Chinese chair, Toronto, Canada. Photo 1 by Don Tai
Chinese furniture is pretty rare here. You can find them at specialty Chinese furniture shops within Chinese-only malls. This one came to me discarded and in need of repair. I thought it rare and interesting, so wanted to repair and document it.
The chair has no manufacturer marking on it anywhere. It is not of high quality. Seams are showing. There are painting errors, where the painter put too much paint on and left ghastly drips, right on the front of the back rest. A higher quality chair manufacturer would have sanded down the drip and repainted. Not here.
The entertainment space in the world is getting larger and larger. We dropped cable a couple of years ago and use Over the Air (OTA) digital tv. We are not supplementing this with internet video streaming. Yes, you can go directly to Youtube and stream whatever, but there is also another way: the Kodi Media Player. Using Kodi I can now stream live Chinese tv to Canada, when I want.
Kodi: Chinese Language Mandarin Broadcast Status: 2017 July 06
CNTV Live / CCTV, China
China has a lot of people. Baoluan, 暴乱, is the Chinese fear of chaos, of the Government or Emperor losing control of their mandate to rule. The people, having little to lose, rise up and kick their overlords out. Today China’s overlords are the Chinese Communist Party. This recurring issue heavily colours what China does.
From China: They provide employment for their people
The solution in China is to give everyone work. With work they will not revolt and not upset the Communist Party, thus preserving the status quo: The Communist Party stays in power.
After living in China for a while, few things really get under my skin. One is the incessant spitting. The other is the toilet paper situation in Chinese public washrooms. Thank goodness here in Canada we always seem to have toilet paper in public washrooms. As for spitting, yes, when Chinese people come to Canada they also bring their spitting, though it is not as prevalent.
In general, almost universally, there will be no toilet paper in Chinese public washrooms. This includes restaurants. You need to come prepared, as all Chinese people are. Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Toilet Paper?…
I have an old dell desktop with Win XP on it that runs slowly. Though it is old I thought I’d try a different Linux distribution on it. The smaller ones were Puppy Linux Precise 5.7.1 2013, and Debian Dog Jesse. Here is how I put Chinese input on Puppy Linux Precise 5.7.1.
My old Dell is a Dimension 1100/B110, 2006, P4 Celeron, 2.66mhz, 778mb ram. It is old.
Pork Cuts: Where they come from and how to cook them
Different parts of the world use different terms for meat. It can be confusing when you go to the store, or read a Canadian grocery store advertisement or weekly flyer for a cut of meat, research it on the internet and find conflicting terms. Even more conflicting is when you go to the Chinese grocery store and find the Chinese name that may or may not correlate with the English name. You can see these terms in the weekly Chinese grocery ads. Such is life living in Toronto, Canada, in a large Chinese community.
CIA hacker stopped by Windows popup box, in Chinese
CIA hackers may have been stopped by a Windows popup box in Chinese, according to a recent Wikileaks. For those of us that know Chinese, this is amusing.
A dialogue box in Chinese had kept popping up on screen as the agent tried to install a test program on a computer running the Windows operating system. Unable to understand what the box said, he tried everything from setting the system region to an English-speaking zone to forcing the program installer to use English.
Bicycle path over highway overpass, Xiamen, Fujian province, Feb 9, 2017. The overpass looks long, but the length allows a gradual ascent and decent for cyclists, improving safety
Back in the late 1980s there were more bicycles than cars in Beijing. I thought it was heavenly. People were healthy, Bikes were like a swarm of insects, clustering together, and riding was safe for everyone. While the air during spring had sand swept down from the Gobi desert (风沙), the air was relatively clean most of the year. Fast forward to a 2008 trip where Beijing’s air pollution was terrible and cars choked the city. There was a yellowish haze present in the air even when looking at the building across the street. Terrible air, terrible for your health, and preventable. Xiamen has built a bicycle path that looks very enlghtened. At 7.5km long it includes a highway overpass. If you could use it I think your life would be much better.
Chinese human rights lawyer Xie Yang 谢阳, in undated photo (left), and Chinese government photo (2017 Mar 02) still in jail after over 1.5 years. Though he seems to have survived his 6 months of torture, he is obviously thin. I could hardly recognize him from his photo.
In January I had written about a Chinese lawyer Xie Yang 谢阳, who was tortured by Chinese police for 6 months, and has been in jail for over 1.5 years so far. Because his story has been widely published in the Western press, the Chinese government has started a a propaganda campaign against him and his lawyers, alleging Xie Yang’s story of torture was all made up by his lawyers, and is, as a Trumpism, “fake news”. His lawyer Chen Jiangang (陈建刚) has tried to refute this. I’m unsure about his other lawyer Liu Zhengqing (刘正清). New York Times
The original Tower Bridge in London, vs the copy bridge in Suzhou, China. The copy is hideous.
Visiting China is always exciting. the country is steeped in its own unique history and has treasures not known in the rest of the world. It is very odd, and disconcerting, when China’s architects blatantly copy world famous foreign landmarks. This is not a new phenomenon and has been going on for many a decade. The most recent case is a copy of London’s famous Tower Bridge, now copied and even embellished in Suzhou.
