Posts by Chris Waugh
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Speaker: The Democracy-Free Zone, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
And the parochialism is most unbecoming. And if north Otago were shifted to the Otago Regional Council, wouldn't you still have Dunedin to complain about when council decisions didn't go your way?
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Cecelia,
Wow! Whangarei and Rotorua are very different climates from north China. But I see it grows natively across a wide swathe of southeast and east Asia. I had no idea. Clearly quite a versatile species, then.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Nora Leggs,
I learnt about toons only after I escaped Tianjin and got back to the relative civilisation of Beijing. 'Relative' because the school I was working at that first year back wasn't the best. I had to spend my first summer teaching up in Changping District Monday to Thursday, weekends in Haidian in the northwest of downtown Beijing. Changping I really didn't like, and still don't having driving through a bit more of it since then, but the campus up there offered me either a dorm room or a basic apartment to stay in Monday to Thursday. I took the apartment, and it turns out my neighbour was a really friendly bloke who worked in the admin office of my department who would regularly call me over and show me various bits of the local flora and fauna. He'd picked a few toon leaves on his way back from picking up his daughter from kindy and saw me and explained what these leaves were all about and showed me various examples of toons in the immediate vicinity from the tiniest saplings to quite mature trees.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Toon.
We've got lots of them or something closely related up here, called 香椿/xiāngchūn, Chinese toon, Toona sinensis. The xiāng means 'fragrant', chūn simply means 'Chinese toon'. The leaves, at least of saplings and younger trees, are edible and used as a herb - though I must admit to not liking the flavour and have no idea how they are cooked. The bark (椿白皮/chūnbáipí) is apparently also used in Chinese medicine, though I can't figure out what for. In spring I see some of my neighbours picking toon leaves from some of the rather young, short specimens in the garden downstairs.
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Hard News: Media3: The Maori Media Man, in reply to Kumara Republic,
And the film’s stars have spilt the beans saying they were duped.
This account hosted at Nei Gaiman's blog makes for disturbing reading.
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Hard News: Media3: The Maori Media Man, in reply to Russell Brown,
But the producer created a fake identity
And is a convicted fraudster with a history of creating fake identities. Apparently also a pornographer.
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Hard News: Media3: The Maori Media Man, in reply to Paul Campbell,
And I’m sure the film’s not representative of all or even most Copts,
Indeed. From what I've read it was made by a tiny community of Coptic extremists tied up with Evangelical extremists like that charming pastor in Florida who thought burning a Koran a good way to build bridges between religious communities.
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Wednesday morning, 8am. View from my classroom - it was a lot more spectacular than my phone will admit. Would've been even better if the students had bothered to show up....
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For all the accusations of John Armstrong fawning at the feet of whoever's in power, he seems to have come right this piece.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Hebe,
I was curious and so had a little poke around and found that elderberry, at least Sambucus williamsii, is used in traditional Chinese medicine as an analgesic (in Chinese, no more reliable (probably less so) than Wikipedia).
My medical Chinese, especially that of the TCM kind, is woefully inadequate, so I can't figure out what it's saying about diuretic properties or apparent use in treating diarrhoea, let alone the "little mouse" - presumably something that makes perfect sense as a metaphor for something we'd understand in different terms after a bit of study of TCM.
ETA: the first Chinese words I found for 'elderberry' came with prefices clearly place it in Europe or the Atlantic, but dropping the prefices got me the one TCM uses. Curious.
