EIGHT TREASURES RICE PUDDING

Tzipporah (Midianite Manna: http://www.midianitemanna.blogspot.com/)
has tagged me to carry on a meme with the following rules:

Each player lists eight things (facts or habits) about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those things are listed. At the end of the post the player tags eight people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read the post and pass the meme and tag onward.


All righty then. Do I boast? Do I confess odd things? Do I ego-trip? Do I startle you? Do I bore with platitudinous detail?
[Do I mention that I am a horrible attention-whore? No, I guess I had better not.]



It's all about me, is it?


Eight things you do not need to know about me:

1. I like smells. I'll cross the street to get close to hot tar and durian. I inhale deeply in elevators. I love mildew. Rotten apples. Cheese. A woman's hair. Burning rubber. Ink. Cardamom. Freshly scrubbed stainless steel. Fish.

2. I learned Cantonese (粵語) from gangster movies made in Hong Kong (香港). You can imagine what that says about my vocabulary and accent. But I have quite decent handwriting, including chuan-shu (篆書) and running script (行書), so I'm not entirely a Tsim-tung (尖東) thug.

3. I own over one hundred and twenty briar pipes. Of which about half are of excellent quality, and the remainder are oddities, curiosities, and bang-arounders. This, by the way, is not unusual for pipe-smokers. What is slightly unusual is that I have nearly eight-hundred tins of pipe-tobacco stashed in my apartment - this should last me for the next decade and a half.

4. I enjoy my job.

5. I have no fetishes.

6. Coconut milk (santen), lemon grass (serai), chilies (tjabai), galangal (lengkuas), kemiri nuts and fish-paste are essential ingredients. So is cooking sherry. Kluwek are not, strictly speaking, essential, but it is very good to have some around for rawon.

7. Dutch is a remarkable language for poetry. Sonnets in Dutch can be terrific, heroic verse is divine. English, on the other hand, is good for doggerel - and there are some very fine doggerel meisters in English, make no mistake. But the English language has only a handful of actual poets, and sheer bucket-loads of nauseatingly bad verse. Sorry. It's the truth.

8. I have memorized much Chinese verse (律詩, 絕句).
Predictably, I like Li Po (李白), Tu Fu (杜甫), and Wang Wei (王維). Zhang Ji's famous poem 'night mooring at maple bridge' (楓橋夜泊) was the first Chinese poem I memorized: "Yue luo wu ti, shuang man tian; Jiang feng yu huo dui shou mien; Gu Su sheng wai, han shan shi; Yeh pun chong shen dao ke chuen" (the moon is low and a crow caws, frost fills the sky; river bank maples and fishermen's flares meet the tired eyes; Outside of SuZhou - from Cold Mountain Temple, The Midnight bell's chime - reaches the traveller's boat). During the T'ang Dynasty (唐朝) this poem rhymed, but the language has changed since then. Zhang Ji (張繼) wrote it on his way back home after failing the metropolitan examinations. He was despondent. Little is known about him otherwise. This poem is what everyone remembers, however, as it is included in the classic collection 'Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang Dynasty (Tang Shi San Pai Shou: 唐詩三百首), which in the past many students committed to memory.

9. Astrology is bunkum.


Enough about me.
Let's talk about you.


I'm tagging these gentlepersons:
Habib ben-Achim Marwan (http://clochardtimes.blogspot.com/).
Knitter of Shiny Things (http://stillinthewoods.blogspot.com/).
Spiros (no blog, but add your eight to the comments).
Steg (http://boroparkpyro.blogspot.com/).
Treppenwitz (http://bogieworks.blogs.com/treppenwitz/).

Enough. Panch main parmesvar - God is with five.



By the way. You may have noticed that I do not adhere very well to rules. Please do not make any snide comments about that, or I will walk all over the grass, cross in the middle of the block, and smoke around children, cripples and the elderly. I mean it.