Beets clearly beats Beats, especially if you like to eat sweets. Beets, or 甜菜 tiancai, in Chinese, are obviously a sweet (the chinese character 甜 means sweet) vegetable.
I nuked a couple for 8 minutes, peeled the skin and they were sweet. The water is blood red.
Beets, bookending a fake copy of Beats. Photo by Don Tai
This test list was developed for my niece in China, to help her prepare for her upcoming university English Exam, called the CET-4, or College English Test 4, National College English Teaching Syllabuses (NCETS). You can download it, and use it in a spreadsheet program in order to test students.
Black mulberry fruit, Toronto, Canada, are messy to pick but delicious. Photo 1 by Don Tai
Every year our black mulberry tree, of the genus family Moraceae, shoots out new branches, which bear fruit the next year. This tree is consistent, and the fruit is very good.
Chinese people have a connection to the mulberry tree. Long ago white mulberry leaves were fed to silkworms in order to produce silk. Therefore the mulberry plant was forbidden to export from China.
163data.com.cn is a very prolific content spammer. While they operate out of Chinanet Fujian Province most of the time, they will take IPs from all over China. You can see the province in their ip address. I get spam from them at least every week, and much more if they have a spam campaign.
I have tried banning their host name but this does not work. You need to ban by IP address, unfortunately.
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi goes ape at a Canadian journalist when asked about China’s human rights. So angry, so arrogant, so lacking in manners. A minister of foreign affairs should have some respect for the culture of other countries, and he clearly does not. China can do much better. The Queen was right.
Comment, I usually do not, when it comes to politics, either in Canada, China, or elsewhere, but Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi on a visit to Canada went ape at a Canadian journalist. As a representative of China his behaviour was disgraceful and unacceptable. Due to military incursions in the South China Sea, China already has a reputation of being a bully. Wang Yi only reinforces the arrogant view that China now holds.
This Oster meat slicer model 319-66 is not professional but does the job well enough. It is a little hard to adjust and clean, but was inexpensive.
Big Boss likes to stir fry, and so if I cut the meat too thickly, I catch hell. Yes, small but terrifying, and I am not talking about the knife. We want fresh meat sliced very thinly for Chinese stir fry, or for Korean hot pot. Thin enough to be translucent. How do you do this with fresh meat? Buy pork loin, drain liquids, cut in half, freeze, slice with meat slicer, and then if you wish, vacuum seal in small bags, then refreeze.
Speaking Chinese and English, it is what I do. As my mother tongue is English and I live in Toronto, Canada, it was natural for me to post in English and use Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and other English biased search engines. I also have the ability to speak and write in Chinese, so I often do bilingual posts just for fun. As I regularly monitor my raw access server log, I can see that Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Sogou, 360, Yandex and other search engines regularly index my content. I wondered how well they index my posts, and if there are any hints and tips that might make getting my content indexed better.
Maps, I do like. Not only are they pretty, they are pretty useful, especially if you are unfamiliar with the area. Map and compass in hand, you can walk at your leisure and not get lost, or at least be able to get help from the locals when you do. But which maps are the best for China? I thought I’d do a map slugfest, comparing Google (line and satellite), 360, Sougou and Baidu. I chose 150 meters of Shandong, Changdao on Jiefang (Liberation) Road as an example.
Black and Decker Steam Advantage Iron, F1000 type 1, has a terrible reputation for usability and reliability. Diana’s iron does not work as the safety features prematurely turn the iron off.
She was miffed, friend Diana, in Toronto, Canada, that her newly purchased Black and Decker Steam Advantage Iron, F1000 type 1, was acting up. It was prematurely shutting down, a supposed safety feature that belied the task of actual ironing. This seems similar to PC anti-virus software that so overtaxes the PC such that it cripples even simple and small mouse movements. She asked me to look into it.
Spare time, I had, and wanted to see where someone was physically located in China. The place is a small town on the border of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, on the Yellow River. What were the odds that I could find her exact location and get a satellite photo of her building?
I started using Google Maps, which was pretty helpful. Considering that Google is not allowed in China, they still had maps of the small city and specifically the 1km section of road that interested me. The sat photo showed great detail, as you can see, but the roads from the diagram did not coordinate very well with the sat map. In fact they were really so far off that some roads went underwater, like tunnels.
