There is, fortunately, nothing like a Full English Breakfast, like this one I had a few months ago in London:
Via reader EB, Times writer Cole Morton traveled around the country wondering why people still eat them:
Here, then, is proof that English bloodymindedness endures. Never mind anti-obesity campaigns, free fruit or the knowledge that the big plate of fatty crap is killing us, some people will just pile on more.
We’re addicted to salt and still eating for the hearty, manual labour of old, when most of our work now involves sitting down, says the social anthropologist Kaori O’Connor. The Full English was born at a time during the Victorian era when new forms of energy allowed us to move from two meals a day — mid-morning, and just before the sun went down — to beginning with an early cooked feast. This then became a symbolic meal.
“The full breakfast is the secular sacrament of Englishness,” says Dr O’Connor, author of The English Breakfast. “In the devout early Victorian period, the day would begin with morning prayers before breakfast, which was a civilised meal for a civilised country. In time, the prayers dropped away and breakfast became a sacrament. You ate it as an article of faith.”
The Breakfast Book by Georgina Hill, published in 1865, lists some “things most commonly served for family breakfast” in a country-house buffet. They include “anchovies, bloaters, brain cakes, caviare, cold tongue, devilled bones, dried sprats...” Surely only those who could afford feasts had this high ideal of breakfast.
“No. Everybody had it,” says O’Connor. “Breakfast was the meal that everybody began the day with, whatever their place in society and however meagre the portions.”
I write this eating a small bowl of Raisin Bran with 2% milk. But the next time I visit the U.K., I will have a Full English. Oh yes. I will. If only to remind myself why I only eat them there.
I'm back in the US, and mostly sure it's Monday evening. Beyond that I'm still recovering from my 14-hour flight yesterday. I'm also waiting for a new hard disk from Dell for my laptop, as the old one died. Fortunately, I back it up religiously.
While I get my creativity back, enjoy someone else's: WW2 As Seen On Facebook.
The Internet experience at Pudong International Airport differs markedly from the experience at our hotel. I've noticed a pattern, whereby unencrypted data, like The Daily Parker, seems to move about an order of magnitude faster than encrypted data, like the HTTPS connection I've got going with my mail server. The interesting part is that both sites are going through the same router back in Chicago. So, either the Web terminal I'm using has a particularly hard time with secure websites, or something is slowing down the mail packets. Hmmm...can't think what that might be...
Compounding my Internet woes, my laptop's hard drive corrupted its boot sector Saturday afternoon. I have no idea how this happened. The Bitlocker recovery key no longer works. I expect tomorrow I'm going to have to install a new hard drive and then install all my software again. This does not make me happy. On the other hand, I have two episodes of Lost to catch up on before Tuesday.
This, anyway, explains why I didn't post anything yesterday, and why the video clip of the world's fastest land vehicle will have to wait until later today. (Because of the International Date Line, even though I have a 13-hour overnight flight, I arrive at O'Hare 30 minutes after I leave Shanghai.)
Two hours until my flight home. Maybe my email will finish downloading by then?
You might see a news story like this:
Chicago would be headquarters to the largest airline in the world if United Airlines successfully consummates a deal with Continental Airlines.
Where to base the world headquarters of the merged entity is one of many potentially thorny "social" issues that have been resolved as the two airlines move rapidly toward a deal that could be completed as soon as next week, said people close to the situation.
The implications make my brain hurt. This would be tremendous for Chicago, at the expense of making O'Hare a fresh kind of hell for Conited (Uninental?) travelers. But United would gain a major hub in Houston to compete with American's in Dallas, and would solidify its Asia-Pacific lead even while essentially conceding the North Atlantic to oneworld. (For the record, I will continue to fly American regardless. The article mentions that US Airways, twice to the altar but never wed with United, may jump into American's arms instead.)
Then there was this, via Sullivan, which has to be a first in American history, in Philadelphia yet:
Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.
"I outed him as a straight person," Josephs said during a fund-raiser at the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant, as some in the audience gasped or laughed, "and now he goes around telling people, quote, 'I swing both ways.' That's quite a respectful way to talk about sexuality. This guy's a gem."
Kravitz, 29, said that he is sexually attracted to both men and women and called Josephs' comments offensive.
"That kind of taunting is going to make it more difficult for closeted members of the LGBT community to be comfortable with themselves," Kravitz said. "It's damaging."
Add to all this the increasing likelihood (though still well below 50%) that Nick Clegg could become Britain's prime minister in two weeks, and I think it will be a fretfully long night. (In a good way. If I were a UK citizen, I'd vote Lib-Dem this time. Seriously.)
One of my teammates has Extra Special Super-Duper status with Marriott Hotels, giving him access to the ESSD Lounge atop the building. Two flights up from that the hotel has an observation deck. I have a camera. The result:
I should mention the reason we're on the 59th floor: we've got a paper due tomorrow afternoon. So, the last night of the residency, we're surrounding ourselves with top-floor views, free booze, and Foundations of Strategy binders. Yes, we're that exciting.
Given the option of touring a corporate office building or going to a culturally-significant place to run around and talk to real people, of course I would put on a tie and head straight for the PowerPoint deck.
Right. I'm actually 1-for-4 with corporate tours now, the one being Indira Gandhi Airport. That tour was cool.
Today's cultural tour took us to Zhouzhuang, a lake village about 72 km west of Shànghăi. Before I run to a lecture on the financial crisis, here are two photos from the place; more when I get another free moment, possibly Saturday:
Another:
This is the point in the residency when I see how much work I have to do by Saturday afternoon and wonder if I should have taken the bar exam instead.
And as much as I love Chinese and Indian food, I'm ready for a Whole Foods salad about now.
Before resuming my Strategy reading, I'd like to draw the reader's attention to this front-page story in the Shanghai Daily News:
Dense fog affected Shanghai yesterday, blocking dozens of ships and ferry boats and delaying at least 150 flights.
At least 400 ships changed their sailing schedules and the 180 commuter ferries for Chongming Island and on the Huangpu River in the city's suburban areas stopped running in the morning, said the Shanghai Maritime Safety Administration.
Other front-page stories included a test run at the Expo site and the announcement of an official day of mourning tomorrow in remembrance of the Qinghai earthquake victims.
I contrast this with the front page of the New York Times, which included stories about the $3.6bn Goldman Sachs bonus payments, the mislaid iPod prototype, and back in Chicago, the shocking, didn't-see-that-one-coming, whocodanode news that Rahm Emanuel wants to be mayor.
It's a slow news day everywhere, but somehow, the Shanghai paper just didn't feel like a paper. More to think about; possibly a cultural disconnect.
I mean, literally. Sunday afternoon:
This morning:
Shanghai has been hazy since we arrived, so some of the fog is man-made. It isn't approaching the level of London in December 1952, but it isn't exactly the fresh spring fog of an Appalachian valley, either. (I'll have more to say about China's economic development in a bit.)
Due to an unexpected attrition of Flip cameras[1], several teams (including mine) set off on the Shanghai Culture Dash without them. This turned out to be liberating: between the six of us, we had four video-capable cameras, so we got more than 80 minutes of video. I'm especially pleased that we got two 10-minute interviews with multiple cameras. That will make the final product a lot more watchable—and audible, I think.
We actually dashed over much of the same ground I explored Thursday and Friday, including the Bund, the Old Town, and Nanjiang Road. This time, in Old Town, we went through Yuyuan Gardens:
This, I think, sums up Shanghai:
(When I get home, I'll try to find a similar vista in Old Town, Chicago; I'm sure one exists.)
[1] Of 20, somehow only 12 got turned in to the program. Three people admitted forgetting them at home. That leaves 5 unaccounted for. Oops.
Really, it's the food. We're all going to double our waist sizes here. This afternoon they took us on a teambuilding exercise in which we made lemon chicken and pork fried rice. Much fun, many calories. Our team won best preparation but, owing to a lack of salt (we think), only came in second overall. Our presentation:
One of my teammates copied down on his iPhone the entire procedure as the chef demonstrated it. Once he's able to send me the note, I'll repost it. It involved only one ingredient whose name the chef's translator couldn't translate, that seemed to be a lemony-orangy powder. Without the powder, you can make fried chicken with lemon slices, which is not lemon chicken. I'd bet there's a Chinese grocery somewhere in Chicago that can hook me up with the secret lemon powder. Otherwise, with a commercial stove and a wok the size of an airplane engine, it's a pretty easy recipe.