As most of you are aware Hash House Harriers is a running and drinking club (usually one, then the other) where a ‘hare’ runs ahead and marks a trail in chalk or flour for the ‘hounds’ to follow. This involves chalk arrows on the ground where possible and handfuls of flour dropped where chalk can’t be used. False trails, check-backs and other features make the whole exercise that bit more interesting. There are thousands of clubs around the world, no governing body, just people enjoying a similar activity. Lovely right?

Until some paranoid sees a trail being marked and calls it in to the authorities as an Anthrax attack. The authorities duly over react completely and Ikea lose an evening’s business. See here.

Now if that’s not crazy enough, they’re planning on pressing charges against the hares, for breach of the peace. See here. A spokesperson for the mayor saying…

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” and “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

Right, first of all “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious.” What? Dandruff? The bit that really gets me “You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” What kind of crazy paranoid place thinks terrorist before it thinks, children playing, student prank, treasure hunt or whatever? That’s paranoia in the face of all the facts as far as I’m concerned.

I seriously hope this community comes to it’s senses and realises that a group of people were out enjoying a bit of good, clean fun, someone misunderstood that, a whole army of people completely over-reacted but ultimately, nobody is to blame.

My actions setting a hash have also been misunderstood, I was drawing chalk marks along a trail at the top of hill in Hangzhou recently when I overheard a man tell a boy “因为他担心找不到回路“  roughly  “because he’s worried he won’t find the route back”!

If you’re in Hangzhou and are interested in joining this nefarious activity check out the Hangzhou Hash.
Thanks to “Bottom-Feeder” and the Taiping Hash for the links.

Ok, I’m not married but if was, I’m sure you’ll agree, this would be grounds for divorce…

D and I have now watched 5 series of 24 together, we’re completely addicted and have stayed up too late many times to squeeze in one more episode, one more episode before bed.

So it was on Monday, with some excitement, we went to the DVD shop and bought a season 6 box set and rushed home to start watching it, managing to squeeze in two episodes before bed. I might have gone for a third but D was falling asleep so it wouldn’t have been fair.

Tuesday is running club* so I was out all evening. Unbeknown to me D was at home gorging herself on 5 back to back episodes without me! She ‘fessed up this morning but showed very little remorse. I now have the dilemma of either skipping ahead to watch with her (grr) or hiding in the study so as not to see any spoilers until I’ve caught up (grr).
It’s an outrage I tell you, an outrage!

* As a running aside, the stats from my Nike+ (the ipod thingy) are now at the bottom of the sidebar on this blog so (until I next run) you can see the rather dismal statistics from my run last night.

D’s rellies are in town. Specifically Grandma, certainly one of my favourites, was invited and like all royalty, she travels with an entourage. So as I type there are two aunts, a cousin and a grandma in my spare room.

All is going well, we were at Banana Leaf earlier as this is foreign food that works with the rellies. Amusingly, Grandma appears to go everywhere, one assumes due to the heat and therefore only in summer, with a wet towel. Now wouldn’t Ford Prefect be proud.

So I woke up on Sunday morning and thought, I know, I’ll go into town, buy some clippers, do myself a nice, easy to maintain haircut. My theory was to get some ‘barbershop style’ clippers and use blade 4 all over so it ends up at, what, an inch long all over? Good plan.

I went to a big electronics shop and they didn’t really have any ‘barbershop style’ clippers but a very pleasant and helpful lady sold me a sort of electric razor with a guard attachment that looked like it would do the job quite nicely, if perhaps a little shorter than I’d originally planned.

Back at triviality-towers, D was away for the weekend which left me free to make bad decisions all on my own. Without any further ado I applied said clippers to the side of my head and off I went. It very quickly became apparent that the clippers were going to leave me with considerably less hair than I’d envisaged. To make matters worse after about 30 minutes of trying I was a patchy mess as the clippers struggled to cut through my hair, which by this point only in places, was longer than they were really designed to cope with. Then the battery ran out. Cue the kitchen scissors to hack of the worst of the length while the clippers recharge. The objective by this point has migrated from ‘do myself a nice hair cut’ to at least try and ‘make it the same length all over’. I never really achieved this.

The end result is certainly low maintenance but, to be honest, not really at all like I was hoping for. On the plus side, as D was kind enough to point out, at least my hair grows quickly as the tennis ball look isn’t really for me.

I might post a photo when I have one.

UPDATE: Ok, go on, you can have have a photo…

Fitz (Robbie Coltrane’s character in Cracker) as a role model. Discuss. [25 Marks]

My justification for this post is that at least two of you use this as your msn pic…

Lost Laowai Blog reports that Xinhua (Chinese state news agency) has used the x-ray of Homer Simpson’s head as the image to accompany a serious piece about new U.S. and European research into Multiple Sclerosis.

Are we to assume that the *coughs* journalists at Xinhua think that this is what western physiology is actually like or are they just employing more irreverent humour than we previously thought possible.

Oh no another running post, I hear you cry. Well my motives are quite selfish here…

I’ve had lax few weeks post Phucket and am in serious need of getting back with the programme. The only runs I’ve really done have been the Tuesday night runs with Even If It Rains and the runs (sort of) with the Hash House Harriers on Sunday.

I’ve decided I’m going to (here we go again) train for a full marathon but do it properly this time which means starting 3 weeks ago. Er. So what better way to motivate myself than a little bit of accountability? I have published through Google Docs my training plan which I drew up a couple of weeks ago. It shows planned runs through to the end of October and actual runs to-date (not very impressive)

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p1836143_6DnhTjuvaZ7bQg

Feel free to send me nasty emails if you don’t see regular updates.

The plan is draws heavily on what I’ve read on the excellent http://www.halhigdon.com/ if you’re looking for a training plan you’d be better off going there as mine is tweaked heavily to my life i.e. taking into account the fact that I run with EIIR on Tuesday evening and with the hash on Sunday afternoon and various other considerations.

I’ve not really decided which event I’m aiming for. October / November time there are a few to choose from in the region. I’m currently leaning towards doing my first full at Hangzhou which, while not announced yet I’m expecting to be in early November. If it works out like last year then there’ll be three weeks break before Shanghai where I might run a half and try and beat my personal best. Running my first full in Hangzhou would be nice as Hangzhou last year was my first half.

On on.

上个星期六我们开了party。很多人来到我们的家，因为是我朋友的生日也是我来到中国四周年纪念。我们准备了很多小吃跟很多鸡尾酒。一个朋友带了她的儿子，他很好玩儿。他推着我的鼻字说“你的鼻字很长，我帮你能小一点！”

Rough Translation:

Last Saturday we had a party. Lots of people came to our house because it was a friend’s birthday and my four years in China anniversary. We prepared a lot of snacks and cocktails. One friend also brought her son, he was great fun. While pushing on my nose he said to me “Your nose is very long, I’ll help you make it smaller!”

A few points about this site, so we’re all up to speed…

1. Chinese – I’m going to start posting bits and pieces in Chinese again. I estimate about half my readership reads Chinese at least as well as I do so it doesn’t seem like too silly and idea. This is part of my big push to learn Chinese properly so corrections / comments are welcome. I will do rough translations so no one misses out .
2. Photos – You may have noticed I’ve implemented a new photo gallery, the old photo gallery was something I wrote myself in php but it lacked some features (most importantly an admin interface) so I’ve switched to gallery2 as it just wasn’t worth the effort of improving my own. I do still use flickr as well. My intention is to put stuff that is of interest to a limited audience into my own photo gallery and stuff that may of wider interest into flickr. If you’re in China then at the moment you may find access to flickr’s photo server is blocked (why?) so you’ll need to install this firefox pluggin (tip of the hat to the thehumanaught) to see the photos.
3. Comments – Like most people I get a phenomenal number of spam comments and it’s quite hard to manage, as such you will have to provide an email address to post a comment and, if you’ve not posted before, you’ll have to wait for it to be moderated. This is not ideal but given the volume of spam comments this site gets it’s the only effective way to deal with it right now.