🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

In Toronto I ran into Styx at the airport.

I mean it literally. I bounced off Tommy Shaw and kind of reeled into James Young. (Totally my fault.)

They were actually really nice, checking if I was OK and once it clicked who I was talking to, putting up with my squeeing fangurl behaviour. Both of us were waiting for our respective flights so I got to talk with them a good half-hour before my flight started boarding.

Completely different words.

Breaking down the words:

• 投 tóu: cast, throw
• 桃 táo: peach
• 报 bào: report
• 李 lǐ: plum

This sounds like gibberish because it is. Chinese characters aren’t quite words, but are more like “roots” in English (like “bio” meaning “life”). As such they have broad and shifting meanings. The big two are the first word and the third. The first word literally means “throw” or “cast” (as in fishing line), but has other shades of meaning that imply “giving”. The third word literally means “report” in most uses, but can also mean “repay” or “reciprocate”. Factor into this that word forms and declensions just aren’t a thing in Chinese, and this particular expression stems from the Book of Songs which is written in the very, very, very terse language of Classical Chinese and …

… well translation is shifty and difficult.

Another way to translate this (with implied meanings in [brackets]) could be: “toss [someone a] peach [and he will] reciprocate [with a] plum”.

Or, you know, give a peach in return for a plum. (And my brain screwed up above which I will correct: I flipped plum and peach for some reason.)

As for the other part of your question, the characters for the online purchasing platform are: 淘宝. Breaking that down:

• 淘 táo: wash, cleanse, sift, eliminate
• 宝 bǎo: treasure, jewel

That first one is MOSTLY used to talk about sifting (such that 淘金 means “sift gold” or more idiomatically “pan for gold”). So the literal translation of that name is “sift treasure” or, more idiomatically, “treasure hunt”.

Insert the “the more you know” meme right here. 😆

Oh, God. Freeze Peach has reached the UK.

A vaguely similar expression exists in Chinese: 投桃报李 (tóu táo bào lǐ or “give a peach in return for a plum”). It suggests that reciprocity is key to gift-giving; that giving is as much part of the joy as is receiving.

When I had lots of money I preferred giving, partially because it made me feel good, but partially because often gifts I received were just not very well thought-out. (“I noticed you have a lot of RPGs, so I got you this new D&D module.” Never mind that the one RPG I don’t have is D&D in any flavour… That sort of thing.)

When I have less money (like now) … I still prefer giving, but only marginally.

Jade is quite a bit harder than even a hardcover book. ;)

It’s not all that posh, though. That example there costs the equivalent of about $35.

I agree with you. I use pillows of that shape almost exclusively these days.

You consider that a difficult pillow?

Try these on for size. The first turns your WiFi into 5G. The second into 6G, and the final one turns it into an ansible.

Yes, this last one is, in fact, a solid piece of jade. Why do you ask?

After many years of working marketing for high tech firms, with an ever-increasing salary until it hit mid six-figures, I had a complete meltdown and dropped that work entirely, with no employment prospects and no idea of what to do for money, living off my savings for a year.

This enabled me to finally take the plunge and move half a world away (teaching English at first) to reconnect with my roots. I’ve been here now for almost 24 years and haven’t been happier. I even returned to marketing (well, market consultation) in 2016 and managed to somehow not have a second meltdown.

The smell of fresh tea when the package is opened.

“Stinky tofu” when passing the street carts selling it.

Freshly-made lard-cooked french fries.

A “strong-scented” baijiu.

A good Indian restaurant, that moment you walk inside and breath.

No, I meant real RPGs, not the computerized abominations. Pencil, paper, optionally a randomizer, and imagination.

“I’ve got new socks on.”

Pick up a new language. A whole language in the course of a normal hospital stage is not really plausible, so narrow the goals. Like only learn how to swear in another language, say. Or learn how to say all the sexual acts you can think of in another language fluently.

Pick up a solo RPG and start playing when you get bored.

Edit Thanks for the report @[email protected] I tried not to frame this in a controversial manner.

Dude! If anything were to show that this post was done in bad faith, doing what you just did was beyond the pale in proving it!

A friend has an eastern European neighbor move in. He says he’s glad they are that instead of American white.

Have you ever been in a gathering with just plain, white-as-in-bread Americans (especially the middle class on up, but not exclusively so)? They are boring as all fuck! They eat boring food, have boring conversations and are in general just tedious to be around when that’s all that’s present. (Part of this is, naturally, contempt for the familiar, but the other part is that yes they really are that boring!).

I’d much rather live in a neighbourhood that has a dozen different cultures (note: I’m not saying “races” here because “races” are nonsense) than a bunch of middle-class, white-as-in-bread Americans. So if I’m living in a neighbourhood that is mostly just plain-as-pancakes (minus the syrup) white folk, I’ll celebrate an Eastern European family moving in too!

Feeling they are individually responsible for what their ancestors and/or rich and politically affluent white people did in the past.

If they genuinely feel individually responsible, that’s just idiocy. The kind of idiocy that the privileged can express because there’s no real cost to them, in fact.

If they are, however, just acknowledging that they have privilege based on their artificial elevation over others (c.f. “redlining”) through systematic racism, and you’re interpreting this as feeling individually responsible, you likely need to have an awareness adjustment.

Acting as if white people anything is bad.

This is just stupid with no qualifiers like the previous one.

Making jokes at their own expense but won’t dare say the same thing to another ethnicity.

Well fucking duh! Self-aware, self-directed humour is the high road. Punching down on someone else for their differences is the low road. (Punching up is the middle road.) I’ll take it from my angle:

• German jokes: I’m half-German ethnically, and spent some of the most important formative years of my life living in Germany. When I’m making jokes about Germans, it comes from an informed position with at least a degree of sympathy for the targets of my jokes. When some American dude from the middle of Montana does the same, they come at it from a position of ignorance and stereotype that is usually a) ignorant, and b) hostile, rather than sympathetic.

• Chinese jokes: Where Americans (not of German descent, and even many who are) make German jokes have at least some cultural warrants in common, there are almost zero cultural warrants in common with Chinese people. White Americans are so incredibly ignorant of Chinese culture, society, behaviour, and beliefs that they think “Ching Chong” sounds like Chinese (protip: not even fucking close!) and they think “Confucius say” jokes¹ are a) plausibly real, and b) funny (protip: neither is true). Use either of these in my presence and you’re going to get the stink-eye and a confrontation you will not enjoy. Yet … I can tell jokes about Chinese people because, again, I’m ethnically half-Chinese, I’ve lived in China for almost a quarter of a century now, and my jokes will actually a) be based on knowledge, and b) be based on sympathetic sharing of values while poking fun at idiosyncrasies.

• Jokes about white folk: Here’s where you’re going to probably find it “unfair”, but the fact is that white folk are the dominant folk in Europe and North America. All y’all’s culture is everywhere, overriding everybody else’s. And all y’all’re the culture with the greatest proportion of money. And here’s the thing: minorities punching up is fine. Indeed laudable. Every king needs his jester to prick his ego and make fun of his excesses. The jester making fun of the king is laudable and brave. The king beating down the jester is not. So like it or not, not only is it bad for white folk to be making fun of minorities, it’s cowardly. And the reverse, however, is fine (and brave). I already know from the nature of your question that you’re absolutely going to hate that I said that, but it’s true nonetheless. Punching down is mean-spirited. Punching up is not.

¹ Consider how typical Americans would react to someone making “Yeshua ben Yusuf” jokes about Christ’s purported sayings that are as offensive as these “Confucius say” jokes are. Now flip the script. Yeah. That.

This right here. I love the feeling of a drink or two inside of me. I can’t stand being drunk.

I’ve never actually had a hangover. I have no idea what they feel like other than, from inference, bad.

And I drink.

I have been drunk in the past too, though I really don’t like the sensation so try to avoid it.

Perhaps instead of age there’s something else that’s causing your hangover?

For me it would be Das Boot.