Bobby Greg's Bistro

So, on Tuesday and Thursday nights, a friend of mine has her cook come over to my place and make supper for me. My friend had felt sorry for me when I told her about how I was eating a diet of junk food, food from street vendors, or perhaps just not eating.

Well, here is a photo of tonight's meal:



Eggs and onions, potatoes with some sort of meat (and a lot of fat that I dropped on the floor to an anxiously awaiting Leo.... sitting and staring, staring, staring at me... an occasional lick of the lips but otherwise focused on my chopsticks as they moved from plate to mouth to plate to mouth to bowl and back again, yearning for me to give him a piece of food willingly or, at least, to accidentally drop on the floor where using his lightning-fast speed... relative, of course, since he's a Shit Zhu... yeah, my dog, my spelling... he could chomp it down. An interesting note, or perhaps not... dogs in China are decidedly omnivorous... stuff that most red-blooded American dogs would just walk over is chomped down in the blink of an eye).

In any event, also captured in this picture is a lesson for all those foreigners out there on how not to bring chopsticks out to a date, or, perhaps worse, to their parents.

Super Bowl Monday

Here's a pic from Pyro Pizza, where I spent the morning of Super Bowl Monday:

Do you want some cheese with that eggplant?

Ah, yes, welcome to the world of phonetically approximate characters which is how many foreign words make it into the Chinese language. Take, for example, cheese.

Not as in the cheese that one would eat, but the cheese which one is asked to say when having a picture taken.

In Chinese, the approximate sounding characters are 茄子 or qié​zi​, which means eggplant.


I just don't see how the mental image that one associates with words can translate, though.

I mean, how can you possibly correlate this:

to this:


For more fun with cheese, umh, eggplant, see this link.

Morning Bed

Here's a picture of my bed soon after I got up this morning:



For those of you unfamiliar with my family, that's Clyde on the pillow and Leo taking-up the passenger side of the bed. This is pretty much how it is every morning.

The night starts with me getting into bed (I sleep close to the edge) and staking-out my space. Clyde then jumps up, and claims as much of the pillow as he can. Leo pounces onto the bed, and either tries to pin me down as he licks my face or attacks my hand. He will then either slip under the covers or twirl around on top of them and collapse beside me. During the night, they often change places, with Leo taking over the pillow, and Clyde lying next to me.

Bonanza

Pernell Roberts, the last surviving Cartwright, died this week at the age of 81. I have fond memories of watching him in both Bonanza and Trapper John, M.D., both of which I watched during their original airings.

I was living in New York City when Lorne Greene passed away in 1987. I remember a cover of The Village Voice with Greene's face on it after he passed, extolling the virtues of this great man. I'm getting sad right now as I think about...

Scott McNealy's first child's name is Maverick. I remember something that he sent out to a Sun internal email list just before the birth of his third child asking for suggestions. He had talked about his first son, how is second was big, and that he wanted to keep the Western theme going. To me, it was a logical choice... Hoss. (His son is named Colt.)

I met Scott about half a dozen times during my career at Sun. He was always extremely approachable. I've written emails to him probably about the same amount of times. I will say this... there was never a time that he didn't respond to something I sent to him. And, well, I'm just a worker bee.

In an email he sent to us a couple of days ago, he had this sentence:

          I am a husband, father of four, and a builder and leader of people
          who want to make a difference.

I can say that working for Sun and under his leadership these almost 15 years (I did a year as a contractor before that and a college internship at Sun preceding that as well), has been an honor and a privileged.

I think I'll stop right now since I'm crying and I've got a midnight meeting to call into in three minutes. :)

Young Man

So, on the way into the gym today, I stopped to take a look at what was happening in the cardio room. I mean, just in case a class looked interesting and I wanted perhaps to join it later (like, you know, there wasn't anything else involved).

In any event, it was a cardio kick-boxing class of men and women working out to the beat of, get this, YMCA. Yeah, folks, reconcile that with the showdown hoopla y'all are getting in the news right now.

And, in case folks need a refresher, here it is:

Wudaokou Hermit

I am, for the most part, a Wudaokou Hermit. I live, work, workout, and play in this area. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of how I lived in Silicon Valley... I had a comfort zone ranging from Santa Clara up to Menlo Park, and would seldom stray from it... and, don't even think about getting me across the Dumbarton or San Mateo Bridges.

Part of my isolation here had to do with transportation. Taking taxis and buses in Beijing isn't pleasant. And, since I refuse to own a car, the only other option left was taking the subway, which didn't connect me to a lot of places... until recently, that is. (If you're not familiar with the changes to the metro system over the past few years, or with the changes which are planned to occur over the next five years, click here for a map.)

In any event, yesterday I hopped the 13 to the 10, exited at the Tuanjiehu station, and met a friend for lunch at The Bookworm. It is a combination of a bar, restaurant, library, and an internet cafe... I must say that I'd never seen a full bar in a bookstore before. :)

I had a three-course lunch which was great.

Here are some pictures:







And, finally:



I very much enjoyed the environment and food, and plan to go there again.

Jack Soo

Every once and awhile, I think about Jack Soo. I watched Barney Miller when it was first broadcast (1975-1982), and remember quite vividly Jack Soo's character of Detective Nick Yemana.

I also remember the episode which the cast did to commemorate his life... coming out of character to honor the man and give some background into his life. (I would also contrast to the farcical way that Hill Street Blues later dealt with the death of Michael Conrad.)



If you're not familiar with Jack Soo, here's a good introduction:

    http://www.hokubei.com/en/news/2009/02/Affectionate-Look-Back-Jack

and:


Now I gotta see if I can find You Don’t Know Jack online somewhere.

Notes about the trip

A few notes about the trip:

• I was able to actually meet many of the "virtual" friends I've made over the last (almost) 15 years at Sun.
• Made a number of new (real) ones.
• Helped some people travel vicariously via my blog and pictures.
  
• Took a number of photographs of which I'm proud, and began to scratch the surface of what my Nikon D300 camera body can do.
• Affirmed that the Nikon 14 mm / F2.8 lens I originally bought for my North Korea trip was a great investment... what a wonderful lens.
  
• One of my photos was featured on the pragueee blog.
• The kind folks at the Sheraton Paris Airport Hotel added a link to my pictures of the hotel on their facebook page.
• Started blogging with regularity (yeah, let's see if that continues)

btw, once I returned home, there were a couple of care packages consisting of:

• Nokia N900 cellphone
• Belkin Wired Ethernet Networking kit
• Pen/pencil set from Claret Wood Designs (I was their first customer years ago)... I do so enjoy fine writing instruments

Perhaps I'll discuss these more in later posts.

Home again, home again, juiggity-jig

Well, I arrived home safe and sound yesterday afternoon.

Here are some observations about trip back which reminded me that I wasn't in the EU no more:

On the airplane

• The gentleman across the aisle from me in coughing-up stuff (into a tissue and then placing that into a flight-sickness bag... at least, that's where I hope he put it).
• The same gentleman, well, gyrating his posterior very close to me as went through exercises in the aisle.
• Another gentleman a few seats up placing his hands on the seatbacks of people he didn't know to stabilize himself as he frenetically shook his legs (I also thought this was some sort of exercise).
• Being asked by the stewardess if I wanted an omelet or noodles for breakfast.
• The Founding of a Republic being shown as the main in-flight entertainment.
  
• This followed by a somewhat improbable recounting of the 2008 Chengdu earthquake. Some examples:
  - General, there has been an earthquake in Chengdu.
  Mobilize all the military! We must do all we can to save the people!
  - Comrade, look, the PLA! The PLA is coming to save us!
  Close-up of the woman with tears streaming down her face
  
  Yeah, I know, at least it was better than what was shown on my flight to North Korea.
  
  
  
  

In the airport

• Most of the staff wearing masks
• None of them wearing side-arms (compare this to France, where there were even soldiers patrolling with machine guns)
• Being in a well-planned and easy to navigate terminal (again, compare this to Paris and the Charles de Gaulle Airport).
  
• A few foreigners asking "Hong Kong is an international flight?" after getting in the wrong line to clear immigration.

Back in Beijing

• Traffic rules becoming optional... especially to pedestrians (okay, well, I was one).
• The slow and, umh, awkward way in which people drive (compare to the lunatics jetting around Paris).
  
• People spitting with reckless abandon (I will plead the fifth on this).
• The number of buildings that were coming down, came down, or started to be built up in the roughly three weeks that I was gone (compare this to Prague).
• The large amount of people wearing masks.
• facebook, blogger, and other such websites timing-out unless I used a workaround.
  
• And, finally, the thick film of dust that covered everything in my apartment... even though my double-pane windows have been closed tightly during the trip.
  

One kinda surreal note... as I turned the corner onto the road leading to my apartment, there was a man standing there playing the saxophone. Not David Sanborn, and maybe not even presidential, but certainly not awful.