You’re familiar with the rule by now. Do not carry your own liquids allowed into the airport departure lounge.  … except that I was drinking an awesome green tea I’d brought with me from China. And no one was asking me to surrender my cup. How long, I wondered, could I keep this up?  Right up to the boarding gate, it turns out.    Actually, it’s quite the comfort to have tea, especially green, in one’s hand while being herded through an airport. But why haven’t any of the other liquids in my...

Dressing up schoolwork as a toy. It’s such a hoary old cliché it might just work. I’m hoping to coax out some actual written words from my students by inviting them to play with the paper itself; dirty it up a little for display purposes. Harper Lee herself describes it as a “filthy piece of paper”, the note that two children try to post through the broken slats of the Boo Radley house, “Boo” being the nickname of the mysterious recluse in To Kill a Mockingbird.  If successfully coaxed, my students will...

Tea is supposed to be zero calories. So what is this shiny slick on the surface of yesterday’s drink? It’s like the blue-brown façades of blocks in China’s fourth tier. It’s like a rolled scarab carapace. It’s like the squeezed temple of a liquid crystal. Shake it and the metallic tectons quite collapse, broad shards collecting into one bronze rim-stain.  Perhaps this is why we are frequently warned not to drink tea that’s been left overnight. Well, if there is a swollen cigarette-butt floating on top, let me concur; that cup may...

Especially here in Asia, it’s common to hear how smoking is good for stress. Men, particularly, face stress in their lives which needs a remedy. Tobacco, though not intrinsically healthy, at least helps to assuage that greater health threat; stress. Or so the logic goes.   Well, smoking does greatly reduce stress, if you are a nicotine addict overdue a nicotine fix. If one of the significant sources of your stress is chemical withdrawal then, yes, a cigarette will greatly alleviate that.    But if you are a never-smoker who has...