<snob>No, I meant tea, not tea dust.</snob>

🤭

<snob>Where do you even get tea in the UK?!</snob>

😉

Born in Germany as a Canadian citizen and now resident in China.

Mine started fine.

Probably my bamboo scroll of 茶经 (The Classic of Tea). SO sprung that on me one day out of the blue. It’s been the centrepiece of my tea photo essays and of any fancy tea setups I have with guests ever since.

OK, this one is going to be tough to explain. I’ll start with pictures:

These are two variants of 陈年八仙果 (chén nián bā xiān guǒ or “Aged Eight Immortals Fruit”). Basically you hollow out a pomelo, fill it with a mixture of plum pulp, tangerine peel, assorted spices (including licorice), and salt. Then you dry it until it’s dense. You cut it up into those wedges you see above and … well … you eat it.

Or you make tea with it.

Or you chop it up finely and use it to flavour meat dishes.

But mostly you just eat it as a snack.

…

5:30 on workdays, anywhere between 7:30 to 11:00 on weekends.

I’m pretty sure that entire message was provided by degenerative “AI”. It just reeks of the format and language of an LLM chat bot.

Could people who have actual technical skills check something for me? Does this code even work?

The year is 1999. The tech scene, where I did most of my marketing work at the time, is collapsing in Ottawa. I’m getting tired of the disrespect I doubly get for a) not being a techie, and b) not being male. I decide to go for the money instead.

A company in Houston is hiring and I get headhunted. The salary hinted at is almost double what I’m making now, plus some very generous bonus and stock schemes. I get flown down to Houston, kept in a really nice hotel room for two days as I go through several interviews with different departments and managers. When I’m finished and on the flight back home, I have my pick of four jobs. Feels good, right? To be wanted that much?

Yeah, except that the final interview had already settled which I’d take: none.

Before that final interview I’d already had a few red flags:

1. Houston is a lovely city and far more cosmopolitan than I’d imagined I’d ever find in Texas, of all places. But … there’s still billboards left, right, and centre for churches, religious radio stations, etc. It may be surface cosmopolitan, but that general feel of fundamentalist Christianity is everywhere.
2. The salary is high but digging into the paperwork for the proffered health plan leads me to believe that if I have any kind of a major health problem or accident or the like I’m not going to be seeing the benefits of that for long.
3. As cosmopolitan as Houston itself looked, the company was whiter than white.

None of these was a showstopper. Hell, all three were just a mark in the “minus” column of my PMI¹ analysis and had not yet outweighed the “plus” column.

But that final job interview… Yeah.

I was talking to the final hiring manager (the pattern was in each department first a group interview with HR plus a few potential coworkers, and if I passed, directly with the hiring manager) and I noticed an intriguing sculpture on the shelf behind him. It was a smooth rock (a river-smoothed piece of granite, it looked like) and on it was mounted some pieces of shiny metal with weird dented-in spots that looked half-melted with the metal melting into weirdly-shaped blobs. So I asked about it. I couldn’t see how the metal was formed the way it was, melted so it sagged, broke through, and also pooled in the hole.

“Oh, that? That’s the platters of a hard drive that failed. I took it to the range and shot it with this.”

And he pulls out a revolver from his desk. Nothing special, just a silver .38 special revolver, like the kind cops used to carry. Loaded. He waved the handgun around in ways that would have my father (a retired CWO) leaping across to him and buttstroking him to unconsciousness for the sheer lack of trigger and barrel discipline. I can’t get across just how unsafe this guy was being. He was in an office full of people, he was waving around a loaded handgun that he’d taken from his office desk, paying no attention to if the barrel ever pointed at someone or not. I was too stunned to look, but it would not have surprised me to see that he’d placed his finger on the trigger too. This was just reckless.

And. Nobody. Else. Around. Me. Thought. This. Was. Unusual.

In the middle of a job interview, an interviewing manager thought it was OK to pull out a loaded handgun and wave it around. And nobody around him thought it was even slightly off.

That by itself would have been a hard “no” for accepting any kind of a job. I didn’t need the other red flags in the slightest. I had four offers in my pocket and my answer to all four was “sorry, I’ve decided I’m never setting foot on US soil ever again”. And I’ve stuck with it ever since.

¹ de Bono’s “Plus/Minus/Interesting” technique.

What stood out for me was this line:

— so it could be, whether the NYT understood it or not, that its “experts” were simply winking at the reality that it’s hard to build affordable gadgets in a country with robust labor rights.

Robust labour rights? An American is talking about “robust labor rights”!? If someone from the EU had written that I’d have gone “fair enough”. But against an American employer?

Let’s put it this way: I’ve worked in China for 25 years. I turned down a job in the USA shortly before moving here (about two years before). There’s a reason for this (and it wasn’t just the gun in the job interview).

“Duration” isn’t one of the “familiar first four dimensions”. That’s the point.

it starts with the familiar first four dimensions (length, width, depth, duration)

Duration?

It starts with that?

Then it starts with a complete and absolute failure to comprehend even the basics of relativity.

When (if) science discovers it, then I’ll think of multiple timelines. Until then it’s an entertaining fiction at best.

I think in terms of reality as can be seen, measured, observed, and inferred from that.

“Timelines” and “parallel dimensions” are not a part of any of that, so no, I don’t think of reality as different timelines. Those are (often very entertaining, I’ll admit) fictions.

I love this one!

Toss-up between autumn and spring.

Spring because that’s when the really good teas start showing up, when most of the flowers start showing (there’s nothing quite as beautiful as a plum tree filled with blossoms and icicles) and the days’ length starts to increase visibly in the race to the equinox.

Autumn because that’s when all the really good crops start hitting the markets, because the horribly humid heat of summer starts to fall, when the moon cakes start showing up (along with the nice delicate rice wines hitting the scene) and the colours start their final run toward their winter forms.

There are some places in the Chinese diaspora where leaving your chopsticks like that will get you soundly rebuked (or smacked if your parents catch you). That’s a superstition that’s taken very seriously in traditional Chinese circles.

Where’s the emoji of Chief pinching the bridge of his nose after 86 speaks when you need it?

Did you not read?