Month: May 2015

Ah… but these pills are natural

Take a look at a box of western medicine, .. for headaches for example and you can note 2 things straight off   It says…

1.)  Active ingredient: Paracetamol Chlorphenamine 500mg  or something like this,  &
2.) Take 2 pills every 12 hours

Now take a look at a Chinese box of medicine… apparently meant to cure the same ailment

  • Contains…. Something….  (perhaps deer antler or something)
  • Take 4 pills every 4 hours
  • The pills are some strange shade of green that you’ve never seen in your life

You will have people saying, Chinese, and foreigners alike..  “ah but it’s natural so it’s better!
All the ingredients can be found naturally in the world, so therefore its better”

Yeah…  sure.   And you don’t think western medicine was based on the same principle?
It’s about the active ingredient you morons!

For example Asprin’s active ingredient is salicylic acid found in 1763 in the bark of a willow tree.  Found… in… nature.

Now would it be logical to just eat the bark of a willow tree, or…  would it be better to take the active ingredient out… replicate it and then consume that?

Now on the rare occasion that these pills do actually work… (although something tells me that deer antler is not a good active ingredient),    it is because there is still an active ingredient that exists somewhere. 

And while it might not compare to the real medical equivalent in which the active ingredient has been solely replicated so that you don’t have any of the bad shit that might be detrimental to your health in the natural substance, It is enough to influence those hippy nut-jobs that  this alternative medicine is in fact working, and that because it doesn’t work quite as well as the ‘real medicine’ equivalent, and because it for some unknown reason has an off-green colour, it must undoubtedly be more natural…
which for some reason in their vacuous minds of theirs almost always translates to better.

[Death by quick bullet to the head, or death by vicious bear attack….concentrated mainly on the face and genital region. ….  Well the bear option… is more natural, therefore it must be better.]

So yes,   the active ingredient may still be there…. but the fact that you have to take so much of it means that it’s nowhere near efficient.

Sure I CoUld eat 3 platefuls of spinach, or… I could eat a steak and get the same amount of protein.

Check out Tim Minchins 10 minutes beat poem on this kind of subject called ‘Storm’

On youku here     (i’m sorry for the ads… its youku, and they’re dicks)

or for you lucky people on youtube here

Quote from Tim Minchin via his ‘Storm’ beat track:

“By definition, alternative medicine has either Not been proved to work… OR…. has been proved not to work….  Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proved to work??…
Medicine!”

Hot-cold medicine

You may get the feeling that China is backwards in thinking for a lot of things.

Not true.    Chinese people are just as intelligent as anyone else, and in modern times a lot of them don’t believe in the general shit that their culture once led them to believe.

However, because China has relatively recently joined the modern world, there exists a conflict between their traditional beliefs and their modern thought processes which ….this time luckily involves a bit of reasoning.

For instance I’ve met very intelligent people .. (well at least I presumed they were), that when offered a glass of cold water  have stated. “Oh no I can’t drink cold water at the moment”

And when asked,  “Why???”

“Oh because I have my period, and I can’t eat or drinking anything cold”

“Again…. Why??”

And then they turn to me… and they have this look as if it’s the first time that they’ve actually thought about it …..pause and then start on some illogical reasoning, that when the body is hot, if they have cold stuff, then it will make the blood solid, and make it difficult for the blood to flow… or  something.

Hmmm.

Have we got stuff we can learn from Chinese medicine?    Maybe…  yes.

But from these people?, incapable of thinking rationally by themselves for 2 minutes?…..  NO.

Cupping

Ah Chinese medicine..   Traditional… fine,
Cheap … sure,
historical …fantastic,
natural…  yep whatever.

But using it for actually trying to cure ailments…. Mmmmm?  Not the greatest idea in the world.

I imagine this post might get a few comments …..so let me just start out by saying:
This is not only a Chinese thing—Some western people are equally as stupid when it comes to understanding via rational thinking of logic how different kinds of techniques might actually help, or rather, not help   ailments.

For instance check out homeopathic medicine.  Apparently the less of the active ingredient it has in it …the better.

Fantastic!  That makes perfect sense!

So it can help you because the water has a long term memory of some onion juice (which is supposedly good for you?), but…luckily it has forgotten that there was once poo swimming around in it….that might just be bad for you.

Logic is not strong with these people…. But anyway.

Let’s get back to the Chinese stuff.

They have something here called ‘Cupping’    It basically involves putting a cup over a piece of skin, creating a vacuum inside the cup so that your skin rises up, and then when your skin goes purple…because all the blood as come to the surface, it is released.

cupping1

The justification is that this process draws the bad blood to the surface and then….makes you feel better.

Hmmmm.. this sounds similar to some 15th century something English medicine where they would drain the body….by cutting you, of ‘bad blood’, and then when you heal, it is the ‘bad blood’ that has gone away, and therefore no more disease.
Same process with putting leeches everywhere it was a way to take out the ‘bad blood’

Now most people in China , and the world, should be aware, …. That in medicine we’ve moved on from such primitive tactics.  .. because

1.) it was bullshit   &

2.) even in the cases where it is useful..  there are better techniques

For instance we’ve also moved on from deciding to cut off a leg, because it was painful.

The point on this cupping thing is that they often say… “Ah you see… if the skin bruises, it means that you’ve got something bad in your blood”  (or whatever these duck-anuses say)

No it doesn’t…    it bruises…, you turd-burger, because you’ve applied a vacuum for no fucking reason… it’s because YOU are damaging the skin!

Now I understand that some people get it done …because …’it looks cool’?? .. Wait.. is that right?

I’m not sure about that.  Sure.. you may have gained the respect from other equally stupid people, incapable of logical reasoning..   But I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.

Even if there was some credit to this process ….it hasn’t even gone to the extent of removing “the bad blood” .  It’s just brought it to the surface, and then I guess it sinks back down..
They’ve even failed in their own logic…  hmmmm

what a view…

Toilets in China have long been a big topic for foreigners. … Although nobody, especially women, want to have detailed conversations about toilet conditions, because the fact that in China there are just such big extremes …this actually comes up a lot, and in much more detail than anybody would care for.

It is slowly changing…. Hooray!

But…. Depending on where you go…well squat toilets are usually the norm.

We’re talking about PUBLIC toilets here.  As in most apartments they will have proper sit down ones, and hotels… at least from my experience, they all have this.. Hostels, especially in the country side…not guaranteed, but anyway…

Sometimes you will enter a public toilet, … there will be no lights, and just 3-4 squat toilets all in a row…  all luckily facing the wall, and sometimes they will have little dividers so that you can’t see poo coming out of the person next to you..   awwww how considerate.

However there are NO doors.  So as soon as you walk in… you can see everyone squatting down taking a shit, in all the glory that this such process has.   FANTASTIC!

This isn’t even the worst of it, sometimes (country-side mainly, near petrol stations) there might just be a big trough … like a trench, where you must straddle it- one foot on either side, squat down and do your business.  Once every 10 minutes or something some water might flush through in an attempt to…well you know.  But the point is, is that you’re either staring at some Chinese trucker guy face to face, smoking a cigarette and puffing it in your face, or… you’re staring at his butthole as he’s pushing one out.   …Luxury!!

Oh and no toilet paper.
As Karl Pilkington said…. “I thought this was the place where they made the Ipod … I think I got the wrong place, because this ain’t a place you need an ipod, have a toilet roll first”

kaer toiletkaer panda

Ok so as well, the situation given means that public bathrooms are not shy affairs.

What is a contradiction to all of this… and which defies logic is that Chinese girls actually act very shy when it comes to all kinds of private matters, like sex, going ‘niao niao’ (literally a children’s word for peeing) that they use, because apparently it sounds cute, and all of this kind of stuff.

As a friend put it..    “If you’re going to act all shy about this kind of stuff, fine, but how about you put some fucking doors on the toilets, instead of being perfectly fine showing your pussy to the world?!?”

what?

This particular one, I’m happy to say I have no pictures of.

Peeing or shitting in public.

Wow.  Yeah. That is a real thing that happens in China.

I don’t have pictures for this one, and if I did… it would be a pretty bad outlook for myself.

I once saw a grown woman at Beijing station just peeing in just outside the main corridor that leads inside.

Wow.

WTF?

I realise Chinese public toilets generally seem to be incredibly terrible.  But I think many of us have realised that Chinese people have got used to it.

So why this lady was just peeing in public …. I have no idea.

… perhaps these toilets were on a different level.

She didn’t even try to find a corner or something

Drainage

A very long time ago when I first ‘properly’ came to China, I was walking around the university and nearby  area to figure out points of reference and what-not.

I came across a lady that …I guess it was her job to drain the water out of one manhole, kind of drain thing, and then deposit wherever.  Except what she was actually doing was depositing the water back into another drain hole.  Ok… sure.

And as I went to go take a look , I realised these 2 drains were connected.   Hmmm well done！

Now a few things crossed my mind when I saw this.   1.) That is retarded.

2.) Poor lady.
The government has probably told her to do this job and so she just has to do it.. as part of this whole ‘communist’ thing they seem to have loosely going on.

3.) If there really was no point in what she was doing, why didn’t she just tell the gov. that she had done it…  because after all there is no point, and no body would know the difference.

But…. Whatever.  It clearly didn’t make sense to me

But I wondered a while later, perhaps… if she did actually sit back and do nothing then she would be bored out of her mind.   Perhaps this was something that she could get minimum wage for and fight off the boredom at the same time..

And by the process of it, intrigue some foreigners.  Hooray!

Broccoli curry impossibility

Asked the local restaurant laoban, which we go to all the time as it’s right next to our work, to put my favourite dishes together, curry chicken and broccoli.
So in 1 dish, not having to pay for a large broccoli dish for 3 people, and a large curry dish.
She looked at me like I was asking her to go to the moon or something.

“This is not possible” she said.   “Do you know how to cook broccoli?”, as if it was some magical knowledge that only the greatest chefs had mastered.
“Yeah I know, you put the broccoli in boiling water and wait”
She looked at another waitress, told her what I wanted, and she too looked at me, wide gaping eyes, like it was completely impossible.
And then started laughing together.
(Silly foreigner thinks he knows how to cook broccoli.)

I told her afterwards, “if I can do it, …a little bit of broccoli, then mix into the chicken…. Then I’m pretty sure you can do it”  (you know, especially as this is your chosen profession)
She wouldn’t have any of it.
In the end I got the damn chicken, and the broccoli for 3, and made a point of mixing it in whenever she walked past, muttering things to myself like
“oh this is so easy..”, “I could probably do this in the kitchen”…
Fucking retarted!

Mind controlling medicine

[Originally posted 30th November 2013]

Had a bit of a cold, – (in reality I get these cold from my students, of which I have 3.  Between these 3 there’s pretty much always one that either has a cold, or is getting over the cold.  This leads me to think that either I am constantly get colds, …which is probably true,
or that I’m in a state where I constantly have colds- and so even when I feel normal, I am in fact sick, but have just got used to it,
or….the much more sinister option, – these children have banded together, and their goal is to create the worlds strongest ‘Super cold’ , and I, I am their incubator for this disastrous virus!     I …am… Patient  Zero!!!  Muhahaha,–  although bad news for me of course.)

Anyway, I obviously got side-tracked there, had a bit of a cold, went to get a bit of medicine from the pharmacy, (The American tylnol medicine.  , Ty Nol, or however you say it….Some of the Chinese western style medicine does seem to work, but not all of them… as they all come in white boxes with masses of chinese writing on them, I can never remember which one is the one that works…and as others that tend to burn your stomach from time to time… anyway the point is that ty nol is a trusted brand that is easy to recognise and relatively easy to say),
Went in there, asked for Ty Nol, only to get…. “No”.
“errrmmm, ok, why?”   , I said.   “You need to show your ID to get that medicine”, … “Again….., Why?” (with slightly confused but mostly cynical eyes)
And then I got “shi shishis hxi shi hi” – of which I understood practically nothing, other than, the imagined thought that the government wanted to monitor who exactly bought the western branded western medicine, rather than the Chinese counterpart which had done so well over the years trying to meticulously copy the right ingredients and mixture.
‘Why buy the real thing when you can buy a very good copy?’, ‘ sure this AmErican brand has a reputation, and has consistent QuALity control… but we have…. We have…, its Chinese ok! We rule the country, you buy our stuff, to hell with America.  Sure they may have greatly helped us over the years…. Investment, technology… trade opportunities, aid, not to mention helping slightly in removing those pesky Japanese…. But we hate America …. And so you will buy our damn cold medicine!!’
‘And now that you InsiSt on buying your fancy AmeriCaN medicine, we will monitor the fuck out of you’
‘BOOM!’

“And you see children… for making a scene like that…..that’s how I got kicked out of China.“
Or is it that Homer Simpsons was right all along, and they’re putting mind controlling drugs in the flu medicine?

prisoner-simpsons