Category: Biology

  • Pain in the Wrist

    My earlier bout with tenosynovitis had cooled off several months, but had announced its return soon after my arrival in Wuhan.  After a month of tolerating it, I decided it was time to seek medical help. Secretly I hoped Chinese physicians might have some alternative approaches of coping with the malady — which I believe, […]

  • What’s for Dinner II

    [No prurient photos along with this posting] In College, my favorite professor was an anthropologist, Earl Count by name, lately deceased, who also held a divinity degree. One of his hobby-researches was into the practice of placentophagia. The dots Count connected were these: 1. the abrupt transition from the pregnant state to the post-partum state […]

  • Shock and Awe in Hangzhou

    [click on a photo to enlarge it] “Xixi Wetlands” is a laudable attempt to preserve some of the original marsh environment in northwest Hangzhou. That has been the direction-of-choice for Hangzhou urban expansion — you’ll recall my earlier note that the new Zhejiang University campus is built on a swamp. The Xixi effort seeks to […]

  • Racial Profiling

    [mouse click a photo to enlarge it] My efforts at racial profiling began when a Chinese friend, who like many Chinese still harbor a great grudge against the Japanese, not only on account of Japanese brutality during their aggression into China beginning in 1937, but because of the continuing Japanese denial and historical revisionism…. Anyway, […]

  • Of Mice and Matriarchs

    [mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] On my hotel room wall in Hanoi hung a print of mediocre artistic quality, but provocative content. Stretched out on the long horizontal axis was a bridal procession — I suppose in the Vietnamese tradition, but familiar to me as Chinese tradition. Ranks of musicians and well-wishers […]