Category: Is that the way it is?

Taste of Latinum, Taste of GOLD [condensed soup edition]

  • May 22, 2023
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Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The easiest (or laziest) way of advertising in this corner of the globe is to operate on the basis that local consumers are real-world equivalents of Ferengi route and strongly insinuate that the product being hawked, whatever it may be, is associated with the rapid accumulation of vast wealth. For the first time, I’m seeing […]

They want cats to eat ze bugz too, it seems.

  • October 4, 2022
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All My Friends Are Insects HerpDerp Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter
S. and I stopped in a local pet supplies store this afternoon and some peculiar flavors of canned cat fodder caught my eye. Sandwiched in between some of the traditional fish-and-fowl-based products were rows of unusual combos, proudly labeled as having been made in Taiwan: CRICKET & CHICKEN, RAT MEAT & CHICKEN, MEALWORM & CHICKEN, […]

恭喜發財! And the cargo tricycles sit idle.

  • January 31, 2019
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Is that the way it is? Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter
恭喜發財! That phrase has a literal meaning but, in practice, it’s used as a verbal cue to either fork over one or more envelopes of banknotes or to pause for a moment to receive some envelopes of cash or to do both. There’s traditional visiting and eating involved too, mostly to ensure that family members […]

赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift + GOOP really has CHAINGED!

  • December 12, 2018
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift. In Traditional Chinese, it’s 贈品. The same reasoning that comes into play in trying to reason out the sorts of merchandise that might hypothetically be traded over interstellar distances (assuming that the buyers don’t already have Star-Trek-style replicators) applies when choosing whether to order something from Taobao or […]

Double rainbow at dawn

  • June 10, 2017
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Is that the way it is? Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
How long did it take you to spot the rainbow? The rainbow faded from one second to the next and, even at the moment I took the above photo, S. had to point it out to me. The fainter second rainbow, above and to the left of the first, only became apparent when I opened […]

Maybe it’s “Democracy dies in the edits”: Does the The Washington Post have memory holes?

  • May 4, 2017
Categories
Is that the way it is?
Tonight, I planned to write something complimentary about The Washington Post. WaPo published a brief but excellent piece of investigative reporting by Peter Whoriskey (@PeterWhoriskey) on the organic dairy industry, specifically scrutinizing a company called Aurora Organic Dairy: Why your ‘organic’ milk may not be organic. Update: As of Monday, May 8th, the image in […]

What it looks like when the wheels fall off; Or, Where’s the good-journalism bot?

  • May 1, 2017
Categories
Is that the way it is?
A defunct Cooper Mini on the edge of a village in Hong Kong’s New Territories. The software tools mentioned in These are the bots powering Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post efforts to build a modern digital newspaper: Feels Bot Asks you to express your feelings about a news topic by selecting from a pre-chosen list of […]