User Comments - Grambers
Grambers
Posted on: Shopping for the Husband
November 27, 2011 at 8:39 AMIn terms of my own stuff, well, I've done very little for a few years now (I have two young children). However, if you're keen, please do check out a couple of multimedia pieces I put together a few years back. These detail the experience of writing a guidebook while living like a pleb in Shanghai, and a trip to Tibet in which I wriggled free from the not-so-heinous clutches of the region's tourist authorities. As you'll see from my site, I do have a blog onto which I once poured thousands upon thousands of words (I actually treated it as a kinda notebook for crafting later stories and few (if any) actually waded through the lot of it). However, it is now very very rarely updated. However, if you did have a mind to, I'd recommend looking at a blow-by-blow account of travelling with a government cavalcade through the wilds of Inner Mongolia in 2006.
The links for the multimedia pieces are here -
Tibet: http://www.grahambond.com/multimedia_tibet.html
Shanghai: http://www.grahambond.com/multimedia_shanghaiguide.htm
Inner Mongolia blog: http://grahambond.blogspot.com/2006/08/road-to-hohhot.html [NOTE: this is the first of several long, long blogs which detail the trip on a day-by-day basis. If you have the interest (which I doubt), read the "Gao Gets Glassed" entry which details precisely what it promises, the glassing of a local party leader. You had to be there. It was funny.
Posted on: Shopping for the Husband
November 27, 2011 at 8:30 AMThanks again Bodawei. Appreciate the warmth of your welcome.
It does sound like you are in the 'Chinese exceptinalism' camp, though it's probably unwise to make this such a binary issue. However, it's one I do feel strongly about. After first going to China, I can remember waxing lyrical about the fact it felt, more than any other place I'd been to, like a different 'planet' rather than merely a different 'country'. Everything seemed to exist on a slightly different plane. To borrow a phrase surely well known to any English speaker who has travelled in South East Asia, China was the epitome of "same same but different" (with a heavy emphasis on the different). All this would seem to support your view, and that of the Chinese exceptionalists. However, as time has gone on, and as my understanding deepened, I have rowed back from that and realised that though, superficially, things are very different in China, they are far more similar at a deeper level - the opposite experience to the one you've described. Anyway, as I said, there probably isn't a binary here, though it's far to say we are two different ends of the spectrum.
Posted on: Essential Math Terms
November 27, 2011 at 8:12 AM"Triginometry' - is this an American spelling?"
Someone's cruisin' for a bruisin'. Very funny but.
Posted on: Essential Math Terms
November 26, 2011 at 7:23 PMIs this a good time to admit that I cut'n'paste this from the Wikipedia entry on calculus?
I was wondering whether that most English of English folk (and disputed father of calculus) Isaac Newton said math or maths? Or perhaps mathmatica?
Posted on: Essential Math Terms
November 26, 2011 at 5:40 PMWow. Big respect. I love maths, even bought a "Calculus for Dummies" book for a bit of light leisure a few years back. However I was ultimately defeated and came to regret ceasing my formal Maths education at age 16.
Posted on: Essential Math Terms
November 26, 2011 at 4:50 PM"Does math hurt your ears as much as maths does mine?"
In a word, yes. I'm feeling a little bit queasy even having merely cut'n'paste this sentence. 'Math' (ugh) feels like a word which contracted a nasty disease at birth and suffers to this day from stunted development.
Frankly, having (surely?) learnt much of her excellent English in Singapore, Jenny should be ashamed of herself for using this bastardisation. Note that's bastardisation with an 's', not a ZED. And, yes, I am aware it's a completely inappropriate use of the word, but if you can't get digs in legitimately, you gotta contrive what you can, right (for reference, see Colin Powell's UN address in February 2003)?
Posted on: Essential Math Terms
November 26, 2011 at 4:39 PMI had a straightforward translation question. How do you say...
...in Chinese?
Posted on: Shopping for the Husband
November 26, 2011 at 2:22 PMBut you like pistachios, right? Respect those who respect pistachios, as my old mother used to say to me.
Posted on: Shopping for the Husband
November 26, 2011 at 11:40 AMCheers bababardwan.
I just can't believe we have, collectively, waxed lyrical on this subject to the tune of, what, 5,000 words or so, and yet nobody, NOBODY, has seen fit to comment on my other bit of provocative fire-starting on this page.
And so, let me repeat:
上海女人嘛，美丽优雅性感，就是买菜做饭什么都不会
C'mon, someone must want to take the bait. Anyone with Shanghainese girlfriends/wives out there (I am not being sexist in saying this: I'm assuming that any women FROM Shanghai probably won't be using Chinesepod). For what it's worth, I've got a Shanghainese neighbour (despite living in a small village in Hampshire) and she definitely vindicates me!
Posted on: Shopping for the Husband
November 27, 2011 at 8:51 AMThe Pedants Revolt lives on. I do hope you counted those manually, using (of course) Roman numerals which were chiselled onto a cave wall?:)