This is a test, a most egregious test

This is a test, a most egregious test, for yesterday's blog attempt produced a message about suspicious content.

I can produce suspicious content at warp speed but in the blog I was innocently havering on about the correct way to think about data structures.

The weather continues bitter cold, for these parts, for Hong Kong and Shenzen have been visited by the frost Dragon of Manchuria, Hielongjiang from the cold Black Dragon River.

I gotta send money to the Red Cross. I do not use credit cards any more, so will post from Hong Kong this weekend. I have earmarked a hundred Yankee dollars this month, 200 next.

I make that much simply by buying and holding Euro dollars which have shot up from 1.27 when I was in France to 1.36 today. Every time Bush opens his yap I make some money. Sort of sweetens the deal.

Hong Kong is a currency swapper's paradise although I lose money because the ordinary currency exchanges gotta make a living. I encounter Yuan with Mao's picture, genuine "bank notes" (issued by banks and not the government) in what are called, for laughs, dollars but which are a fraction of the Yankee dollar (at least for now), and Euros.

I did not notice any negative effects while in Paris for the very good reason that I bought all the Euros I'd need before going, and in Paris, the things I wanted to buy (budget hotel rooms, cafe noirs, Nicotine pastilles, and High Culture) are like Edward Lear's prawns as related by The Yonghi Bonghi Bo, "plentiful and cheap".

Like San Francisco, Paris has a lot of inexpensive (less than 100 euro) pensions. A cafe noir is a couple of Euros. All over the world Nicorette and nicotine replacement therapy is cheaper than America since the pharma rackets decided to soak the Yanks for what Emily Dickinson called "those little Anodynes".

And owing to State subsidies, High Culture (Kultur) is dirt cheap comparatively. Louvre cost me 8 Euros to get in, sure, but for this you DON'T get the Art Institute of Chicago, with one Poussin (St John, a good one) and all the Impressionists the Mellons could steal from starving artiste peintures.

You get the entire Canon up to 1845 and need only mosey over to the Orangerie (ok, for a few Euros more) for the rest of the story.

Everybody loves bashing the French. I think they are a great and noble race. Sure, the women don't shave their armpits, but neither do I. Sure, a French tank has seven gears, six in reverse and one forward in case the Wehrmacht invades Luxembourg and attacks from the rear, but my own military career is itself inglorious if not nonexistent, which it is (nonexistent).

And seriously...men who endured Dienbienphu while naming their redoubts after pretty ladies in Paris are men of honor.