I will miss my Shanghai bathtub

I probably take a soak in my bathtub only 10 times in a year*... But I like the possibility of being able to take one anytime, and I adore it each time I do.

At some faraway and unknown point in life, I became charmed by the idea of a bathtub. One of the top things I look for when renting an apartment is a bathtub (even when I was a poor student), and it is again one of top things I look forward to on work trips.

An idea, a plausible one - perhaps the reason why I run off from Singapore often is not because "I can't stand it" (in words of cousin J, but which are not true) or because the pasture is greener outside, but simply because I like the possibility of taking a bath anytime.

I will miss my Shanghai bathtub.



*Mainly out of time and ecological considerations... Or maybe the luxurious feeling from one bath lasts me more than a month.

Note #2 to little cousins, nephew and niece

Professors often don't have students' best interests at heart. Why should they? After all, once they have tenure, they can't be fired... Professors sometimes abuse this power, such as when they choose textbooks based on kickbacks they get from publishers. And have you ever wondered why all the "good" classes are held at the same time, in the middle of the day? Possibly it's because those tenured professors want to come to work late and leave early. The result? You can't get the class you want. And even if you got it, you might not learn much. Faculty members generally aren't promoted based on their teaching skills, but rather on their prestige and the research dollars they generate.

(From the same Thomas Sowell below - who is a professor himself.)

And to the extent that you can generalize that professors in big-name universities are more focused on generating research dollars and upkeeping prestige, this would confirm my observation all along that »my professors at Madison were much better teachers of economics. It would also support why in terms of selecting classes, you should not let titles ("lecturer" vs "professor") affect your your choices. (Some of my best classes were taken with »this memorable lecturer.)

The chess-piece fallacy: why you should not study what is hot

Adam Smith chastised people who thought they could "arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess board." Yet, more than two centuries after Smith's warning, policy makers still try various forms of “social engineering.” Usually such schemes don't work because, unlike rooks and knights, people have wills and desires that often conflict with social engineers' theories...

- Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

Or, facts can change such that engineers are no longer as in demand after you are told that four years ago that engineering is a hot thing to major in.

Note to all my little cousins and nieces and nephews please.

Muji chronotebook

Diary schedules are arranged in lines and grids, which are difficult to see and has little flexibility. This notebook makes it clear, intuitive and easy to plan and see your daily schedules.

Such simplicity, but how brilliant!

Of immortal crabs and roosters' eggs

Speaking of crabs and Mexican in the previous post, I am reminded of a lunch conversation when I said, "A penny for your thought?" and Mexican Mr V and Columbian Mr F looked at me blankly.

Turns out that they don't have a similar expression in question form, but they have superb answers to the question. The Columbian answer is "thinking about the eggs of the rooster", and the Mexican one, my favourite, goes:

"Thinking about the immortality of crabs".

Crabs! How magically realistic!

When there are no birds, even an arse is a nightingale

...Still, differences in idiom do teach us about culture and history. Where an English-speaker says "the die is cast", a Mexican says "the rice is cooked". The proverb "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" becomes, in Russian, "When there are no fish, even a crab is a fish," which reveals a surprising amount about what survival once entailed for the typical Russian peasant. (I admit, though, to being baffled by the cruder popular version of this phrase, "When there are no birds, even an arse is a nightingale.")

»Living in Babel

I also don't get how the arse can be related to a nightingale, but in Chinese, our 生米已煮成熟饭 is identical to the Mexicans'. Amazing.

《土豆先生的伤痕》

现展于莫干山路的»Outstanding Art画廊。

画家是位26岁的满族人，名字很特别，叫宫鹤。

原来每一次的呼吸都是很宝贵的

Ferragamo opening

___

»Museum of Contemporary Art.

X plate taxis in Shanghai

One little tip to share about Shanghai taxi: try not take any taxi with BX in the car plate.

Any car in Shanghai has a car plate, like this: 沪B-X1234 [...] if there is a car without these characters [U, V, W, M, N, X] on plate, and pretend to be a taxi, you will know it.

Among all these plate, X is very special.

X plate taxi are private taxi plate, while all the others are company owned taxi. A company owned taxi means the taxi is owned by a taxi company, and the driver is hired by the company to drive the car, and the driver needs to pay about 450 - 500 base fee to the company everyday. Their earning needs to pay this fee, gas fee, and all kinds of maintaince fee for the car before he can get a profit.

X plate taxis, or private taxis, are owned by individual persons, and they don't belong to a company, so they don't need to pay anything. Recently, they are required to join a company setup just for the management propose of private taxis. The management is as low as 150 RMB per month, v.s. 15,000 for other taxi drivers.

So the owner of an X plate taxi earns huge profit.

However, their service quality is the worst among all the taxis, just because they are not afraid of any customer complain at all - there is no company responsible for it. Their service standard is also pretty low. The rule of thumb (although with a little bit discrimination) is, if you feel very bad about a taxi driver, chances are, it is a X plate taxi...

»Full article

Interesting tidbit and I'll keep a lookout for X plates . But as the daughter of an unaffiliated cab driver, I must speak up to say that unaffiliated drivers are not all bad eggs. (At least not in the context of Singapore.) For one, consumers can complain directly to the Land Transport Authority, a move that likely has more impact (or repercussions from the perspective of the driver) than just calling the cab company. And secondly, it is safe to say that yellow-top cab drivers are the old guards who have been driving around for 20 years and actually know the roads.

双双对对

春雨后

流水无情

去年的»落花有意。

梅花二弄

满乡的油菜花

婺源三重唱

The shochu which listens to music

Japan is the land where cows are massaged as they drink beer and shochu* listens to music as it is bottled.

We love quirky Japan.



*The square bottle shochu at tucked-away Mokko Bar. Apparently, music vibrates the bottle which makes the shochu better.

Teenage Stories

It was a gorgeous spring day at »MoCA today.

More on »the Teenage Stories series and »Julia Fullerton-Batten.

A day bed to curl up in

On this rainy day, I want to curl up here, read a book, then drift off to sleep...