Month: June 2021
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Vaccinated. But safe?
So this is it. I’ve had my second shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Let’s hope it works and continues to work against new variants.
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BFF
Once, we met Patrick on a busy Paris metro train in a very unexpected way. He, his wife and daughter, and his parents were travelling from Canada to visit his brother. Priscilla and I had flown in from London the evening before to celebrate my birthday. Neither Patrick, nor I knew that the other would…
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WOW
My sleep pattern is wrecked. I go to bed at around 2 a.m. most days, except when my body crashes and forces me to an early sleep. I then have a very good rest, but only to recover for more 2 a.m. bedtimes. In short, it swings from one extreme to the other. Now, my…
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Old new friends
I was added to an alumni WhatsApp group and got to talk to my old high-school (or college) friends again. It’s interesting to see that after 27 years, the same cliques exist, the same people monopolise the conversation, and there are the same quiet ones. There’s also the dichotomy of the friends who live in…
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What’s in a name?
Many years ago Ms Jiang, our Mandarin teacher, asked us for our names, went away for a few days, and came back with the Chinese equivalents. For a long time I wondered how she managed to do that, given that the names on our official documents are approximate English transliterations of the Chinese originals at…
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US$ 0.68, postage included
If you don’t know what AliExpress (https://www.aliexpress.com) is, wherever you’re buying your stuff from, you’re probably paying too much. The best way to describe it is with an example. The gimmicks in this picture are USB LEDs that light up when they are inserted into a USB connector. They turn any USB power source into…
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Undoing Facebook
My Facebook account is now reduced to a groupie boosting Like-counts on my wife’s posts, but even this strange marital responsibility and my occasional anti-anti-China taunts are becoming less effective motivators for me to log into the social network. I can’t deactivate the account outright because I know that there will be that one need…
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Remember to touch base
A few months ago, picking up an old-new notebook from my stock of pillaged office stationery, I was surprised by my own handwritten quotation on the first page. Remember to touch base. Base is where you were before you became lost. I copied it onto a Post-It that is now stuck on my monitor, but…
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2Blowhards
Before Facebook and Twitter destroyed our ability to focus for longer than 15 seconds and to read more than 140 characters, blogs were kings. To me 2Blowhards was one of the best. Reading the authors’ thoughtful and inspiring posts, mostly about arts, was a pleasure. Their blog also impressed on me their peculiar salutation of…