This day, 2 April, 1999, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Ma Ke and Jiang Tao, the murderers who robbed and killed Zou Jingmeng, Member...
I need to cut back. We’ve overspent this month.
When I look back, I don’t know whether it’s the newly-printed poster board on my wall which I’ll point to as “peak-splurge”.
Maybe it will be the sailing sun-hat from the French sports shop in Shanghai. The family have teased me about the price tag on that one. I bought the poster despite the teasing. Profligacy.
Maybe it will be the tea I’m drinking these days; comfortably the most expensive I’ve bought with real money in ages. It was ¥170 for a bag,...
We’d bought quite a nice one, actually.
It had made sense because we were only the second people ever to have lived in that apartment. Everything was very modern and sleek in there, though it was also restrictively small.
We’d previously satisfied ourselves with cheap water dispensers, usually in the ghastly blue and white of those tracksuit high school uniforms (when will these trends end?).
This time, we’d plumped for something black and dark gold, something like real furniture. Tall, free-standing. Space for paper cups down there.
When we moved again, it came...
I wrote last month about glossy teas; teas with a polished appearance, mostly from Japan. I also mentioned a pea-green variety from Sichuan’s Emei mountain range called Bamboo Leaf Tea .
Now, let’s be honest. Sichuan is less famous for growing tea than it is for pandas, bamboo and spicy snacks. Were Sichuan and tea are ever connected in people’s minds, it is the tea houses and the tea-drinking culture that stand out rather than native varieties of leaf.
Possibly that is just how Sichuan people like it. Local tea...
This is the era of big data. There was more digital data created, stored and shared in the past 2 years than all of the digital data existing before that.
What used to be a computer thing is now a watch and fridge and spy-camera thing. Lots more ones and zeroes flying around.
Yes, but this 2-year rule has been true for far longer than 2 years. The “big data” term is 800 bytes, which has somehow survived that exponential data churn unharmed, used by humans for decades, most continually...
