Posts by Chris Waugh
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Capture: The Colour Of Spring, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
but Autumn seems a much better ‘fit’ for the ‘Sully Season’
Well, alright then. I was actually saving these up for next southern autumn when I’ll actually be back on the civilised side of the equator, but never mind…
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Steve Parks,
Digressing a bit: I also think that the voting age should be lowered to 16, and that all (or most) prisoners should be able to vote.
Well that, except for the (or most) bit, I certainly agree with.
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Capture: The Colour Of Spring, in reply to krothville,
Also, how do you upload multiple photos per post?
Upload the first, when it's done, hover over your post, see the 'edit' button appear in the bottom right corner, click that, upload your second, rinse and repeat for up to 3 photos/post.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
奇异 sounds like Kiwi, apparently!
Not so much in Mandarin - qíyì, which for those not acquainted with pinyin sounds more like chee - ee than kiwi. It looks like it likely does sound like kiwi in Cantonese, though, and many a foreign loanword entered "Chinese"* through Hong Kong and therefore is written in a way that resembles the original when pronounced in Cantonese, but is completely opaque to uninformed Mandarin speakers.
*meaning the collective of Sinitic languages commonly thought of as a single language even though they're not mutually intelligible.
ETA: Interesting Tumblr find, one to be bookmarked. Thanks!
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Farmer Green,
Polled Holsteins
I did read something about Holsteins imported from NZ once a couple of years back - maybe in one of the links I posted earlier. But there's not much dairy farming out my in laws' way. Grapes and apples are big out there. There's a dairy "operation" of some kind a few km up the road, but it looks pretty miserable, courtyards of a size typical for a traditional northern Chinese farmhouse, but the house along the north side of the yard replaced with a brick shed. There's no space up there for NZ-style fields, and growing conflict with the need to protect Beijing's water resources, it being the northeast bank of what once was Beijing's second biggest reservoir, and what is now one of the few bodies of water upstream from Beijing with substandard water quality.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Greg Dawson,
Please tell me that is because a regular peach looks like a ‘moon’.
Yeah, no, sorry. I even had a flick through zdic, but couldn't find anything.
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And two more. Flags up for the upcoming National Day holiday; she was quite taken with the flag that had got tangled around its pole.
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Two from my daughter.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
“yang tao”
Well, that's interesting. Kiwifruit is usually either 猕猴桃/míhóutáo or 奇异果/qíyìguǒ in modern Chinese, but I check here, and among some older names is 阳桃/yángtáo - "sun peach". Thanks, Ian!
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Sacha,
