At last, the cycle is complete. On Sunday night, we had a vegetable curry. And in this curry went one chilli pepper.
Part One · Part Two · Part Three · Part Four · Part Five · Part Six · Part Seven· Part Eight· Part Nine· Part Ten
This day has been a most productive one, and were Flickr currently functioning, I would be happy to show you a picture of my bra. Or indeed of any of the five such items that I bought this morning, following a fitting session at John Lewis. This is a much less glamorous or titillating experience than one might assume, so stop drooling, Sevitz; the very no-nonsense lady measures you with a tape measure and, with one disapproving glance at the shabby and ill-fitting garment you are currently wearing, she disappears to the stockroom to seek something in sensible white, that will fit itself perfectly to your curves.
Turns out I’ve been very, very wide of the mark in terms of both bust measurement and cup size; but fear not: I am now properly supported, and the happy owner of not one [sensible, white] but five [interesting colours, with lacy bits] new bras. And some knickers.
Anyway, all this talk of breasts isn’t making us any less thirsty, is it. I’d better sort out that pint for the Doctor of Death, who is probably somewhat discomfited by all this discussion of his sister’s underclothes. Sorry about that. Incidentally, obit season is now officially over – we mourn its passing. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should definitely read his site more often.
The prize for finding China goes to Adrian, and while we’re here, please don’t forget the topically entitled Second Annual Bloggers’ Bra, tomorrow afternoon somewhere in London.
The geographically-challenged among my guests, namely Ade and Stuart are most welcome to their Singapore Slings. I appreciate that it was a difficult one to call; I didn’t experience a great deal of alcohol in China, except for on one occasion, when I did experience a great deal of plum wine, which is exceptionally nice, like sloe gin but lighter.
On a more authentically Chinese note, a round of properly oriental drinks for Gordon, Timbo and estee, all of whom seem to know what they’re talking about.
In the Creative Corner, krissa has matched royalty to former colony; and Lyle has simply made something up. Fair enough.
And there’s always one who eschews such virtual nonsense as themed cocktails, and asks for something random. But I’ll forgive Gert her request for champagne, because I know she’s a fellow devotee of the bra-fitting experience. Talking of which, flickr seems to have sorted itself out now…
… will be served either around 3.30 or around 4.30, depending on how my lovely sunny day off pans out.
33. I picked up a copy of Shanghai Baby, by Zhou Wei Hui
It’s usually a bad sign when a novel is written in the first person about someone around the author’s demographic who happens to be writing her first novel. In this case the first novel is intended to be full of metaphysical thoughts and raw sex, and clearly so is the one being read by your humble reviewer. Unfortunately the sex isn’t all that raw and the thoughts aren’t all that metaphysical; the book’s failing is that it constantly tells you how profound and exciting it wants itself to be, and never even approaches its own goals.
The affected style and stilted prose might just be a weakness of the translation, but the overload of self-conscious contemporary references can be blamed entirely on the author. On the plus side, it includes some interesting descriptions of Shanghai, and of China and a certain set of the Chinese. It was irritating in the way that Human Traffic was irritating; there is little that I find less entertaining than vapid party people who think they are existentially obsessed.
2/5
34. Len Deighton is always reliable, and Winter
Winter is an unsentimental but sympathetic story about a German family from 1899 to 1945, and principally the tale of one son’s rise to a position of pwer as a Gestapo lawyer. Ruthlessly plotted and with the meticulous knowledge of German history and politics that you come to expect from Deighton, it never gets so technical that you start to skim a couple of paragraphs here and there. This story is tense, gripping, and crammed with detail. I was even prepared to read it again, as it was the only book I had with me in China and I finished it on the middle weekend. Fortunately I was able to find plenty of books in English once I got back to Hong Kong.
4/5
35. And the book that I bought was The Kitchen God’s Wife, by Amy Tan
Amy Tan is writing about people and relationships as well as about China; she writes about how someone copes with barely imaginable difficulties: being sold into one’s husband’s family, running to escape an ever-changing enemy, living through wartime and trying to pick up the pieces afterwards. The Kitchen God’s Wife absorbed me through two flights and a hideously long delay at Hong Kong airport – I’m grateful.
4/5
Doing the play has really opened my eyes to just how much free time we have in the course of our everyday lives. With our/my free time roughly halved, all of a sudden I haven’t wanted to play Grand Theft Auto all that much, and a strange new wave of Wanting To Do Something Constructive has befallen.
I know this feeling very well. While Karen was away I did a pretty good job of suppressing it, and just getting on with beating up those whores, but this was an isolated fortnight in a sea of otherwise.
I live in a bit of a bubble at the moment: get up, get in the car, go to work, drive home, potter about the house. The real world is being squeezed down a telephone line for my consumption. And though it is a fat pipe, it’s not representative. It doesn’t tell me much about what’s going on in my town, and what I can do to be a part of it.
So I guess that’s my challenge.
Heh, a fat woman on a bicycle just rode past the window. She was huge, and clearly struggling.
If you’re finding that all of a sudden, libgmail.py has stopped working (most likely you’ll notice that gmail-notify can’t connect to your inbox) then I have your solution.
I think that Google must have changed their ways of doing things slightly in the last 24 hours. Either way, to fix it, load up libgmail.py. Search for RE_PAGE_REDIRECT. This should currently be defined as the following:
RE_PAGE_REDIRECT = ‘top\.location\W=\W”CheckCookie\?continue=([^”]+)’
You want to change it to the following:
RE_PAGE_REDIRECT = ‘top\.location\W=\W”https://www.google.com/accounts/CheckCookie\?continue=([^”]+)’
Save libgmail.py and you should find everything is better.
UPDATE: This has now been fixed in sourceforge, in a slightly different way which looks like it will resist possible future changes better. Grab the latest version from CVS here
Could you please send me a color snapshot of the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?
[Not news, but still worthy]
You will have completely failed to notice the two comment spam emails that appeared on this site overnight, as they have been promptly deleted by the ad-me-nistrator. I’m hoping that this will be a one-off occurrence, of course.
And to what site did these two spams link? getfirefox.com
Now, I’m all for promoting Firefox, but these were standard spam comments with meaningless content and urls obfuscated by javascript. Considering that the whole firefox ethos is “taking back the web” and avoiding such annoyances as spam, popups and malware, I can see one of two possibilities.
a) Comments were posted by some brain-dead idiot zealot who has no fucking idea.
b) Comments were posted by some Microsoft zealot with the aim of undermining the Mozilla foundation by making their supporters look like brain-dead zealots.
More on developments when they happen.