"If the Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me" - Jimmy Buffett, Song Title

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"In the past, for instance, English teachers in 10th grade were told how many words and which grammatical rules they had to teach their students and exactly what they should tell them about America. Now the curriculums are all about “competencies”, general skills that students are expected to master."

Replace 'English' with 'Chinese' and 'America' with 'Singapore and China' and you have a perfect description of the way Chinese is taught in Singapore.

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Foodline.com: Search and Reserve: Menu for Sally Ling's (page 1)

This doesn't seem to be the same Sally Ling's I patronised just outside New York, since this is in Massachusetts. Perhaps it's a branch, but they don't have the "No. 1 Dish in the World". Nonetheless, the menu is hilarious, with entries like:

- Sally Ling's Fillet of Beef Hunan - Decidedly recommendable
- *Ants on a Tree* - Minced pork (or chicken) sauteed and clung to cellophane (Ed: !!!) angel hair noodles. A farm dish that became favored by people all over China.
- Sliced Chicken Breasts with Artichoke Hearts and Snow Peapods - The texture is smooth, the presentation is noble.
- Take-out is not a good way to enjoy well prepared quality Chinese food. Most Chinese dishes, particularly the gourmet ones, are supposed served just-off-the-wok-hot. When it becomes cold, it loses its flavor. if you re-heat it, Its texture may change. Each well prepared dish should have its own distinguished taste. Don't mix dishes and make them all chop-suey dishes.
- East Meets West - Chinese refer to tomato as "foreign eggplant", when these two sauteed together it produces a unique taste and became very popular in China.

There's also this thing called "New England Chinese food, not available in Chinese restaurants elsewhere." Crab Rangoon falls into this category.

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My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky: Khmer Rouge, Faurisson, Milosevic - "Consider Chomsky's claim that: "In the early 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients..." On its face this is ludicrous. When the United States selects clients for cynical great power reasons, it selects strong clients--not ones whose unarmed men are rounded up and shot by the thousands. And Bosnian Muslims as a key to U.S. politico-military strategy in Europe? As Bismarck said more than a century ago, "There is nothing in the Balkans that is worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." It holds true today as well: the U.S. has no strategic or security interest in the Balkans that is worth the death of a single Carolinian fire-control technician. U.S. intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was "humanitarian" in origin and intention (even if we can argue about its effect). Only a nut-boy loon would argue otherwise."

25 Years - "The above picture is a police photo of Gerri Santoro, who died in 1964 at age 27 in a Connecticut motel room after a botched illegal abortion. To anyone with their priorities straight, this photo should be far more disturbing than any photo of scraps of post-abortion fetal tissue, of the type waved by anti-abortion protestors outside clinics. No fetus was ever the beloved sibling of fourteen brothers and sisters, as was Gerri Santoro. No fetus was ever the loving mother of two daughters, as was Gerri Santoro. No fetus ever endured the verbal and physical abuse of a spouse for the sake of the marriage, as did Gerri Santoro--and then left the marriage for the sake of the children, as did Gerri Santoro. No fetus ever put her life into grave peril to try to keep her husband from taking her children, as did Gerri Santoro, when she heard her estranged husband was coming to visit the girls-- when she panicked at what he might do when he found she was pregnant by another man. And no fetus was ever left to die alone in a motel room by the man that operated on her using borrowed medical implements and a textbook."

Palm oil has balanced fatty acids content - "As researchers have uncovered palm oil's health promoting qualities, it is being widely used to produce a range of healthy solid fats worldwide."
I think denying the harm that palm oil does to your health should be made a crime more serious than Holocaust denial. To say nothing of the harm it does to the environment.

Inuit Words for Snow - "The Great Inuit Vocabulary Hoax is anthropology's contribution to urban legends. It apparently started in 1911 when anthropologist Franz Boaz casually mentioned that the Inuit—he called them "Eskimos," using the derogatory term of a tribe to the south of them for eaters of raw meat—had four different words for snow. With each succeeding reference in textbooks and the popular press the number grew to sometimes as many as 400 words."

Sudan man forced to 'marry' goat - "Mr Alifi, Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, told the Juba Post newspaper that he heard a loud noise around midnight on 13 February and immediately rushed outside to find Mr Tombe with his goat. "When I asked him: 'What are you doing there?', he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up"."

'419' fraudsters busted in Dutch-US op - "Police have arrested 12 Nigerians in Amsterdam and Zaandam suspected of internet fraud in an operation that also involved the US Postal Service. Many of the fraudsters victims came from the US."
So that's where they're based...