Events

Really, it's the food. We're all going to double our waist sizes here. This afternoon they took us on a teambuilding exercise in which we made lemon chicken and pork fried rice. Much fun, many calories. Our team won best preparation but, owing to a lack of salt (we think), only came in second overall. Our presentation: One of my teammates copied down on his iPhone the entire procedure as the chef demonstrated it. Once he's able to send me the note, I'll repost it. It involved only one ingredient whose...

I'm still digesting Shànghăi, possibly because it's all about the food. Take, for example, the family dinner my classmate Kyle invited me to. Including me, there were five of us. This is what Kyle's mother and wife prepared: That doesn't show the rice, by the way. All of it was delicious. I admit, I didn't try the green jellied duck eggs, but Kyle smoothed that out with his folks. Earlier yesterday he took me to Qībăo, a tiny oasis of old Shànghăi about 15 km southwest of the city center. More food...

Obligatory Pŭdōng skyline shot: And completely surprising shot of the kids that mobbed me to practice their English:

Best view yet: Much better than Dubai.

It's 5:20 in the morning here, and I don't know what day it is. This, believe it or not, I expected, which explains why I got here a day early. Just one major complaint: The Great Firewall apparently blocks Facebook[1]. Those of you waiting for me to play Scrabble, I'm sorry. (The Great Firewall sometimes changes its mind, so I'll keep trying.) I won't bore you with details about my messed-up circadian rhythm when I could do it with something else, so here, à propos of nothing, is a photo of Tokyo...

Above Siberia, 9:34 JST I actually can see Russia from my window:

Over Great Bear Lake, N.W.T., 16:20 MDT Note the first: A westbound 13-hour flight seems a lot shorter than a 9-hour flight the other direction. We left Chicago a little more than four hours ago, which equals the flying time from Chicago to San Francisco, the farthest place you can go within the Lower 48. It doesn’t feel that far. The sun confounds perceptions of time: we took off at 1pm and we land at 3:30, chasing the sun across the Canadian permafrost most of the way. I get to Shanghai at 7pm. My...

First, a housekeeping note. This is the one of three entries posted after the fact. Almost always, a post time you see on The Daily Parker accurately records when I first posted the blog entry. At this writing I’m on an airplane over Canada’s Northwest Territories, so the post time shows when I took notes about the entry that follows. This all may seem, as my dearest friend might say, “a bit Asperger’s-y.” Perhaps. Another very close friend blogs retrospectively, because she wants her entries to...

As reported earlier, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do not like the Pope's actions in dealing with child abuse. Dawkins has clarified his remarks: Needless to say, I did NOT say "I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI" or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself. What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me...

I discovered this joke from the head of Duke's CCMBA IT department: An accountant is having a hard time sleeping and goes to see his doctor. "Doctor, I just can't get to sleep at night." "Have you tried counting sheep?" "That's the problem - I make a mistake and then spend three hours trying to find it." And 24 hours from now, I'll be somewhere over Minnesota on my way to Shanghai...