Showing posts tagged China

One of these photos is Beijing under heavy smog a few days ago, during the city’s first ever Orange Alert, a government warning about visibility.

The other is an image from Blade Runner (1982), set in Los Angeles in 2019, conceptually designed by Syd Mead, who also worked on Tron and Aliens, and refers to science fiction as “reality ahead of schedule.”

Meanwhile in China…

This is a Wasabi Kit-Kat I had in a friend’s house. It tastes exactly as you would expect it to taste, if you’ve ever had Wasabi. 

I thought it might be interesting after seeing this post about some odd flavours of Kit-Kat in Japan.

Placename Beat

Chica Boca, Chica Boca, Woolloomooloo
Walla Walla, Wuhan, Bam

Dongo, Dongo, Republic of Congo,
Weihai, Cahora Bassa Dam

I was deliberately trying to look masterful and in control during a Settlers of Catan card game with Yung-An. As per usual, Yung-An beat the living hell out of me, causing me to use lots of inappropriate language in front of his traditional Chinese parents.

I’m So Old

I can remember when 

  • MTV played music videos;
  • Big Bird was the only one who could see Snuffleupagus;
  • Ireland won the Eurovision Song Contest every year;
  • Christmas was fun;
  • All I wanted to do in my spare time was build fire engines out of Lego;
  • The capital of China was “Peking”;
  • Modems made bleeping and hissing noises;
  • Our car wouldn’t start in the morning without pulling on a little button under the steering wheel called the “choke”, and you had to actually wind up all the windows;
  • Snickers was Marathon;
  • Milk came in glass bottles and were delivered to our front door; 
  • Lucozade came in glass bottles with orange crinkly wrap around them;
  • Playing in the snow sounded like a fun idea;
  • Telephones had massive clunky rotary dials, that made dialling 999 more effort than it was worth, and all lines were land lines;
  • Friends was funny;
  • Birthday parties meant running around in circles with tiny paper cups of Fanta, home-made rice krispie buns and fun-size Mars bars;
  • Going on long, pointless journeys to visit people in ramshackle farmhouses (they were just outside of town, but for some reason they seemed like very long drives when I was young);
  • The word ‘Sony’ was followed by ‘Walkman’ and not ‘Playstation’;
  • Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan were the good guys;
  • Television didn’t start until noon, and would break down all the time, the resultant gaps of which were plugged with the weird video for Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. Dear reader, imagine what effect this had on my tiny little mind!