Category: General

This print ad is posted in the elevator in my apartment (mentos is a minty candy).    So what is going on?   Is the girl so ecstatically happy because of the cake with the 21 on that is presented to her?  Well, no.    I enlisted the help of my colleague here at work :  turns out the translation of the Chinese text actually reads ‘How mentos do you want to be?/ How mentos do you want your breath to be?  So now we can reverse engineer what happened.   She presented the guy with the cake with the 21 on.   He blew out the candles with his minty mentos breath – and that blew her away.    There you have it!

It was a beautiful day outside .. low humidity and mild temperatures.    The pictures are from my (fourth, I think) visit to the Outside China Town East theme park here in Dameisha.    The first picture shows the entrance; the second is of a billboard showing that a ‘snowy’ Christmas 2010 has arrived in the park as well.   However, there’s little evidence of that inside : a snowflake decoration here and there, and a layer of ‘snow’ on some roof tops is about it !    I don’t know the guy on stilts or the young woman posing with him.   The next picture shows Dameisha in the distance.    The last picture shows the latest real estate project which has been completed :  the Ocean Crown.    Buyer beware!

Friday and I decided to stay put in Dameisha because I need to get the last of the jet lag out of my system and I have to do a few hours of work tomorrow.   I’m not a workaholic! but we are going to leave the China team behind here between Christmas and New Year’s Day to continue in our absence – and they need to have good instructions and data in the test system.   Tonight a few of us went to the Sheraton hotel here for a beef burger and a beer.   The lobby was decorated with Christmas paraphernalia – that’s a ginger bread ‘house’ with ‘snow’ on the roof.      The WATERSKY OTEL is across the street from the Sheraton.  I liked the golden neon sign at the entrance.

It has been a very long time since I saw an Afrikaans movie in a theater, and tonight I did : Liefling the Movie.  It is an Afrikaans musical with English subtitles, and on track to become a blockbuster South African movie.  Think Mamma Mia! the ABBA musical – it’s about the same.    The picture below shows the romantic leads.  The movie was made on a tiny tiny budget by American standards : R 5 million (US $800,000).

The original song Liefling was recorded in 1972 by Gé Korsten (album cover below).

Below are the opening lyrics of the song.   Overly simplistic and dramatic, one could say – but consider this :

[Source : Wikipedia] In the 2002 Currie Cup final against the Golden Lions, a South African Rugby Union player Derick Hougaard broke Naas Botha’s 15 year record for points scored in a Currie Cup final of 24 by scoring 26.  This feat at the start of his career and his excellent goal kicking success ratio during the following years earned him the accolade  Liefling van Loftus (Eng. ‘Sweetheart of Loftus Versfeld Stadium’)  in Pretoria.   Each time Hougaard scored points for the Bulls at Loftus, the chorus of this song was played in the stadium.

Which reminds me of Simon and Garfunkel singing Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you (Woo woo woo) in the song Mrs Robinson (1968).

Liefling 1972 (Kunze, Maffay, Toerien)
Jy weet dat ek nie sonder jou kan bestaan nie  You know that without you I cannot exist
Jy week dat jy ook nie alleen kan bestaan nie  You know that you too cannot exist on your own
Dit weet jy goed  You know that well

Koor Chorus
Liefling kan ons nie maar vergeet en vergewe?   Sweetheart could we not forgive and forget?
Liefling ek kan nie sonder jou verder lewe   Sweetheart I cannot carry on without you
Dit weet jy goed You know that well

[Source : Wikipedia] Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada. Traditionally, it has been a time to give thanks for a bountiful harvest.    While it may have been religious in origin, Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday.   It is sometimes casually referred to as Turkey Day.
In Canada, Thanksgiving Day is celebrated on the second Monday in October, which is Columbus Day in the United States.    In the United States, it falls on the fourth Thursday of November.

The precise historical origin of the holiday is disputed.   Although Americans commonly believe that the first Thanksgiving happened in 1621 at Plymouth, Massachusetts, there is some evidence for an earlier harvest celebration by Spanish explorers in Florida during 1565. There was also a celebration two years before Plymouth (in 1619) in Virginia. There was a Thanksgiving of sorts in Newfoundland, modern-day Canada in 1578 but it was to celebrate a homecoming instead of the harvest.   Thanksgiving Day is also celebrated in Leiden, in the The Netherlands.    A different holiday which uses the same name is celebrated at a similar time of year in the island of Grenada.  There is no Thanksgiving Day or equivalent thereof in South Africa.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone !

I traveled back to Johannesburg tonight for more work before I can finally take some time off.   It was a beautiful clear day in Cape Town with temperatures crossing 30 °C (upper 80s °F).  The view of the colorful airplane tails was taken while we were waiting for the pushback at Capetown airport.   Flymango.com or ‘Fly the Mango’ is a low cost airline.   The other picture is the courtyard of the boutique hotel I am staying in, the Quatermain.   I’m pretty sure it’s a reference to Allan Quatermain  – the protagonist  of H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines and its various prequels and sequels.   The character Quatermain is an English-born professional big game hunter and occasional trader in southern Africa.   He supports colonial efforts to spread civilization in the Dark Continent, and he also favors native Africans’ having a say in their affairs.

I found the  DVD starring Richard Chaimberlain and Sharon Stone .. and word is that Sam Worthington (Avatar) is attached to a sci-fi interpretation of the legendary Allan Quatermain character.

I finally got this nice filing cabinet from Pottery Barn for my study – it was delivered last week.  The bottom drawer is filled with file folders (not visible on the picture).  Just to get all my DVDs in one place, I packed them into the top drawer on the left, and all my CDs went to the top drawer on the right.  But should I really keep them? And if I do, should they occupy this prime storage space?

Option 1 : Throw them out – not throw them away, of course.   I can take them to Half Price Books .. they might bring in $1 apiece.   If I had the time and patience I could sell them on Ebay I suppose, but that seems hardly worth it for all the trouble.

Option 2 : Keep them .. at least keep the DVDs and CDs I’m still somewhat attached to.   But I’m thinking I could make sure all the nice CDs are on my iPod, and then take them out of their jewel boxes and pack them into a spindle container like the one on top of the filing cabinet.    (And make the CD covers into a booklet?)  DVDs I could do the same with.

The first picture shows the Art Deco detail of the Tower Building on 7th Ave in Seattle.   It’s close to the dentists’s office where I went today for a check-up.  (Got to check those chompers!)  The next picture is from the corner of Republican Street and 16th Ave, 1/2 block from my house.   And the last picture is CNN announcing that the Republicans are taking the House.   Not too big a surprise, right? .. but what makes me scratch my head is that in a major recession with 10% unemployment, and the majority of voters needing affordable health care, Social Security payouts, Medicare and Medicaid support, that so many vote Republican or Tea Party.   (For my readers outside the USA : the Republican party stands for limited government, repealing the expanded health-care bill passed this year, and abolishing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.)

It’s Halloween and I’m posting Google’s home page pictures .. it’s a whole cartoon strip featuring Scooby Doo.   From Wikipedia : Scooby-Doo is a media franchise based around several animated television series which were produced from 1969 to the present.  All versions of the show feature a talking dog named Scooby Doo; the original series included four teenagers or young adults: Fred “Freddie” Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Norville “Shaggy” Rogers. These five characters (officially collectively known as “Mystery, Inc.”, but never referred to as such in the original series) drive around in the Mystery Machine van solving mysteries by exposing seemingly otherworldly ghosts and monsters as flesh and blood crooks.

P.S.  Gelukkige Verjaarsdag, Pa!  Ek sien geweldig daarna uit om almal te sien.

Yes, a movie that I stumbled on to tonight the way I sometimes do on TV, and I had to watch it to the end : about a woman who marries a widower but fears she lives in the shadow of her predecessor.  It is one of the first Alfred Hitchcock masterpieces with two very handsome romantic leads in Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, and it garnered the Best Picture statue at the 1941 Academy Awards.  It’s black and white and I’d consider buying it for my fledgling Blu-ray collection of movies, but it’s not yet out on Blu-ray.     I saw Blu-ray movies for $10 at the grocery store on Tuesday.  A young woman checking them out as well asked ‘What is Blu-ray?’ It’s a new format and you need a special player for them, I said.  (And thought : you evidently never ever go to the video store to rent movies).

This is a library cabinet from a store called Crate& Barrel that I bought and that was delivered today.  It’s solid walnut (read : not cheap) with traditional Chinese joinery – interlocking joinery without any screws or nails.  The two glass-paned doors open to three fixed shelves, with glass paned sides opening up the view.  No sooner had it landed, when I stuffed it full of items!.. I will rearrange them in good time.  The uploaded picture is actually very large.  Click on it once, and then one more time to take a closer look at the items inside the cabinet : ).

Is Frankenstein afraid of the spider, or is he too big to stand up straight on the porch?   The picture is of a house a few blocks from mine that I took on a walk tonight when there was a break in the rain.   It was chilly enough for me to wear my scarf!  Soon I will have to dig up my gloves as well.

(The picture was taken Sunday morning.  Saturday morning the deck was dry and clean as a whistle).   I will have to scrub the deck soon .. there’s black moss on it that makes it slippery when it’s wet.  And as I looked at the deck this morning, it reminded me of the Three Worlds lithograph print by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher (see http://www.mcescher.com) which was first printed in December, 1955.  Of course, the three worlds are the one for the fish in the water, the one that is the surface on which the leaves float, and the one outside with the trees.

Hansel and Gretel is the name of the beer I had last night at The Elysian Brewhouse.  It is of course a Brothers Grimm fairy tale as well, with Hansel and Gretel left in the woods by their parents that could not care for them, after which they arrive at the witch’s house built from bread and with a cake roof.

Knupper, knapper, kneischen, wer knuppert an meinem Häuschen? (who is knocking on my house?) asks the witch.

The pictures are from a German version of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale book I bought in Vienna two years ago.   I had to buy it : I still remember many of the watercolor pictures (done by Janusz Grabianski – is that a Polish name?)  vividly from when I started reading !

I like to save articles from magazines or newspapers with interesting pictures or graphics .. this one is from a TIME magazine earlier this year and shows some statistics about the finances of the US federal government.  (Click the picture to make it bigger).

P.S. Typhoon Megi went north into mainland China, away from Hong Kong and Daya Bay.

It was another beautiful day in Seattle.   But on the other side of the world super typhoon Megi is approaching Hong Kong – the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane and is packing maximum sustained winds of 185 kmh (115 mph), according to the Hong Kong observatory.  This one does look like it will hit Hong Kong dead on in the next day or two, says my colleagues out in Daya Bay.  (They will stay away from going to work tomorrow).

There it goes – my ballot for the 2010 Washington State Mid-term Elections – into the security envelope and into the mailing envelope.  It’s a paper ballot* and the marks get counted by an optical scanner.   *In spite of it being the year 2010.  Paper ballots will only go away when paper money goes away, I believe.

We will see if Washington State gets a State Income Tax (we’re one of 7 hold-out states in the union).  The net income from the tax is intended for education (70%) and health care (30%) .. it’s just that state legislatures are notorious for applying funds raised this way for different purposes.

We will also see on Nov 2 if California voters pass Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana!  (But it may be a storm in a teacup since there is still a federal law in place that makes owning it illegal, and federal law trumps state law per the US Constitution).

A colleague alerted me to this picture posted on the Bryan Bros.’* website.  His wife happened to bring their baby in for a routine check-up to the hospital in Shanghai, and ran into them.  I love the giant tennis ball.

*Twin brothers Robert Charles Bryan (Bob) and Michael Carl Bryan (Mike) are American professional tennis players.   At one point they were the World No. 1 doubles team for 201 weeks.   Between 2005 and 2006, they set an Open Era record by competing in seven consecutive men’s doubles Grand Slam finals, three of which they won.   On February 26, 2010, they recorded their Open Era record 600th match win by defeating Taylor Dent and Ryan Harrison in the semi-finals of the Delray Beach ATP 250 tournament.

It’s the second Monday in October and therefore Columbus Day in the USA.   Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas around this time in 1492 (the indigenous people had been here LONG before that, of course).  And he didn’t really discover what is today the USA. Wikipedia put it like this : Christopher Columbus (c. 31 October 1451 – 20 May 1506) was a navigator, colonizer, and explorer from the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy, whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere. Spain and the other Americas celebrate Columbus Day as well – but not Canada.

The voyages of Columbus [Source: Wikipedia].

That’s a date reference (yes, I’m cheating a little since the year is 2010 but oh well).  It is also the birthday of Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (10 October 1825 – 14 July 1904), better known as Paul Kruger and affectionately known as Uncle Paul (Dutch: “Oom Paul”).   He was State President of the erstwhile South African Republic (Transvaal).   He gained international renown as the face of Boer resistance against the British during the South African or Second Boer War (1899–1902).

The Krugerrand is a South African gold coin, first minted in 1967 to help market South African gold.  It is produced by the South African Mint Company.   It is minted from gold alloy that is 91.67% pure (22 karats), so the coin contains one troy ounce (31.1035 g) of gold.    The second picture shows the rise of the gold price since 2000.   Friday it closed at US$1,318.95  on the New York Stock Exchange.  Is it headed even higher?