Eye-catching

Having had a blog for 15 years, I now have a lot of data about what topics people incidentally land on. To be clear, I don't have many views for individual new posts (most posts will have no more than 10 views) but over my whole body of work I have 287 views per month. There is probably always a level of passive "stumbling" on my ramblings, either through coincidental matches of words in search terms or topics that I have touched on that have been, at a time, well searched. 4 of my over 750 posts have 400 or more views. What are these posts? And is it the actual topic, an eye-catching title or an inadvertently popular search term?

Without wanting to make the popular more popular, the number one post on my blog, ever, is a 2007 post called "Re-addiction". The title itself might have caused it to be found. I can only imagine that many of the over two thousand views were people who went to this post seeking help for a crushing compulsion for crack cocaine, and instead found the comments of a nerdy guy gushing about cracking cryptic crossword clues. It could have been that, but also plausibly because I included the name of a particular compiler, the late, great Kropotkin who did have a weekly crossword in the Herald. At various times it was hard to find online guidance about his clues. I know because I searched for a time at a time. His clues were particular enigmatic to the average cryptic fan and a very possible search term.

With only a third of Re-addiction's view count was 2011's “没有天然的对错，只有必然的因果”  which came in second place. With blogspot inaccessible in China, it's unlikely that the title itself was a reason for it (which was a line for motto of a Cantonese radio host, meaning "There is no inherent right and wrong, only the inevitable cause and effect."). What was the hook? I have written many posts about languages (specifically Cantonese) and language learning. I still don't know what made people stumble on this one. That being said, it was a special post for me. I had stumbled on something that made a breakthrough in my language learning.

Bizarrely, with over 600 views and in third place is an cheeky one liner, "A gentleman will walk but never run.".  It was just one line. Literally, the post was a title: "Saintly Notable Quotable" and that one liner which I said to a friend during a long walk after he dashed across the road. It is initially unfathomable what was found by Google in this post that helped so many people find it. I think that the only thing that would compel incidental people to find it is literally people trying to find the name of the song by searching a line from the lyrics of Englishman in New York by Sting, which is where the line "a gentleman will walk but never run" comes from.

The last one with over 400 views, Forum Rules, from 2009 is another unusual top ranking post. It was one that I wrote prior to going to China. I was trying to expose myself to more Chinese websites at the time and was looking at comments about the US Open where many of the respondents were writing clearly racists comments about Serena Williams. I found and translated the forum rules for the page, which were in line with most of the rules for Chinese sites. It is well known that a political post would be taken down because it endangers "social stability" but these clearly egregious comments remained without any response from the moderators. Were the majority of the accidental readers searching for "forum rules" or perhaps "Serena Williams" (the latter of which there'd be many websites and articles). I don't know.

The next four posts had 125 views, 56 views, 55 views and 52 views respectively, one of which was the one I wish were number one, Never trust a eunuch, which I wrote while I started reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese classic.

Bee with butterfly wings

In my bush-marauding youth, I cannot recall bee stings. Wasp stings, yes. Bee stings, no. I guess I was never the bare-footer that others were, but still I had plenty of spring and summer days in the thick of things where I'm certain the laws of probability should have made me a better target for the bane of bees. Fast forward to a few years back when I skipped onto the drive at my mother's place and felt an unusual discomfort on my toe. I casually swatted down on my foot thinking a prickle or some such must have been lodged, only to recognise a bee tangled in my sock. The stinger was on the outside of the sock but had gotten through to my skin. It wasn't terrible but certainly memorable. Fortunately removing the sock removed the stinger and in the end it was very mild.

Bringing the lens to recent times, two weeks ago in fact, my wife on another memorable day got stung for the first time in her life on a little suburban stroll when we stopped to take photos at a cricket oval. And now barely two weeks later, while at the Parnell Rose Gardens, a bee decided to check the underside of my watch and got lodged there. I felt the sting but saw the little creature before any instinctive flicking. I had to remove my watch first to remove the bee, which was rather hard to do without squashing it more. Once released, the bee feebly flew off to its certain death. With the watch off I asked my wife to try and remove the stinger. The difficulty level of this task was quite a lot higher due to the forest of hair on my arm, but after some clearing the sting was removed.

I was fascinated my the sensation. It wasn't that bad overall, but had occasional pulses of intensity. Then it more or less dissipated by the time I got to a chemist. Several hours later though the swelling moved from the site of the sting to the joint. Now any movement of my hand causes discomfort. 

I hope it goes by tomorrow because we're off to the Waitakeres!  

The demands of others

An extra special day. Three days from the end of the year. Each day packed with meetings and when not an intense series of performance appraisals, student meetings and activities. The morning of my appraisal with my line manager. The receptionist walks in:

"The big boss is sending me e-mails. He wants me to buy gift cards."

I hand her my credit card and head to my appraisal. It went well. It capped off another intense but successful year. I walk out and pick up my things to head off to another campus for a meeting but before I left my receptionist said:

"The big boss asked for $1000 worth of cards but your card would be over the limit." It being for the big boss, I diverted her to my line manager to use her credit card, and went out the door.

The meeting was another kick-in-the-butt to remind me that in my flustered lurch from one meeting to another I hadn't followed through on my action points, and I returned to my home campus with a sense of urgency to direct things to make sure things were happening. What I found was a surprise.

My receptionist was agitated: "The big boss asked for more gift cards! We don't have any petty cash now." This disturbed me - why was the big boss using the receptionist at my campus to buy cards and not his usual helpers. She told me that she'd sent our Student Support officer to buy more, but against her direction he hadn't taken the petty cash at all, but had decided on his own to buy with his own credit card because petty cash is pretty vital. I called him immediately and stopped him on the point of buying them and called our finance director.

"It's a scam. Ignore it," he said immediately. I hopped around the receptionist desk and looked at the e-mails to read the e-mail aloud while on the call.

"Hi Naomi, I'd really like to give some staffs a surprise..."

"That sounds like the big boss," he said. 

But unfortunately it was the first time I'd seen the e-mail and I knew straight away that the finance director's first instinct was correct. The e-mail address was obviously a fake. And then the next horrifying thing I read, not aloud because it hammered the point home:

"I want to give it t them now. Could you scratch the code off and take a photo and send it to me?"

Then I saw the stack of cards on the desk. All scratched. All obediently sent to the "Big Boss". Our company had been defrauded by a scam to the tune of $1000. 

It was unbelievable that the receptionist fell for it. Not only that, the Student Support officer that sits next to her almost used his own money, which would not have been recoverable, also falling for it. Ultimately, my and my line manager's naivety and lack of checking also added to it. It was her card and she decided to pay it back from her own money. 

It certainly changed the flavour of the week.  

Glass with butterfly wings

It would be curious to know to what measure the legends of the past, the superstitions, the miracles and magic were explainable by the curious power of randomness to conjure up the unlikely. When you think that the proverbial butterfly wings can churn up a hurricane, it might not cause much strain to believe that inadvertent acts can cause rather improbable outcomes that in turn from their sheer unlikeliness lead some to ponder whether there were mysterious forces at work. 

And thus was my weekend's intrigue. My wife and I were home and keen to take advantage of the apparent sunshine and blue skies by going on a loop walk to the village and back. I had my normal glasses but it was so sunny outside that I thought I'd head to the car to swap into my sunglasses. I opened the door, went in, put my normal glasses in the divider between the car seats where I kept my sunnies, shut and locked the car and left.

It was a pleasant day but it quickly turned eventful as Christy, after posing for a picture beside a lush cricket oval, received her first ever bee-sting. Fortunately there was a well stocked first-aid kit in the shed next to the oval; there were tweezers; they had a cream for the sting; and we left the area quickly for lunch. We went to a cute Italian restaurant I'd been meaning to go to and then we went home for a brief rest before we got in the car for some more distant errands. 

When we got in the car nothing seemed awry. We drove first to a shop to buy Metamucil. I went into the back seat to grab a shopping bag, because not many places have carry bags any more. I also grabbed an umbrella from the backseat because the weather had clouded over and it was starting to spit. Fortunately the rain was never heavy and I didn't use the umbrella in the end. We got to the shop. I put our purchases into the shopping bag, threw both the umbrella and the purchases into the back of the car and then it was off to the Chinese supermarket. The weather was fine, yet again, and we vege-shopped, picked up the dry-cleaning and then drove home. And it was when we got home that something weird was noticed. I went to switch my sunnies back to my normal glasses, but there were no glasses in the divider.

At first I didn't tell my wife. To be upfront, for all my apparently normal intelligence and cognitive functions, I can be very absent-minded. No person wants to hear the groans from others for yet another misplaced wallet, phone or set of keys. I wanted to check if I'd somehow managed to take them up to the flat but a casual check of the house, my pockets, the shopping bag with the Metamucil and then a not so casual look in the car through the divider, side pockets, glove compartment, boot, backseats and ground around the car failed to come up anything besides a lot of general rubbish. The car was pretty clean inside by the end! 

I went up to the flat and admitted to my wife that something had disappeared. She didn't groan. We generally pieced together the same sequence of events that led to the present time. We both knew the glasses had to be in the car. My wife ransacked the car for good measure with no outcome. At no point during the earlier drive had I changed to my normal glasses but perhaps, we thought, I somehow pocketed them and then dropped them? Had I even put them in the car in the first place? we pondered. Perhaps I had got the sunglasses out but pocketed the normal ones on the walk before the drive, only to remove them from my pocket and place them on the restaurant table, from where I left them. None of the actual physically possible scenarios were plausible. (A walk by of the restaurant confirmed that implausibility was not to be the case.) But there must have been some sequence of events that lead to the situation. My glasses had completely vanished from a locked place where they should have been. 

I slept that night without knowing where they were. We got up the next day planning to have our normal Sunday but also with a brief scout of the Metamucil shop and the Chinese supermarket. First I took my wife to the gym while I had coffee. While there, another grand fine day crumbled into messy rain. After her workout, we got back to the car but as we drove to Dominion Rd for lunch, the heavens were clearly breached and a Singaporean monsoon came down on Epsom. By the time we parked, the rain had stopped but I still decided to grab the umbrella just in  case and we went to a new noodle house ("A Noodle Less Ordinary"). There I leaned the umbrella against the wall and we had our noodles and left.

It was on the way to the car that, holding the umbrella horizontally, I felt through the synthetic material that there was something unusual inside the unopened umbrella.

I knew what it was immediately. 

It was ridiculous. 

How my glasses came to be in there was beyond me. We'd never opened the umbrella at any stage over the two days and it was never near the divider between the front seats. The umbrella had just lain on the back seat and was always been put back on the back seat when returned. If the glasses had been in the umbrella from the get-go, we'd taken the umbrella out twice and there were plenty of opportunities for it to fall out both on Saturday and Sunday, yet it appeared in the umbrella just then, safe and sound.

It was just like a magician pulling a rabbit from behind your ear, where it had been all along.

It was reminiscent of a time in our first year back. We went to the Butterfly Valley near Thames. It was a nice little excursion. Butterflies galore, as you'd imagine. We wanted to get a fridge magnet butterfly for Mum, so Christy chose and bought one and put it in her handbag. I saw her. Even the shop assistant saw her. We went straight to the car where Christy proceeded to open her bag to play with it but could not find it there at all. Mystified, we retraced our footsteps, even asked the shop assistant whether she recalled where we put the butterfly. (She recalled it had gone straight in the handbag.) We checked the floor. The path. And we both ransacked the car. 

But that butter had flown. 

It is a story we often tell. We never found a trace of the butterfly since then. If only I knew then what I know now and checked the umbrella.

Under watching eyes

I'm rather starting to miss running. I've been out of action now for a month and psychologically it's rather tough. I feel quite different: I don't have the energy I did. Probably because I'm still eating like a marathoner, I seem to be putting on weight. And I'm rather groggy in the morning. How was I getting up at 4:15am before? I pulled out of my final event of the year selling my entry. 

But there is an opportunity cost to running. During this rather hectic streak of running since the start of last year, I've barely read. My only break from running was my surgery but that was during a time I was hosting guests so I didn't read much. But after my marathon I began what has been a hot streak of reading!

It started with Wandering Earth which is a short story collection from Liu Cixin, the same author as The Three Body Problem trilogy. Some of the short stories have characters from the trilogy but perhaps in a parallel universe as the plots won't fit together. But they were clearly from the same universe. And it was clearly so attractive that we ordered the book in, not waiting for our trip to China. The title story became a movie which earned $700 million in China. Although Wandering Earth was not my favourite story from the collection, it was very memorable: Irregularities are detected in the Sun to show that it is near an event within that would trigger a massive expansion that would engulf the Earth. The first instinct is to get into spaceships and run but the nearest planets are all gassy and toxic. Solution: Put some massive boosters on the Earth, put on the brakes and fly it out of the Solar System and park it in the orbit of another star at the distance of your choosing. Just as he did in the trilogy he's thought about how it would actually happen with the physics of doing such a change. Getting out of orbit with the sun takes a lot of time and effort bringing the Earth first into an elliptical orbit that flies close to the Sun a few times before getting enough speed to exit. Overall, a fascinating adventure. 

It was probably wrong of me to start with Wandering Earth because two years ago in China I bought a pile of books, only one of which I'd read... And I'm just over a month from going back to China and possibly buying more books! But I got straight onto the job with another short story collection, Mr No Problem by Lao She. I'd read some of the authors of the Republic of China period (after the fall of the Qing Dynasty) during my university years, all translated. Lao She was one I'd never read but he was one of the big ones. He grew up in Beijing but lectured in London and Singapore before returning to China. Most of his writing was before the Chinese Revolution, and thus it was all rather free and sometimes frivolous. He wrote satire, social commentary, whimsy and tragedy. As the were short stories each story launched you from one state of mind to the next. I read half the stories before strategically leaving the rest for my flights and travel. The last story I read, The Crescent Moon was tough to read as it focussed one what could happen to widowed women in the China of that time. 

I interrupted that collection also to read books that I wouldn't be able to read in China. I have a forbidden biography of Mao Zedong (Mao: The Unknown Story) and another book that probably wouldn't be banned but could be problematic: Nothing to envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Even though it's an English language book, I received it from a colleague in its Chinese translation. It's a compelling read of the stories that the North Korean defectors have told and retold by author Barbara Demick. I'm quite happy with my pace of reading in that I've read over 100 pages in a week, which means I'll easily finish it and probably be able to at least start the other before I board a plane. 

It's nice to know that when I can't do one hobby I can even more out of my other hobbies. In the meantime, I hope that all this rest will do something to help my healing.