In part 1 of my blog "From Boy to Man", there is a strong emphasis on self-love and self-respect. While self-love and self-respect are essential to the formation of a  great relationship with a woman, they are not enough. What else is needed? In a word - connection!

A young, 20 or so years old, Chinese male disembarked from the Laurel in Sydney in 1818, just over 200 years ago. The first or perhaps the second legal immigrant from the Middle Kingdom to Sydney. Surely many other itinerant Chinese had landed in the north west diving for beche-de-mer (trepang, sea-cucumber), and perhaps Zheng He had come there too, 400 years earlier. Others had been shanghaied or press ganged and later jumped ship, probably from the Pearl River region, whence Mai Shiying (aka Mak O'pang, Mak Saiying) came too. At some point shortly after arrival, He was assigned the name of John Shying, willy nilly, clearly resulting from the confusion over family names.  That name thenceforth appears on marriage and birth certificates. From John Shying Circa 1798 to John James 1823, John Joseph 1844, William John 1868, and Jack Reuben my grandfather the male chain continues, but Reuben had four daughters, so Narelle, mum, was the end of my branch of the Shying chain.

I was having a rather interesting text-chat last night with a female CLM member who is known to many of us here.

Depending on where you are in the world at the time I post this New Years Eve is approaching or may have slipped by in the last few hours. Either way we want to wish you all a very happy New Years Celebration and a fantastic year in 2020. May you all live in peace, enjoy good health & prosperity, enjoy a loving relationship with your family and either maintain a loving relationship with your current life partner or find such a relationship with a new life partner. 

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to meet the nicest person I have ever met in my life. She would have been in her 30s, never married, nor ever likely to be lucky enough to find a guy who would find her physically attractive, yet she was an awesome human being.

What causes flocks of birds to act like they do in the picture? So-called 'scientists' will tell you all sorts of things, but in reality, they have no idea.

When I was a kid.....and I mean primary school age....my Dad often chastised me for 'not respecting authority'.

What time is it, right now, at the centre of the North Pole?

Could someone who has been through the Chinese education explain to me how Xu Zhimo's poetry is taught and analysed and explained in the Chinese schooling system?  As part of my never-ending Chinese study I recently followed up on the brief poem By Chance 偶然 which I had liked so much,  and read others of Xu Zhimo, including the mandatory Second Farewell to Cambridge.  Xu Zhimo seems to be rated as a great modern Chinese poet, and is studied in junior or middle schools in China.  My reading of him reveals no strong reason for such a high rating, pleasant reading but not much more.  So why is he rated highly and spoon or force fed to Chinese students?

I thought I had lost all my photos from this 2015 or 2016 trip, since they showed up neither in OneDrive, nor on Flashdrives or any hard-disks.  Two of my computers used from 2010 through 2016 had expired or had replaced disks.  My old DSLR had gone the way of eBay, and current phone and camera memory has been uploaded to OneDrive and emptied. On this trip or trips I had been to Changsha, Zhangjiajie, Fenghuang, Zhugecun, Qiandao hu, Ningbo, Suzhou ZhaoZhuang... so the loss of the entire suite was to have been something of a disaster.