June 2005

the hotel thermometer says 27C in the shade... there's hardly a cloud in the sky and Ulaanbaatar's broad largely treeless avenues are damn hot

the most unexpected thing about Ulaanbaatar is how well dressed everyone is - most of the women wear high heels, many of them narrow stillettos, which is an unnatural combination with Third World pavements. And the local supermarkets have a great range of Eastern European packaged foods.

"Ave! Vicipaedia cooperandi opus est ut creatur Libera Encyclopaedia. Omnes ad participandum invitati sunt."

"With a fair market value of around $50,000 for a new scroll, $9,000 for a used one, Judaism's sacred text is in some ways a perfect underground commodity."

I don't think my local notability in multiple small niches warrants a place in a general purpose encyclopedia

"A Dell spokesman notes that the cost of the components that make up a PC drop an average of half a percent a week."

"symbiotic relationships between fungi and algae may have evolved long before the colonization of land by land-based lichens and green plants"

"It is often difficult for French publishers to imagine just how hard it is for foreign fiction to get a hearing in the US and the UK"

"They don't understand this kind of warfare. They want to return to war as they envision it. That's not going to happen."

"a 46-year-old office worker who spent the lunar new year holiday driving 6,000km around China says that now is the best time to be a car owner, because the newly built intercity expressways are still so free of cars"

"Gandhi's oddness and celebrity have encouraged historians to underestimate the degree to which he was shaped by the Congress that he inherited"