warmth?
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on November 10, 2007
Apparently our central heating is on. The pipes are a little warmer than they were two days ago. We were warned that the heating in this apartment is kinda pathetic, but even so…
Silly thing is that neither of us feel cold and we have the windows open to air the place out. So far this late autumn has been fairly mild.
Hainan Yellow
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on November 9, 2007
When we visited Gege and his family last weekend, one of the many things he insisted we take with us when we left was a box containing two small jars of chilli sauce. No big deal, right? I spent my first year in China in Hunan, home of the hottest, and China has a wide variety of chilli sauces.
Except that this particular sauce is made of 海南灯笼黄辣椒/Hainan Lantern Yellow Chillies. Hainan has its own particular flavour, quite distinct from other chillies- although I don’t know how to describe how the flavour is different. And it has quite a pleasant burn to it. Actually, it’s pretty damn potent.
So this evening I mixed a couple of chopstick-pinches of this Hainan Yellow into the vinegar for my jiaozi, and poured myself a glass of Guizhou Chun to wash it all down with, and the result is I’m on quite a pleasant high, thinking I ought to do this more often.
I never thought I’d say this about a non-Hunan chilli or chilli sauce, but that Hainan Yellow is good stuff. Look out for it- 海南灯笼黄辣椒/Hainan Lantern Yellow Chilli. But be careful, it’s potent.
Yeah, lzh is still away at this conference. She’ll be back tomorrow morning (uh, yeah, better clean up then, ay?). But that’s ok, because that Hainan Yellow turned my store-bought jiaozi into something really quite pleasant.
…floating…
That durian candy Gege gave us wasn’t so good though… but it did help me out big time when I got up from my attempt at a nap and was hit full force by a kick-arse huge sugar craving.
I love chilli. I hate Tianjin for robbing me of my chilli tolerance. I really love chilli. I also love Hunan food. Damn, it’s long since time I returned to Changsha. I’ve got places there I need to show lzh just like there are places in Aotearoa she needs to see. Places I grew up in. Places that are burnt into my soul.
Did I mention I love chilli?
Yeah, sure, I was born and raised in New Zealand of 100% Pakeha stock, and I lived there until I was 23 and a half- as in never left those fair isles until I wangled my first job in China. But still, there are many respects in which I grew up in China.
Damn, that Hainan Yellow is good, but I’m going to have to put a bit more in the mix next time, it’s starting to wear off already.
bloody hell
Posted by wangbo in tilting at windmills on November 9, 2007
So how much did he get paid? Oh well, who cares…. If Tony Blair were speaking anywhere within a 500 km radius of me I’d be demanding he pay me a minimum 500,000 pounds sterling (cash: used, non-consecutive, unmarked bills in clear plastic bags with none of those dye bomb thingies. I’ll contact you at 9:40 am Monday morning to tell you the drop-off point) in compensation for the grave psychological harm caused by the sheer amount of waffle emitted. And I’d demand an equal amount be paid to the local authorities in compensation for the environmental damage caused by the sudden release of such a huge amount of hot air.
I like Mr Spencer’s last paragraph:
I suppose that’s one unfortunate by-product of not being a democracy. Instead of getting to listen to your own democratically elected leaders for free, you have to pay millions of yuan to listen to the wisdom of leaders that have been democratically got rid of elsewhere.
oh?
Uh, no, John, I suspect either you’re wrong (for the time being) or I’ve had incredibly brilliantly unusually good luck finding those holes in the GFW/catching Nanny napping/sneaking out of the Panopticon. I’m still getting through to blogspot blogs unpoxified (deliberate spelling mistake- I hate poxy servers).
live-blogging the weather forecast?
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on November 8, 2007
According to the CCTV-1 weather forecast, most of northern and western China has entered winter weather “from a meteorological point of view” [really loose paraphrase of what the announcer actually said]. The rest of the country is still in autumn. Thing is, the forecast for Beijing tomorrow is clear, low of four, high of thirteen. It’s not really winter until it’s below zero every night.
But how sad is this? I didn’t even manage to live-blog the weather forecast. First of all, this page took a while to load, and then I was interrupted by a phonecall. And my wife is away at a conference. Shouldn’t I be out getting into trouble instead of blogging about shit so inane as the CCTV 1 weather forecast?
Bugger it, I’m going to watch a DVD.
fresh air
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing, random, ranting on November 8, 2007
Here’s a breath of fresh air: It’s going to be a painful 12 months’ wait for the Olympics. Well, it’s less than 12 months, now, and it’s already painful enough…. But wait, is that blogspot open again? That opened unproxified for me!
And on the subject of fresh air: It was still rather hazy, but generally unfogged, this morning, but the air is clearing up beautifully as the day goes on. No doubt that lovely, cool breeze is at least in part to blame… A pity that the rain forecast for this morning didn’t materialise, though.
bombshell
Posted by wangbo in Uncategorized on November 8, 2007
Right from the first reports, I suspected this would happen, but still it comes as a shock- a pleasant shock, but still a shock:
Police drop all terror-related charges
The police are not charging any of the so-called Urewera 16 under the Terrorism Suppression Act, despite using the legislation to search homes last month.
Police took 12 of the 16 cases to the Solicitor General last month who assessed the police’s evidence.
Solicitor General David Collins QC announced this afternoon that the cases did not warrant prosecution under the act but could go ahead under the Arms Act.
Although Mr Collins does slip in this ominous little comment:
Regrettably not all the evidence I have been able to see will be made public
There may well be very good reasons for this. On the other hand, the reasons may be just as good as those that kept Ahmed Zaoui in jail with the threat of deportation to almost certain torture and death hanging over his head.
Well, they’re not free, there are still the charges under the Arms Act to be dealt with, and if the Police do have the evidence to prosecute, then they should be prosecuted.
Anyway, there’s still this interesting little comment from Mr Collins:
Mr Collins criticised the legislation and said it should be reviewed by the Law Commission. He said it was complex and incoherent and was almost impossible to apply to domestic terrorists.
Complex and incoherent law can only be bad law, surely?
what a surprise
Here’s one for the “No Shit Sherlock” files.
Why does that not surprise me?
An experiment
Posted by wangbo in admin, life in Beijing on November 7, 2007
I’m told embedding voicethreads may well be easier via live writer than directly through the wordpress set up, so here goes:
This, hopefully, should show a voicethread of yangge dancing in our village one Spring Festival a couple of years back:
Nah, still doesn’t work. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Anyway, here’s the voicethread in question.
eating glue
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing, tilting at windmills on November 7, 2007
For some reason I’ve never managed to make decent good edible fried rice straight from fresh rice. I mean, cook the rice then fry it. Never. I’ve been trying since my university days, and the best I’ve ever managed has been reasonably tasty glue.
I can make decent (if a little weird, thanks to my cooking style) fried rice from day-old cooked rice easily enough. Actually, for many a long year I was fully convinced that rice had to sit for at least 24 hours to “dry out” before it could be fried. But somehow lzh can make perfect fried rice from rice that has only just finished boiling. I can’t figure out how she does it.
I mean, first of all, the best I ever manage is to cook decent fried rice from cooked rice that’s had a day to dry out, and yet she makes perfect fried rice from rice that’s only just been cooked. Secondly, doesn’t matter how recently the rice has been cooked, or whether it’s sat for a day (or even two or three in the winter when it lasts longer), she always cooks it perfect, whereas the best I can manage is decent. But that second point tells you why she does most of the cooking.
And what brought this on? lzh’s danwei is running a conference over the next few days, and so this evening she had to pick up some Korean guy from the airport and show him to his hotel, and so she’ll be home rather late, and so I had to cook for myself, but there’s bugger all in the fridge. Two eggs, and that’s about it. And so, dutifully following my wife’s instructions, I boiled up some rice to fry. There were also some onions and garlic in the kitchen, along with the odd, random assortment of Chinese and Western sauces and spices, so I managed to get some reasonable, if somewhat unconventional, flavour into the fried rice. But, as always when I cook the rice less than 24 hours before I fry it, I wound up with a wok full of flavourful glue.
Oh well, it filled my belly, and that’s the main thing.