Link: http://misterjam.com/

It occurred to me, there's no shortage of fresh water in the world, it's just unevenly distributed, as people are.

So if the spouting from my roof was connected to BJ, there'd be plenty of water in BJ. Of course it'd need a lot pipes to water another golf course . . . or they could just call it the South-North Water Project, as they in fact did.

I wonder how much fresh water is dumped in the oceans, unused, so to speak? I must see how much NZ doesn't use....except to generate power to run an aluminium smelter.

I see a spot to link to URL, which has nuttin to do with water, but he's a funny guy

DaveZu

I did write this once but I can't . . . so, in February I flew to Xining, 2 hours west of Beijing, and back a week later. Coming back was brill blue sky, the loop of the Huang Ho, brill white clouds, then the pilot announced descent and the horizon announced Beijing. The brill blue sky turned to coffee, weak milky coffee and the clouds disappeared. BJ was invisible under coffee gateau from 6000 metres up and 15 minutes out.
And then I walked out of the airport and got into a taxi and drove off . . .under a blue sky. Amazing. A Beijing blue sky with Chinese characteristics, these being I don't need sunglasses in China, and my tan has faded to a hideous white color. I look English, sick, anaemic. Of course yes part of that is being a teacher and spending hours indoors and I did change color by one tone in June 08. But the girlies still use umbrellas to stop getting anything like Vitamin D. Only peasants have a tan, in Beijing. Only peasants could ever get a tan, in Beijing.

So my conclusion is, there's blue skies New Zealand and there's blue skies Beijing. And there seems little industry around Bj, so I suspect 3million cars have somethng to do with it.

DaveZu

Yeah there is a seafood diet. But the seefood diet is better for you.

If you see some food and you think, I gotta get that, or you're pondering the nature of Chinese girl's universe and you suddenly get an image of sardines, it's intuition and not your left and right hemis making a logical conclusion. It's your SFD, SeeFooddietDepartment sending you a reminder, like your tax guy does.

If you ate lots of strange food earlier in your life, cos your Ma was a vegetarian or your family moved to Siberia, or you went to Boy Scout camps and/or you hitched to Yugoslavia, your SFD has a library of which stuff contains what you need, based on what you've eaten and what goodies each food contained, since you were weaned.

So when you suddenly want to eat marzipan as sandwich filling, it's cos you went to Auntie May's wedding in 1959 and were given a slice of wedding cake. Never mind you thought the icing was disgusting, your SFD analyzed it and now, when you need a top up of Essential Fatty Acid 4B/2, you have a sudden flash of inspiration. Go with it. Your body needs you!

Eat what you want and you stay healthy. Of course the eternal warning is to eat all that in moderation, cos if you way exceed the daily limit of sardines and marzipan sammies (even as separate food items) you're gonna balloon up to 160kgs and that's not good. You'll have to buy a new belt.

An Aside - I found out why I'm not in jail! It's amazing what you learn on TV. If your mother eats a lot of fish during her pregnancy, you end up more social and well adjusted and less likely to commit crimes. The program went on to extol the virtues of fish for some Omega 3 oil and some guy moaned about his teen dau who wouldn't eat fish. The prog briefly mentioned soy and walnuts and evenly briefier mentioned half a billion Indians who don't eat fish and 1 billion Chinese ditto (oily fish for 0m3) but didn't extend the logic of eating soy or linseed bread. A pity. Lots of dramatic music and images of walnuts, or brains, but biased brief content. A Women's Mag in AV format?

And now the medical version of the SFD.. . .

"New Delhi, June 27 : Chinese authorities in Beijing are planning to publish a regulation on public toilets' management to ensure that people flocking to the capital in the wake of the Olympic Games can find restrooms when they need to "answer the call of nature".

Ma said that there were 5,333 public toilets and 270 mobile ones in Beijing, and that the commission was working on locating each toilet using the Global Positioning System. "

This isn't new. Beijing has had GPS to locate toilets for years. especially the three years I was there. One simply opens one's nose and starts the GPS function, the Glorious Pee Smell. There was one by the public bus stop I used frequently, #16,26,105,601, that was locatable from at least a hundred metres downwind and on a radius of fifty metres on a still day. One couldn't walk along the other side of the street without knowing exactly where it was. There was one in my teaching building, two classrooms away but I knew where it was too. The one on the eighth floor wasn't much better, or in terms on locatability, was equally good.

It's not only BJ has the GPS network. I used it in Yunnan, Hunan, and various cities in Dongbei. The GPS system is faulty in Changsha, where "they" built four kilometres of riverside promenade with no public facilities, so your nose function may lead you to improper corners. One could always pretend to be French. "Weel, everyone elze uzes it, you can tell zat by ze pong, so why should not eye! Uh??"

However the traveller in Macau has a problem. There is no GPS here. Not even in the schools. Thus if the traveller needs to use the facilities, he will have to look for signs, otherwise he will walk right past the toilets without his GPS function flashing up the block your nose red flashing warning.

I did read in today's paper that BJ is making a special effort to upgrade its toilets and 8,000 workers have been trained to keep them clean. What's new 2 ? These people were lingering before but one assumed they had nothing better to do, or were untrainable in toilet training, or were selling fake toilet paper.

And of course this is the wet season in Macau. An inch an hour. I'll let you know what happens in the dry season. If there is one.

US2

NZ, the country blessed with enough water to drown your donut, has decided to ban sales of incandescent light bulbs (for house lighting) after 2009. The energy minister (a misnomer in NZ if there ever was one) says only 5% of the power they use is produced as light, the rest is lost as heat. So far so good.
New Zealanders will be allowed to import incandescent light bulbs for personal use. You can imagine the scene at Customs...
Her Majesties uniformed officer; Excuse me sir, but are these 2 dozen 65watt bulbs for your personal use?
Scumbag in torn jeans, carrying his worldly possessions in a sugarbag pikou; er yeah I mean you know whatareya you know aah ya fuckin pig i use the bloody things everyday whattya got against me ya arsehole? My house blows them about one a fuckin month so I need lots.
HMO; Oh excuse me , sir, I'm sorry I asked.

alternative ending 2-
HMO; Listen shitface, you're off for a body search to see how many you've concealed internally. Pheeep!!!

alternative middle 3-
Scumbag; listen you jerk yu probbly got heating. I gotta light up nine of those just to heat up my effing boodwar.
HMO; Well, why don't you burn your floorboards like the rest of youse unemployed arseholes?

For those ignoramus among you, a sugarbag is a light jute sack to hold 20kilos of sugar. Probably made for single use but they last for years. 30 years. Tie string from one corner to the other diagonally, repeat crosswise, drape it over your shoulders and it's a pikou, aka daypack.
Australia will ban personal imports of incandy lightbulbs so their Customs won't have the pleasure of these questions.

Isn't "communist" rhetoric great? You can convince yourself that plant produce, that 3/5 of the world's population would pay to get on their dinner plate, is not food.

Thus China can use that land to grow stuff to produce biofuel.

Suggestions by the Min. of Agriculture, China-Daily 8 May 2008, were that China could grow some biofuel crops on 100 million hectares, and that four companies are interested in processing the crops. Those plant crops are only sugar cane, sweet sorghum, cassava and rapeseed.

The land is 'unsuitable' to grow grain, but we've all seen rice growing in Longji in terraces 20m by 1m wide. And I've seen sweet potatoes growing in 3m by 2m terraces in west Hunan.

Maybe the honourable minister will encourage them to switch, to grow cassava for biofuel. They may earn more money and then they could buy sweet potatoes from ......?

Aren't yellow fields of rape flowers so photogenic in Sichuan? Ever tried eating rape seeds? Admittedly you can process cooking oil from them, after you remove the toxins. But as China imports way more than it exports, this is probably a red herring.

I also see Chinese companies want to grow rice in Ghana. Maybe it has a high yield but it's only 1/5 that of potatoes, but potatoes aren't food, so we need to use four times the quantity of water to grow 1/5 the quantity of the fluffy white stuff that produces the smallest people in the world. By my math, that's twenty times the water to get rice in your bowl compared to spuds on your plate. (Now you know why I failed math).

But the x20 times water argument can apply to rice anywhere, except maybe when it's aerobic rice (rice with exercise ! ) Actually, aerobic rice is irrigated 2 or 3 times, thus saving water, and reducing methane leakage into the atmosphere... though south China has more than enough water and so do the monsoon countries in a normal year.

I read China is already the world's biggest producer of spuds, but that doesn't excuse the biofool excuse. Neither does the idea of second-generation biofuel from plant residues such as corn stalks. I was talking to a guy on the weekend who's trying to breed up 'maize' with higher sugar content in the stalks, which sounds reasonable. NZ used to have s.th called sweetcorn, which may be just maize with sweet cobs and I recall the stalks were sweetly edible.

So I still reckon using 100million ha to grow primary produce for biofuel is just stupid. Unless C-D screwed up their translation of zillions of mu into millions of ha, which is quite likely. In which case you can stop reading. Unless Chinese ag produce is already so expensive other countries can't afford to buy it.

I kept notes for this one a few weeks back, situation may have changed... and they could buy sweet potato from NZ hahaha except I doubt they could afford them. Imagine the Food Miles! Let's leave that one on simmer for a minute....

I criticise China, I also criticise my own country. There is universal stupidity, like Henry's universally black Model T. Some stupidity is just stupid, whether it happens in China or NZ or Whykickamoocow or Oxford St.
Krashen came up with UG, Universal Grammar and there is also US, Universal Stupidity.
Parking your bicycle perpendicular to the footpath, blocking it entirely, is something I consider universally stupid. The reasons for this are another matter.
NZ's latest and brightest was a 90km/h speed limit to save gas.

Making your countries' major exam paper available to the public at the same time as students are sitting that exam is stupid. It is an invitation to cheat. When one point separates your entire life as a soft skinned academic, professor, tenure, the whole golden rice bowl, from life as a labourer with calluses, with instant noodles in a paper cup, is it any wonder some try to cheat?
ChinaDaily 6 June 2008 says the exam papers are now 'top secrets of the State' but it doesn't say that papers will not be released at the same time. Duh!
Last year 10 provinces had details on websites within the hour....and within the exam timeframe. You've heard of the Vagina Monologues, or was that the Vagina Motorolas?

Davezu

I blog therefore I am.
hmmm.
does a blogger exist because others read what he says?
doesn't he have a job? friends?
hmmm
okay I have sent ludicrous and inflammatory, and occasionally informative, posts over the last 2-3 years and the result is that this line runs on and on...maybe Jarte is set wrong. the result is I've been invited to join a blog because of my antipodean image of the world. Imagine looking at the world from the point of view of looking up a guy's shorts, or the back end of a cow.

okay I'll log on and ...program wants to send a cofirmatory email. ok. doesn't arrive. log on. your whatsit has expired. Of course cos I've set browsers to dump them. So this morning I'll try again...

in the meantime, what does this sentence mean?
"The kiln remain is the birthplace of chinaware"
Beijing Today's two experts dissected this last week and they both missed the message.
your opinion? If you win this, you get a free...thing.

I'll try to write in plane English, since I just looked at a GRE website and saw words I've never imagined. or never imagnined I'd use. Plane English is limited to the number of words that can be written on a 747 in 248point font. Words on flaps are not permitted

Weird huh. AVG has refused to update for 3 days, and has just done it automatically at 9.04 ! And why does NDIS User Mode want to access the 'net every ten minutes?

There's some nice pics on NZ at
http://www.civildefence.govt.nz/memwebsite.nsf/wpg_url/for-the-cdem-sector-photo-library-landslides?opendocument
this is to encourage you to stay at home.

Something worked...but it thinks I'm in Beijing.