without attempting to tally up all the comments I wrote (on my own blogs and elsewhere).  I could have written a novel in that time!  Well, half a novel, anyway.   Let's hope I can cut back a bit from that output this month, since that would assuredly be a sign of much-improved financial and mental health.     However, glancing back over those 90 posts, I do feel it was a month of considerable quality as well as quantity.   My post on favourite openings of novels (reader contributions encouraged) seems likely to become a long-running 'collecting box' feature, and I must soon promote it to a spot in my sidebar.  I was also quite pleased with the piece on My philosophy of teaching and my recent Halloween collection of micro ghost stories.   Meanwhile on The Barstool, there were important posts about my theory of Beer Equivalence and the essential ingredients of a good sports bar (all sadly lacking in Beijing!).     Nothing interesting to report on the readership this time, I'm afraid.  Google Analytics is determinedly unforthcoming about the geographical origins of my visitors, and - usually much more fun and informative on this - Statcounter seems to be down at the moment.  If you are looking in from an exotic corner of the world, please leave me a comment to say hi.

War on Chinglish (11)

been and gone It's a curious little quirk of English that we use the Present Perfect tense of 'be' rather 'go' to talk about whether we have ever had the experience of visiting a place.  Hence: He has been to New York several times. He has been to the opera twice this year. We haven't been to the seaside since we were children. This enables us to create a useful distinction whereby the Present Perfect of 'go' is only used for trips which are still in progress. He has been to the doctor's means he has finished his consultation and come back with his prescription for medicine.  He has gone to the doctor's means he is still absent from work, might still be sitting in the doctor's waiting room for his appointment. He has been to Paris means he had a holiday or a business trip there once, some time in the past.  He has gone to Paris means he is there NOW (or is on his way there). The Chinese usually seem to have a complete blindspot about this usage.  If they pick up on it at all, they tend to start thinking that 'be' can be used interchangeably with 'go'. In the recording studio this morning we had an instance where somebody's absence from the office was explained with the phrase:  She's just been out for a little while. That would have been fine, if this lady were now back; but the context made it fairly obvious that she was still supposed to be out of the office.  Clearly what was meant was She's just gone out for a little while. It occurred to me (so conscientious am I in my efforts to avoid having to re-write anything) that the script as written could possibly have been interpreted to mean  She has only recently announced that she is a lesbian. But I very much doubt if a Chinese educational publisher would be addressing topics like that....

Bon mot for the week

"They say there's a good book in everyone. Unfortunately, with most people, it's buried under the four or five really terrible ones that they have to write first."

Froog

Strange weather

Winter has shown up early this year.   It's been getting decidedly chilly at night for the past week or so, but Friday marked a dramatic ramping down in the temperature.  In fact, there was a point around 7 in the evening, in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, when the temperature must have plummeted a good 10 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit in the space of just a few minutes, taking it down to not much above freezing: my breath was steaming fiercely as I scurried through the downpour towards my evening's entertainment.   Last night, more of the same: bitterly cold, and starting to spot with rain as I arrive at a gig around 10pm.  Shortly afterwards, the tentative rain became a downpour.  And then, at the Halloween witching hour, the rain became SNOW.   By the time I went home at 2am or so this morning, the snow had turned to sleet and then to rain, and it didn't seem likely that any of it would still be around this morning.  At some point overnight, though, it had turned back to snow once more, and it was coming down heavily when I woke this morning.  The sky looked absolutely full of it, and it didn't start to let up until around lunchtime.   SNOW, on - or slightly before - the 1st November?!  Unheard of!   Well, not quite.  I remember back in '03 we had a very heavy fall, quite out of the blue, on the 4th or 5th November.  Then, as now, the trees were still in full leaf, and were bowed and shattered in their thousands by the great weight of snow.  There's going to be lots of clearing up for the city authorities to do tomorrow.   It's all melting again now, but I have a feeling there's going to be quite a bit more of it this season.       Did anyone see a Snow-Mao today?

Halloween punnery

Just to bring yesterday's collection of micro ghost stories up to a Baker's Dozen, here's a final little spooky frippery for All Hallow's Eve....     He haunts the back benches and the lobby bars: an old ghost Tory.