A clash of cultures

For the past few days, one of my musician neighbours has been obsessively practicing Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee on.... well, I'm not quite sure what. Either a guqin or a guzheng, I think.

It's very technically impressive, of course. But it is becoming somewhat irritating...

Loophole!

Another gleaming gem (of potentially useful information?) that I fossicked from this week's pile of legal memos:

According to article 6 (1) of the Beijing municipal government's Regulations for the Administration of the Showering, Beauty Treatment, and Hairdressing Industry, paid massages must not be given by the opposite gender. However, this restriction does not apply to facial/head massages and foot massages, which means that paid facial/head massages and foot massages can be given by the opposite gender. Article 6 (1) only prohibits paid massages provided by the opposite gender; massages provided by the opposite gender for free are not prohibited.

You see how this works? Next time you go to a little neighbourhood massage joint to get a quick scalp rub from one of the attractive and supple-fingered young ladies there, don't forget to ask about the free extras on offer. Don't worry: it's all perfectly legitimate.

Haiku for the week

In a marathon, 

Every yard of the last mile

Feels like a full mile.

And that's rather how my workload has been starting to feel this week: classes last night, this afternoon, and then on Monday lunchtime, and then..... nothing. But gawd, this week has been one hell of a slog.

That reminds me of a song

One of my favourite grown-ups in Beijing is about to get on a plane and leave for good. Even worse, she is taking my very favouritest little girl in the whole world with her. I am glum, yes.

I much prefer the Peter, Paul, and Mary version of this song (it's up there alongside Mary Hopkin's Those Were The Days as one of the very first songs I can ever remember hearing on the radio) to John Denver's (although I gather he wrote it two or three years before they recorded it). However, this 1972 TV clip of him duetting with Mama Cass is an unexpected gem I've just unearthed on YouTube.

[I discover that jokey punk 'supergroup' Me First and the Gimme Gimmes do quite a fun version of it, too....]

All done with the touch of a bottom

I've spent most of the last 48 hours picking my way through a raft of turgid legal memos, to try to find useful illustrative examples I can use in a writing class (owing to certain scheduling hiccups, we find ourselves trying to cover the last three sessions - of six - in just eight days; and owing to my having been wretchedly ill for the whole of last week, I find myself severely behindhand in the preparation).

The tedious hours of keyboard work are rendered tolerable, though, by the occasional nugget of unintentional humour in my source material.

I was just reading through an overview of the law of contract as it applies to online transactions, and was gratified to learn that the client's website enabled customers to confirm a purchase by just pressing on a special bottom on the screen.

Now, that's what I call "user-friendly"!

Just got paid

If there's one type of employer worse than a Chinese university (or a Chinese private college - they're the worst), it has to be a Chinese educational publisher.

I just managed to get paid for some editing work I did for a "distinguished" academic journal.

Yes, I just managed to get paid. Nearly six months after I did the work.  More than six weeks after the journal was published.

And they weren't going to pay me just yet. Oh no. They wouldn't tell me when they were going to pay. There was an 'internal process' of payment approval to be followed, and it was going to take an unspecified amount of time. It might have been another month, or two; it might have been more.

I basically had to fake my own death to get paid.

Ah, China.

At least they gave me a copy of the journal in question as an extra thank-you for my work (something to put in the coffin with me, as one of the proudest achievements of my life).

I find that they have removed a lot of the edits I made, reinstating gross, embarrassing, Chinglish errors.

I also find that every other article has been "edited" by someone who spent about a tenth of the amount of time that I did on the work, and basically did nothing.

And I find, on the title page, that the journal aspires to provide "a leading forum for academic debeta" in this field. Hmm. Probably doesn't succeed in that aim, I'd venture.

Ah, China.

A double bon mot

"Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked."

Robert Browning  (1812-1889)

"It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date."

George Bernard Shaw  (1856-1950)

Another Classical Sunday

My selection of one of my translations of Catullus as my latest 'Pick of the Month' dip into the archives reminded me of this little frippery I was knocking around a little while ago.

It's inspired by an image in one of Horace's best-known Odes, 1.v, in which he tries to console himself that he's better off without his tempestous former lover Pyrhha. Dedicating one's clothes to a god in gratitude for surviving a shipwreck was apparently a well-established custom in the Roman world, and I rather fancy it may have been something of a literary trope in circumstances such as this as well, an apt metaphor for escape from a gruelling love affair. I'm pretty sure I've come across it in another of the Classical poets somewhere. Catullus, maybe? Or Propertius?

With Horace, it's just a concluding quip, picking up on a metaphor of the "rough seas" he imagines his successor having to learn to endure in a relationship with the girl. I thought the image could carry a poem on its own. Here's a preliminary effort.

After Shipwreck

Like a man escaped from drowning,

I should make a shrine

of my still wet clothes

in thanks for my salvation.

How fierce was the storm!

How hard I had to kick

against the undertow that pulled me

to the bottom of the sea!

Yet today the sun is bright, the wind calm,

the waves lap gently at the shore.

As I walk along the damp strand

gazing wistfully out to sea,

I remember only

sailing in fair weather.

Demolition derby

A few years ago, I inherited a DVD player from departing drinking buddy Crazy Chris. I'd never had cause to try and use it, since I had a number of other DVD-capable devices (most of those also legacies from friends who'd quit Beijing). But, over the last few months, all of those other options have started biting the dust - either dying completely, becoming maddeningly glitchy and imperiously selective over which DVDs they will deign to play, or having their remote control units expire (which usually leaves you with no commands other than 'pause' and 'play' on the machine itself). So, I have finally been forced to give Crazy Chris's machine a whirl.

I might have known what to expect. Crazy Chris would buy the cheapest piece of locally manufactured crap he could find (and then wouldn't use it much anyway, since he liked to go out pretty much every night).

So, even by the standards of cheap, useless, nonsensically designed Chinese electronic products... this machine was conspicuously BAD. Somewhere beyond bad. Quite gobsmackingly awful.

The main problem was the remote, which was much the most unnecessarily complicated device of its kind I have ever seen. It had nearly 60 buttons on it! None of them bore the internationally recognised symbols for basic functions like 'pause', 'play', 'fast forward', or 'skip to next chapter'. Many of them were not labelled at all. And even where there were labels, they were in such tiny script that Chinese friends struggled to decipher them (or failed altogether: some of the Chinese words chosen were, apparently, not at all self-explanatory of the supposed function).

I managed to figure out 'play' and 'pause' and one or two other basic functions (but not 'fast forward' or 'skip to next chapter'). But the buttons which Chinese friends had assured me ought to be soundtrack and subtitle selection proved gallingly dysfunctional.

Even worse, several of the buttons led to a scrolling sequence of menu screens - from which one could not escape!! Whenever you have a function button like this that leads into a set of menus, repeated pressing of the same button ought eventually to take you back to the screen you were on previously - or to the movie you were in the middle of watching. But not with this little bastard! There was not even (as far as I was able to discover) a 'master button' that would take you back to the movie from any menu screen (with most machines of this kind, the 'play' button will do this - but not with this little bastard!). Thus, inadvertently pressing any one of about 40 of the remote's 56 buttons would leave me mired in limbo, and having to restart the movie from the beginning (because I was not able to access any 'skip chapter' or 'select scene' functions).

Even worse (how could it be worse?).... many of these booby-trap buttons returned you to the default screen. With most devices of this kind I've used here, the default screen has been blank - a restful light blue or violet, perhaps - with just the manufacturer's name or logo on it. But this infuriating little bastard device had a default screen with a tubby middle-aged Chinese guy in a traditional tunic staring out at me with a stiffly simpering smile. I soon grew to HATE that constipated grin - as it confronted me mockingly time after time when I found myself trapped on the default screen with no apparent way of getting back to my movie.

I've been staying in for most of the last week because of ill health, trying every evening to watch a DVD or two.... and having a very hard time of it.

Last night, my patience cracked. I threw the dratted remote control unit at the floor... so hard that it bounced up almost to the ceiling. Remarkably, it didn't break; not completely, anyway. So, I threw it at the floor again, even harder. This time, it broke into assorted shards.

And that felt so satisfying that I repeated the process with the DVD player itself. God, that felt good. I just wish I had a baseball bat, so I could have finished the job properly.

Of course, now I need to get myself a new DVD player....  I must take care to avoid the... er... [takes a moment to sort through the trash] it appears to be a brand called KD DASL (????).

"Rules"!!

The latest chapter of exasperation in my ongoing communications with that Chinese university...

I need a pay breakdown for the last monthly payment period (which they never sent me at the time), to check whether one of the classes I taught for them was included in that payment or not (it gets rather complicated, because their 'payment period' runs mid-month to mid-month, and the cut-off date is different to what they'd originally told me). This should, of course, include a statement of how much tax was deducted, and the basis of the calculation.

Eventually, after being asked by me multiple times, my contact there sent me a statement of the net payment, with no mention of the amount of tax deducted.

I reminded her that it was rather important I know how much tax was paid as well, and asked her to check with their accountants.

She replied: "I cannot ask the accountants that. It is our rule."

Ah, China. I lose track of how many times I've heard some such fatuous line as this.

In fact, that's the second one this week. In attempting to chase down a six-months-overdue editing fee, I asked the accountant responsible if she could at least give me a rough idea of how long their 'internal approval procedure' for greenlighting the payment could be expected to take. "I cannot tell you that. It is a business secret."

Yes, it is INFURIATING. But it is also irresistibly HILARIOUS.

That's ME, that is!

Haiku for the week

Dreaming, awake merge;

Memory given a good stir;

Thoughts combine oddly.

Jeez, I'm ill at the moment - and, if not quite hallucinating, often on the cusp. I've been wracked by some kind of food-poisoning bug for nearly a week now: unable to process any food at all (I attempted a handful of dried fruit for breakfast a few days ago, but it passed through 36 hours later, completely undigested); dehydrated, malnourished, intermittently feverish, and sleeping very poorly. I am quite enjoying the trippiness of some of my 'dreams', but this is inadequate compensation for being unable to do anything else.

I fear I have reached the point of having to go to see a doctor.

And I really HATE having to go to see a doctor. Doctors, I suspect, were at least partly responsible for the death of my father. They were almost entirely responsible for the avoidable death of my elder brother. And when I have myself fallen under their power, I have suffered protracted spells of miserable, unnecessary, and ultimately fruitless investigation ("We haven't got a clue what this is, but let's just run a dozen or so tests for really rare and improbable cancers just to be on the safe side, eh?").

It's not that I hate doctors per se. Most doctors, I believe, are decently earnest about wanting to help people. And a small percentage of them are thoroughly competent. And, heck, some of my best friends are doctors (it's an inescapable side-effect of a university education; well, at least if you go to a university like Oxford, which has a] one of the best medical schools in the country and b] a collegiate system which mingles students from all disciplines in small, tight-knit communities).

But they do tend to suffer from a god-complex (all professional advice-givers do, but doctors are the worst - it's that sense of holding the power of life and death over people that does it). And this is reinforced by the attitude of their patients, who are mostly elaborately deferential when seeking their help, and exaggeratedly grateful afterwards, regardless of whether that help has been efficacious or not. It seems to me that in our modern world there is a widely embraced collective delusion that our medical knowledge is approaching close to perfection, that doctors can now recognise and cure every possible disease. Of course, they can't. A great number of ailments, perhaps the majority, are still a bit of a mystery.

Doctors find their self-worth validated, and give satisfaction to most of their patients, primarily through dealing with that great mass of diseases which are essentially trivial, will resolve of their own accord sooner or later, and can be readily palliated by self-medication. I don't like to waste my time or theirs by consulting them over problems of that nature.

And I am nervous of entrusting myself to them with an illness that might possibly belong to that smaller but very scary group of diseases that rarely resolve spontaneously and are potentially life-threatening or seriously debilitating.... because my experience (perhaps untypical, unlucky, I admit) has been that 70% or 80% of the time they can't do anything for you.

I don't hate doctors individually. But I am extremely wary of them as a profession. And I do HATE the idea of having to go to see one.

I really hope my stomach starts working again soon.

[As it happens, I've already had to go and see a doctor once in the last month or so. About 5 or 6 weeks ago, a rambunctious and imbecilic Young American made what he characterised as a playful attempt to grab my testicles. (Really! In what 'culture', anywhere on Earth, is that a socially excusable behaviour - even as teenage horseplay??!!) In fact, he delivered such a vicious straight-fingered karate blow to my left nut that he nearly tore its suspensory ligament. The pain was not actually that intense, but it has been insistent and lingering: it's still causing me some distress now. Moreover, I gather that this kind of blunt trauma is occasionally implicated in triggering testicular cancer... And I am perhaps excessively susceptible to paranoia about that kind of thing, as I've suffered a number of previous cancer scares (though all of them, mercifully, came to nought). So, the last month or so has been a time of considerable discomfort and anxiety for me. And I suspect all that stress has depleted my immune system, such that what should have been a trivial, shrug-it-off-in-a-day-or-two kind of stomach infection has been able to dig in for a long campaign.]

Something IMPORTANT

In deference to a quirk of my personal experience cataloguing, I just put this brief post up on The Barstool - about fortuitously encountering the first of this year's BBC Reith Lectures on World Service television at the weekend. It was delivered by the Burmese dissident, Aung San Sun Kyi. And it was simply stunning. It is very, very rare to encounter such a potent combination of dignity, intelligence, and articulacy in a major public figure - one thinks of Gandhi, Martin Luther King. [Of course, in China, nobody's heard of her, or not in any very positive light, anyway. Myanmar is little more than a Chinese puppet state; the ruling junta there are just about the CCP's only regional allies. Don't get me started...]


She is presenting two talks in this series, the first on 'Liberty', the second on 'Dissent'. If you haven't heard them yet, follow the links at the bottom of the post.

*******************************

I was having a so-so time on Sunday. Some friends had invited me to a nice barbecue party, but my enjoyment was inhibited by doubts about the condition of my intestines (I've had a grotesque dose of gutrot on and off for nearly 6 days now; it had seemed to quieten down over Sunday and Monday, but suddenly came back with a vengeance!).

Not having much of an appetite for either food or drink, I drifted inside - a considerably more luxurious pad than most I get to visit - and found that the host had satellite TV. So, I spent a little while spaced out in his darkened living room, immersing myself in the forgotten delights of the BBC World Service. I was fretting that it was a tad unsociable to do this for long, so had been planning to try and rouse myself to head outside among the partiers in the yard again at the end of the evening news summary, but....

Well, what do you know? Aung San Sun Kyi came on, delivering the first of this year's Reith Lectures on 'Liberty'. I was glued to the screen throughout the programme; and then had to quietly slip away home, because my eyes were embarrassingly moist.

It was an emotionally devastating moment. Beer and burgers - even if I had been in more of a mood to partake - suddenly seemed a complete irrelevance.

Aung San Sun Kyi is a captivating speaker, and it was an utterly beautiful speech. You can listen to a podcast of the programme (or download a PDF transcript) here.

The second of her two lectures, on 'Dissent', was broadcast for the first time yesterday morning: the podcast is here (although the PDF option is mistakenly linking to Lecture 1 at the moment).

Further encounters with Chinese accounting...

Or, yet another reason why I hate working for Chinese universities...

I went to pick up a wodge of money today from the Chinese university(-based school) that I have been doing most of my business training for over the past couple of months.

My liaison there was "too busy" to e-mail me the breakdown of payments and tax deductions (expected, as a matter of course; and oft requested by me over the past few days) until this afternoon, after I'd taken delivery of the cash from another member of staff (who I didn't know very well, and hadn't actually been involved in running any of the courses I'd taught).

And - surprise, surprise - I found it riddled with errors and omissions.

The applicable tax rate was not stated. (Although I now know it to be de facto 16%; there is, in theory, a tax-free allowance of 800 rmb per month, but this is rapidly eroded by the swingeing 20% tax rate applied to the first tranche of taxable income. A tax rate that swings up from 0% to 20% and then back down to 16%, and then who-knows-where? [it doesn't bother me, since I never earn enough to get up into the next tax bracket] - that is pretty eccentric, even for China!)

The tax was not calculated separately for each of the different courses (although, in practice, the same tax rate applies throughout).

The total of taxable income was not given.

The "traffic allowance" (i.e., travel expenses) was listed alongside the taxable income, even though it's supposed to be tax-exempt - leading to the entirely predictable screw-up that tax was inappropriately deducted from these sums as well.

Ah yes, and one full day of training I'd done near to the mid-month payment cut-off was erroneously omitted altogether. And one of the Presentations classes I've been running on Sundays was recorded as a half-day only, although it was in fact a full day.

So, the payment breakdown is a confusing mish-mash which does little to help me understand how much they are paying me or why. But when I painstakingly wade through it all for 10 minutes or so, I discover that the bastards have underpaid me by a little over 2,000 rmb.

I am NOT happy. No indeed. Not at all.

But neither am I surprised. Nor do I suspect wilful dishonesty. Just about all the Chinese I've ever worked with have been staggeringly innumerate. Not excluding the accountants. In fact, especially the accountants. I have from time to time participated in the grading of the mass recruitment exams the major international accounting firms regularly run in the "leading" universities here: the basic number-awareness of the candidates - even those coming from a science or engineering background - is invariably dismal, far, far worse than their English skills (which are mostly very limited, too; but at least most of them can knock out some kind of sentence occasionally; whereas none of them seem to be able to analyse statistics or complete simple arithmetic).

These reflections can't help but remind me of this classic Chinglish anecdote about the profession of accounting.

Chinese sports TV just keeps getting WORSE...

I have written on here a few times before about how much I love tennis, and especially the Wimbledon Championships.

I have written even more often of how gob-smackingly terrible the sports coverage is on this country's main national TV sports channel, CCTV5 (in theory, it stands for 'China Central Television'; but Chinese friends joke that it should be 'China CRAP Television').

Well, this year, CCTV5 didn't seem to be showing any coverage of Wimbledon at all. There were far too many China-friendly sports going on like, er, badminton... and volleyball... and cycling... and ping-pong, of course... and, er, basketball.

I suppose there must have been some coverage of Li Na's advance to the Ladies' Quarter-Finals, but I managed to miss it all.

BTV6 - the sports channel of the Beijing television service, which seems to have attained a national eminence equal to or greater than CCTV's - appeared to have been carrying most of the Wimbledon coverage this year; but I didn't find that out until the final weekend. And I'm not sure that they showed much of the earlier rounds.

Still, at least I got to see the Men's Final between Djokovic and Nadal live.

And on Monday morning, enjoying an unexpected bit of free time at home before heading out to an afternoon class, I happened to switch on the TV just after they'd started showing a re-run of the Ladies' Final between Petra Kvitova and Maria Sharapova. I enjoyed a full, uninterrupted two-game sequence, and I was foolishly starting to hope that they were showing the match in full, and as live.

No. At the next rest break they went into a series of advertisements. A long series of advertisements (well, mostly it was the same two- or three-minute sequence endlessly repeated). It dragged on for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, getting on for 15 minutes. It began to seem unlikely that they were ever going to return to the match at all. And I certainly didn't have the patience to wait around to see if they did, while watching the same ludicrous, annoying ads over and over and over again. I went off to potter around on the computer.

I returned to the TV about 40 minutes later, by which time, even if Sharapova's resistance fell apart - as I gather it rather did - and even if there had been no further bumper ad breaks, I would have expected the match to be still some way short of the climax of the second and final set. BTV6 was now showing a golf tournament (I couldn't work out which one). I can only conclude that they showed only a few brief highlights of the Ladies' Final, three or four of the biggest games. And in a ratio of 40% tennis action to 60% advertisements.

TV sports coverage in this country SUCKS beyond belief!

New Picks of the Month

Looking back into the archives, three years ago this month...

From Froogville, I select A Classical Sunday - some musings on the difficulties of translation, illustrated by my own version of a famous poem of the Roman writer Catullus.

And from The Barstool, I choose A riddle: What do SARS and the Olympics have in common?

'New readers', please let me know what you think of these.

A bon mot for the 4th of July

"It is a marvellous thing to be unself-conscious, and a terrible thing to be unself-aware. The chief usefulness of Americans is that they constantly remind us of the difference."

Froog

List of the Month - oblique introductions

I am very shy about advertising the existence of my silly little blogs to anyone. But if my 'guilty secret' is exposed in conversation, I will occasionally reveal the names of the blogs to someone who really strikes me as likely to be interested in reading them (i.e., someone similarly irreverent and brain-overfull). The trouble is, it is a bit laborious to write out the full URLs for someone; and, if writing materials are not to hand, they can be difficult to remember. My 'boozing blog', in particular, causes difficulties, because it is familiarly known to my friends and me as The Barstool, but its full title is the rather ponderous Round-The-World Barstool Blues, and its URL - thanks to a mysterious lack of 'availability' of the name I'd originally chosen on Blogger - is actually the bar prop. So... I've taken to introducing my blog(s) to people by giving them a memorable phrase that will almost certainly lead them to me via Google. Just the other day, I told a friend to try to find me by searching for Froog+Zelig.

I am such an eccentrically creative fellow that unusual - perhaps occasionally even unique - phrases are fairly numerous in my online writing. Hence, I thought this might be an amusing topic for my new 'List of the Month'.

Google Searches That Will Bring You To My Blog(s)

obscene paperclip sculpture

mojito trough

mumbling Myrmidons (originally a Googlewhack, I believe)

Mescaline Milkshakes (yes, one of long-time commenter Gary's many brilliant band name suggestions)

Zhongnanhai hair tonic orgies

service with a surl

omnibus analogy

Condoleezza Shinork (likewise a Googlewhack - though scarcely legitimate, since it involves two rare personal names improbably combined)

unshaviness suits a writer  (this phrase an invention of my lovely photographer friend Amy)

with impecunity

the foreskin post  (ouch! one of my most notorious flights of fancy)

Y-front rebellion  (another of the band name game highlights)

the sound of minds boggling

panda pornographers

and, of course, Asexualismo and Asexualissimo

and sporadic advance of relevance (which probably describes my blogs rather too well)

but my very favourite of all is...  Jello Biafra cut my hair

[Sadly, though, my invention of the word limelessness is still going unrecognised by Google.]



With some of these, I'm not quite at the top of the returns, but prominent on the first page. And with most of them, there are three - or four, or five - posts listed (three, as we know, is a magic number): you'll have to use your skill and judgement to identify the original source of the key phrase.

And I suppose this post will itself soon become the No. 1 search result for most of these phrases. This doesn't help my Googlewhackiness (surely that can't be another original invention of my own? It seems it is!). But then, that is a problem inherent in the concept: as soon as you say, "Hey, this is a Googlewhack", it no longer is.

The Other 'Party'

Well, in addition to it being Proud-Not-To-Be-American Day for the denizens of The Great White North, today is also the 90th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party.

Yes, 90th. Is that all?? I had kind of assumed that it must be the centenary we were about to endure.

So, it took me rather by surprise that it's only been 90 years. I mean, what were they waiting for? Over 70 years after Marx and Engels first published their Communist Manifesto; nearly a decade after Lenin and Stalin got their act together to found the Russian Party, and getting on for four years after they fomented a successful revolution to take control of their country; more than two years after the creation of the Communist International, and after the landmark efflorescence of radical protest in China that was the May 4th Movement. The Chinese founders were dragging their feet a bit, if you ask me.

And they've remained significantly behind the historical curve all along. They didn't assume control of the government here until two decades after Stalin had begun to expose the hopeless impracticalities of the Communist ideal; and they're continuing now to pay lip-service to this discredited dogma two decades after the final collapse of the Soviet empire.

If I didn't 'feel the love' about the Founding of the Nation party a couple of years ago, I'm certainly not going to be celebrating the birth of this misguided and oppressive political system. It is my profoundest wish that the CCP will not see its 100th birthday. (I'm sure that wish is going to be disappointed - but let's all keep our fingers crossed, anyway.)

And how will this momentous event be celebrated here? Will there be fireworks and streamers and 'spontaneous jollity' out on the streets? I very much doubt it. There'll be some more-than-usually-DULL political speeches on TV all weekend; and maybe a craptacular or two in the evenings. And then it will all be forgotten. Thank heavens.

Well, except that we ought not to be forgetting. We ought to be reminding ourselves about this every day, and constantly asking ourselves, WHY are these guys still here?

Oh, Canada!

Yes, July 1st is Canada Day.

I confess I have a lot more affection for America, and am much more party-oriented around the imminent 4th July celebrations, but....

Well, I did live in Canada for a year. And I have quite a few Canadian friends here in Beijing.

So, Happy Canada Day, everyone!

(I wonder if it will stop raining long enough for us to venture outside at all today?)

[Further 'celebrations' over on The Barstool...]

Traffic Report - the blog stats for June

I always observe a few days of respectful blog-silence around the Tiananmen '89 anniversary. And my posting was further inhibited by an especially fraught period of work this last month - at least on Froogville, where I came in at under 30 posts for the month for only the third or fourth time ever. Output on The Barstool, somehow or other, remained rather more robust.

There were 29 posts and around 8,500 words on Froogville last month.

There were 35 posts and more than 11,000 words on Round-The-World Barstool Blues.

Nothing very interesting happening in the visitor data. Well, except that I appear to have a new regular - a number of regulars?! - down in Australia (I wonder if that's Cedra checking in??). And I've had a solo visit on Froogville from Finland; I think that might be a first. Even more intriguingly, we've had recent look-ins on The Barstool from Portugal and The Lebanon. I've very nearly collected the UN 'full set' now.

The weekly haiku

Orange air appals

Our lives shorten with each breath

Can't see far ahead

Yes, everything's a metaphor with me - even the Beijing smog. The last two days here have again been utterly appalling. But today's shaping up for thunderstorms - so we might be in for a decent weekend.

A strange dream

A few days ago - Tuesday, was it? - I awoke a tad earlier than I would have liked, and in a rather disordered state, and... a dream fragment stayed with me.

I had been in a Chinese restaurant. Not the kind of Chinese restaurant I usually frequent, but a modestly swanky affair, and one built on an industrial scale: one dining hall (of many) on one floor (of at least three or four, it seemed) was a hundred yards or more long. I seemed to be not actually eating in this place myself, nor even really 'present'; I was somehow floating through the restaurant unseen, like a fly-on-the-wall documentary camera recording scattered glimpses of the behind-the-scenes activity.

During a lull in food service (it seemed to be late afternoon rather than early morning - but the place was suddenly empty of customers) a squad of cleaning ladies appeared - almost as numerous as the wait staff, one to every four or five tables. In this particular room, the tables were - as is usual in China - round, but quite small, seemingly designed for only two, or at most four people. When their tablecloths were removed, they were found to be made of glass. And when the cleaning ladies began to mop and polish them with the damp rags which are the only common cleaning utensil in China, when they began to wipe around the edges of these thick glass discs.... well, the tables began to resonate, to hum with a bright, pure sound, as wine glasses do when you run a wetted fingertip around their rim.

Strange, no?

Although I suppose food and music (and, ahem, drink) are my principal obsessions in life; so, it is perhaps not so unusual that my subconscious would find a way of combining these interests into a single arresting image.

Coming up for air...

Gosh, the first three days of this week have been chock-a-block. And I worked on Sunday, too. And it's been a particularly heavy social/cultural schedule of late as well - music festivals, leaving parties, yadda-yadda. And I've been recovering from a particularly nasty attack of belly rot at the end of last week.

But today... today, I have almost nothing on. Well, apart from having to schlepp up to Wudaokou this afternoon for a three-hour class.

And tomorrow... I have nothing on at all: my first completely free day in about 4 or 5 weeks (apart from Saturdays; and I've mostly had 'stuff' to do even on Saturdays lately).

Heavens, this feels gooood.

The secret to a long life

I am not usually prone to stress. And when it does threaten, I think I deal with it pretty well.

But the lousy weather that blights much of the Beijing summer (clammy humidity, toxic supersmogs, flash floods) has been making life especially difficult just recently. Furthermore, I have had an insanely busy workload for most of the past two months (and having to use Beijing's public transport system too often, especially in the rush hour, surely has a hugely negative effect on anyone's composure, serenity, philanthropy...). I've been stuck in China, in Beijing, too long without a decent break, and I'm worn out: everything is bugging the crap out of me almost every day.

I have been getting dangerously close to a catastrophic implosion.

But now I have new role model, a new mantra: from now on, I'm just going to let it all slide right by.... like water off a duck's back.

[Thanks (yet again) to the inestimable JES for indirectly introducing me to this. Last week's instalment of his 'Midweek Music Break' series was a delightful B.B. King novelty song, One Shoe Blues. Immediately bowled over by the song's composer, the utterly wonderful Sandra Boynton, I went looking for more of her work on the Net, and soon found Be Like A Duck. As with the video of the B.B. King song, it's directed by Boynton herself. It features her four children - the lead vocalist is her eldest son, Keith Boynton.

There's lots more fun stuff to meander around on Boynton's website.]

A return to indolence?

Devoted followers of the blog may have noticed that I have been a bit snowed under with work over the past two months. Indeed, things reached a climax of intensity over the last fortnight, where I thought I might not be able to cope... and was actually deferring or declining additional jobs that were offered to me.

But then, all of a sudden... well, the day-long Presentation Skills course I've been doing for an SOE has had its final seminar moved forward a couple of days this week; and a repeat session, which was to have occupied the whole of July, has been abruptly cancelled (I think due to problems with student availability rather than any dissatisfaction with my delivery). The weekend class that's been so depleting my quality of life this month ended yesterday. I'm already at the half-way point in a 6-week series of Legal Writing classes I'm running for the first time (I had been stressing about this a little, as there is a chance of a lot of repeat work with this law firm; but I'd taken some time out to do quite a lot of the preparation in advance, and it's been going about as smoothly as I could ever have wished). And I'm into the home stretch with the long-term series of classes I've been giving up in the far north of Beijing for the past two months; I've got used to the unsocial hours (Tuesday mornings early, and Thursday evenings - preceding an early, early start on Fridays!); and we're now coasting towards the finish line, with the last three weeks being devoted mostly to preparation for a group presentation exercise to be used as a final assessment. A major new writing/editing position, which would have eaten up a good 8 or 10 hours of every week, has (unfortunately!) gone foop! as well... when it had seemed to be in the bag, a done deal, a sure thing just a few weeks ago.

But [Fanfare], most significantly of all for my psychological well-being, I've managed to wriggle out of my twice-weekly date-with-misery out in the desolate newtown hellhole of Wangjing.

So, at least 150 hours of work (and travel and admin and hanging around waiting for stuff to happen) that I had anticipated having to do in July has disappeared. And most of the 40 hours or so I have remaining is really pretty easy stuff, and should all be concluded within three weeks. I have scaled back from the 25-30 hours of training I was doing each week for the past few weeks to an eminently more manageable 8 hours per week. And after the middle of July I should be completely FREE.

It is quite a shock to the system - but a very welcome one.

But oh, wait, what's that ominous train whistle in the distance? Oh yes.... NO MONEY. Ah well - I don't care too much for money; money can't buy me love.