[tibet] one small piece of the chinese puzzle

There are some bloggers one must respect.

While people like myself make references to matters of importance and even offer some detail in passing, it takes someone like Sackerson and his comments on China and Tibet to bring it home and make one determined to run a better post on the matter.

Here is some of what Sackers said:

Tibet is important because of timber, minerals, extra living space for Chinese - and it houses up to a third of China's nuclear arsenal. A major interest is water, because Western China is very dry; among other plans, one is a hydroelectric plant exploiting the Brahmaputra River, which further down flows through Bangladesh and ultimately joins the Ganges.

The Chinese claim it will have twice the output of the Three Gorges Dam. "Work is tentatively scheduled to begin in 2009 but has been described as a 'declaration of war' against India and Bangladesh. One of Tibet's most sacred lakes, Yamdrok Tso, has already been mined, tunnelled and used for hydroelectric development."

My own angle is the fixation of the Chinese with the Silk Road [esp. the Karakorum Highway] so this week I'm going to try to draw all these threads together in the light of the new material on Tibet and try to cobble together a halfway decent post.

[male pattern baldness] ten legends tall or true

Click pic for video of Michael Parkinson interviewing Patrick Stewart

The legends


1* "You inherit baldness from your mother's father."

2* "Intellectual activity or psychological problems can cause baldness."

3* "One's ethnicity can increase the chances of going bald."

4* "Baldness can be caused by emotional stress, sexual frustration etc."

5* "Emotional stress has been shown to accelerate baldness in genetically susceptible individuals."

6* "Bald men are more 'virile' or sexually active than others."

7* "Frequent ejaculation causes baldness."

8* "Standing on one's head alleviates baldness."

9* "Tight hats cause baldness."


To these I'll just add one of my own:


10* "Acute hair loss has been known to cause baldness."

The effect on the female is an interesting study. Certainly the female who judges by Adonis standards [the vast majority, despite the denials] will be turned away by a receding hairline. But to turn this round, perhaps baldness attracts a better class of female.

One who sees it as part of the whole package.

Who knows?

We can only hope.

[morning sun] head on the pillow

And as she sleeps alone at night,

all of her dreams

shall come to light.


Much mirth and warmth,

an faultless love.

Mornin' sun awakens

her slumber.


And yet this situation still has hope and is preferable to this:


After the many years of furtive smiles and effortless, meandering conversation.

Oblivious, as he always has been
to the way I wore my hair
and the late-night messages on Facebook.

Oblivious, because despite our friendship he never saw me—

he has her. He no longer needs a friend.

If a prayer can put a notion into a man's head, it may be that this can be turned around.

[thought for the day] monday evening

Firth of Forth Bridge perhaps

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

[Conan Doyle]

[eyesight] in and out of focus

The old eyes are getting weary and out of focus from too much blogging - at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it - why I seem to be going blind at the computer.

If I didn't know the blogger in question better, I'd be concerned by the way the 2nd and 3rd letters in her label:

FLICKR

... keep tending to merge.

By the way, Scottish readers will have noted the significance of the time of this post, no doubt.

[truth] endangered species in writing

Don't know what all the fuss is about, tell the truth:

Author Thomas Kohnstamm said he had accepted free services, contravening company policy, and did not even visit one of the countries he wrote about. Lonely Planet says it has reviewed the books that Mr Kohnstamm contributed to but has so far found no inaccuracies. It also denied that the author's methods were common in travel writing.

Big deal. Nige, at Bryan's adds:

A recent example was H.R.F.Keating, whose Insepctor Ghote novels were widely praised for their vivid evocation of life in Bombay - even though he'd been writing them for ten years before he set foot in India. There must be many more such examples... Anyone?

Well yes, Nige. Astute readers wil have noticed I'm blogging from Athek in Western Gobi and that I'm an Eastern Potentate.

Confession time.

Actually I'm Jimmy Hughson from Scunthorpe, married with eight kids, shiftworker at the steelworks and I just wanted a little fantasy in my life. Is that too much to ask? The boss's daughter sneaks me water, every time her daddy's down the line and I get to use the office computer to blog from. Shhhh - don't tell the wife. The company and the daughter, you see - they're both gonna be all mine.

There - now I've confessed.

This talk of exotic girls in Russia and cloak and dagger government work is pure Walter Mitty. Nor am I a sportscaster. And the rumour that I'm descended to the eleventh generation from Sir Joseph Banks is pure eyewash - I have no botanic pretentions whatsoever although I do have the Banks nose. Anyway, that was on my mother's side.

Nor was my grandfather Henry Higham, Cobb & Co. rider from Blackwood, nor did my family hale from County Cork or even Lancashire. We're white rose anyway, from Keighley and you can put me to the test on this - I pronounce it "Keith-ley". Nor did we move to Love Lane, Bingley and I never wandered down and played by the Five Rise Locks, nor once went courting by Beckfoot Bridge nor do I have family in Trinity, Jersey.

Now we've got that straight, I'd just like to say I'm a veritable saint compared to Jason Blair:

Every newspaper, like every bank and every police department, trusts its employees to uphold central principles, and the inquiry found that Mr. Blair repeatedly violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth. His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer -- which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts -- as well as round-the-clock access to databases of news articles from which he stole.

So that excuses me completely.