Occasional Tales

Never lie at a right angle. Today started strangely. I woke up some time after dawn and found that I turned myself 90° during the night so that my head was now pointing towards the window. Logical conclusion: it was the earthquake disrupting the earth's magnetic field. [ Hark at Mr Compass . –ed.] I got to school just before 9am, but with time for the delivery of the TV running out before I had to go to class, I got Tracy to phone Gome. I learnt that they don't start work until 9am, which meant a 9am delivery was never going to happen. Then while I was pretending to teach Class 13, there was a knock at the door. It was Tracy who needed to get the delivery receipt. Then during the next class I got a text message saying that the TV was in the gatehouse. I got it home and plugged everything in. Could I get the DVD player to run through it? No. I got some message saying "No sync detected", which means as much to me as the same message in Chinese. I went back to Gome with...

I think it's the handmaiden. I went back to Gome to see whether I could get any explanations about why the DVD player(s) aren't working with the new TV. I was informed that a worker would come here tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile, it'd appear from Chris's comment that Internet access is probably being limited from here. I'm not sure whether this is Nanny's local handmaiden (which seems likely) or an increase in local Internet traffic in the wake of the earthquake. There are no problems with national websites. I got straight on to China Daily, which is the reason why I'm back. The bottom side bar of the page about the earthquake has the following advertisement: Alibaba is the largest B2B marketplace in the world. Source model ship, wooden puzzle, one-piece toilet, RC hovercraft, photo album, prom dress, pocket bike, Vaginal Speculum, Samurai Sword, String Panty and PVC Pipe. Am I imagining things? Bugger. I've just had a text message to say that the IELTS ...

What's happened to the Net? Last night I noticed that the windows were rattling. I went out onto the balcony because I thought it might've been windy, but it was still. It wasn't until this morning when I saw a mail message from my father that I found that there'd been an earthquake in this part of the world. I saw that the epicentre was just south of Taiwan. My Internet experience this lunchtime has been abysmally bad. Not everything is inaccessible, but quite a lot is. I was surprised I was able to get onto blogspot because LJ and Spaces are both unavailable. The Guardian , which is normally reliable, is off the menu. So is ESWN . Danwei was all right, though. It seems that there's only partial access to international websites from China (just Fujian and perhaps Guangdong?) at the moment. I've been wondering whether this is a consequence of the quake being in such close proximity to Taiwan which has led to lots of people doing searches for "earthquake Ta...