I’m with you on this. I even switched my SNACKING away from sugary anything.

Well it’s not really tofu of course. But it’s given the name 鸭血豆腐 (duck blood bean curd) or just 血腐 (blood curd) because, well, it looks and has the vague texture of tofu. (Cheaper alternatives are made with pig or cow blood, but the real thing is duck blood.)

I’m somewhat sensitive to lactose. I can take small amounts, like, say, a small ice cream bar twice or thrice a week, but past that … things go very wrong.

Blood products taste fine to me (blood sausage, black pudding, blood “tofu”, etc.) but my stomach rebels when it hits.

I won’t touch raw flesh: not steak tartare, not raw fish in sushi, nothing. This is just me hating the taste and texture.

Oh, and rum. Love the taste. Does to me what blood does.

OK, that’s somewhat reassuring.

What’s your gut feel? Incompetence? Accident? Or attack?

Oh, I had someone try to be a Giordan in one school here in China. He was the incumbent foreign teacher and when three new foreign teachers were hired he tried to ingratiate himself with us (badly: more on that later) on the one side, offering to act as the conduit between management and the foreign teachers.

Unfortunately for Leslie (for that was his name), I had enough experience in tech firms and the social service to recognize his type. So while to his face I agreed, I opened my own conduit to the foreign affairs office as well. (Being able to speak the language somewhat helped.) And sure enough, the FA would say something reasonable and our wannabe “conduit” would transmit it with a twist that made it sound horrible and unjust and abusive and such, then he would reassure us that he would “straighten things out”. To the FA he would say the foreigners are very angry and very unreasonable, but he calmed us down and blah blah blah.

Only of course it didn’t work because the FA dean was talking to me, so I played back what he’d told us about the FA’s statement. So he wasn’t the conduit very quickly, and wasn’t really welcome in the FA’s office either.

The guy was a real piece of work. He claimed to be Australian. He had an American passport. He spoke with an American accent. He expressed American ideals. But he was Australian. And he kept that up until a couple of Aussies joined the crowd and one of them, after hearing enough of his “Australian” bullshit, tore a major strip out of him in front of all the other expats. After that he kept to himself.

Burning Witches is a classic metal band (inspired by the likes of Judas Priest) that is 100% women. Infected Rain is fronted by a woman as are Mysterain and Ad Infinitum. (I’ve got loads more but I read the responses first and sliced away the ones that were already mentioned like Unleash the Archers, etc.)

Yes, it does. Which leads me to wonder why you’re doing it.

I think he means those vinyl things people put over their cars in place of paint. Sometimes to change the colour for decoration and sometimes with things like a company logo or the like.

Are there no other messages showing for you?

This is why I laugh bitterly at the notion that Canada is somehow a “nice” society that “celebrates” diversity.

I’m sure it looks this way if you’re white. It doesn’t look this way if you’re “Asian” (between people who call us “their fetish” and people who do what I reported above), if you’re Native, if you’re Middle Eastern of any stripe, if you’re Indian, if you’re Somali, if you’re … You get the drift.

A person who bullies. In the workplace.

All the people who “accidentally” said things like “they (Chinese) just don’t value life like we do” within earshot of me kind of merge together in my memory as one enormous workplace bully.

The ones who would then pretend to spot me and wide-eyed add, “Oh, not you Dianne. You’re one of the good ones” form the second enormous workplace bully.

There’s a reason I moved here “for a year or two” … almost 25 years ago.

Ensemble Unicorn Codex Faenza

I like microwaved eggs for scrambling.

I thought Kissinger used violence to dismantle democracies, not TikTok?

I try to have a piece of fresh fruit (whatever’s seasonal: right now it’s mangoes) about an hour before I go to sleep.

Who said anything about GPS, though? It could easily be those “bluetooth beacons”, right?

Yes, let’s just ignore almost a century of research on perception and go with that, shall we?

Yes. That’s exactly what “elitism” means. 🙄