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. 

Canada: Lots and lots of snow, hockey, the second largest country in the world by landmass, an opportunity for many to improve their lives. These were the few things I knew about Canada before immigrating here.

One of my students today sent me some photos and youkus from China, to do with the upcoming National holiday and I am giving serious thought to travelling to China for the October celebrations.  Here in Sydney it will be almost Jacaranda time and there will be the wonderful purple jacarandas everywhere, but few people and no crowds.

THE EXPLANATION - In the photo above are 9 women who signed on to CLM as women from the Ukraine. Their online activity suggests that they really are all from the Ukraine. We’ve found no evidence to suggest that they aren’t. Nonetheless for the reasons that follow we now know them to be online dating scammers.

This is probably the shortest blog in the history of blogs.

Video link below, for those who have access to it. 3 minutes 41 seconds