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.
The Moyu Cube Stand has some clever design, and it looks really good as well. The stand came with the WeiLong GTS cube. photo 1 by Don Tai
Bought, Little Weed did, yet another cube. This was because the new cube had great reviews from a reputable company, and was supposed to be fast. He was not disappointed. The new cube, a Weilong GTS from MoYu, came with 2 plastic cube stands, convenient for displaying the cube. Or are they really just cube stands?
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.
Shandang Ass Bacon, from Changzhi, Shanxi Province, China. It is preserved donkey meat. 山西世龙食品有限公司 Scan by Don Tai
Returned, she did, and with it some gifts. Bought in Changzhi, Shanxi Province, China, we received 3 packages of Shangdang ass bacon. And no, I am not being crude, as it clearly states, in English, on the package. I believe there is something lost in translation. Ass bacon is the Chinese to English translation, obviously made by a Chinese person in need of further translation experience, of donkey corned meat. Salty, but otherwise tasty.
Air, you really cannot live without it. Literally. Dirty air gets into everything, especially PM2.5 sized. No household air cleaners or air conditioners can get rid of this pollution. I’m sure a house sized hepa filter could do it, but open a door and your air quality would quickly drop. What would life be if you could not go outside?
Anyway, I thought I’d add city air quality readings to my WordPress blog, but I’m only partially satisfied. I actually want 2 cities but can only get one at a time. There are instructions on aqicn.org Air Quality Widget – New Improved Feed
They have not caught on yet, as many Chinese search engines offer no explanation in English of their services, yet their bots are out there crawling all sites on the internet. I am trying to kill as many bots, scrapers, spiders, crawlers, and checkers as possible, and if I don’t find an explanation of what a site does, I’ll ban the user agent from my site. This might seem a little unfair, but I don’t want bots eating my bandwidth, and to have my ISP force me to pay more for hosting, all because they wish to crawl my site.
Unforseen circumstances forced us to get a Chinese visa in a rush, here in Toronto. The experience left us a bit shell shocked, bewildered and traumatized. So that others do not experience the same, I’ll blog our travails.
Google “China visa Toronto” and you’ll get a couple of companies that claim they can do your Chinese visa. They are correct, but might charge you over double the cost. There is really only one way to get a visa for China, through VisaForChina.org and if you have sufficient lead time and follow certain steps you can reduce the amount of trauma you experience.
