Snatched a couple of hours today after meeting some last minute work needs, so took myself off to explore the immediate environs. First off, it is really clean and neat. The streets are crowded, but they are not dirty and they seem a lot more “developed” than, say, Hanoi.

Time came to eat. There w...

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Golly it is hard to blog when you can’t connect to some of your favourite sites. First, the NYT. Now Wikipedia. I promise to add the links when I get back to the land of unfettered access.¹

When I was young, we didn't have English gooseberries (Ribes uva-crispa). We had Cape Gooseberries (Phys...

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I’m in Kunming, Yunnan province, in the southwest of China just above Viet Nam. And the place is chock full of surprises.

I fired up the GPS, just for fun, and got a reading. As it happened, Luigi had just texted me. so I texted back the coordinates. Less than 30 seconds later he texted back the h...

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Cate Blachett surely has to be in the running for an Oscar, but as Actor or Actress? Her Jude Quinn (without a parka!) in I'm not there is astonishing, Bob Dylan somehow brought to life. She doesn’t impersonate Dylan, but she somehow recreates him, which is fitting as this wonderful, kaleidoscopic...

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Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.3 This week: 88.5

Tuesday 11 September: Slowly getting back to where I was, and that despite one of the most delicious steaks I have eaten in a long time. Against the odds, this was cooked in a domestic kitchen, at his home, by a friend. Too often the best home-cooked st...

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