This and that.

I wonder if media reflects the character of the population or shapes it. In Taiwan, the media is totally insular and so are the people. Chicken and egg.

I'm revisiting my roots.

Laurel on Fox, now that would be amusing. I can assure you of this, with total certainty, if Fox were to offer her a job for $1,000,000 a year she would laugh at them, offer up a polite but cutting rebuttal and walk away without a second thought. If there is one thing I did teach her it is that stuff ( with the exception of really good bikes) does not mean happiness and that money is not the important thing for happiness in life.

Your idiot roots. How do people get into running. It is total idiocy. When I was in school, my housemaster was a running fanatic and he made us run cross country after school twice a week in all weather. Sometimes I didn't have a square inch of me that wasn't covered in mud. That guy was an idiot too.

Oversimplified. At CNN, to use your example, you have reporters bobbing around chasing whatever all the other reporters are chasing, on-air talking heads trying to kill airtime, and producers/executives trying to boost ratings. All the parts are not necessarily pulling in the same direction.

Or egg and chicken?
Speaking of China I heard somewhere they consider the feet of chicken a delicacy, and furthermore that as we Americans do not share in this gastronomic craving, that a very big business has developed in the shipping of our chicken feet to China. Amazing how the world works.

Running in the mud is dumb, like cycling in mud or on gravel.

What about ice and snow?

I hate feet of all kinds. They seem to like chicken feet here. They even nibble on duck feet in cinemas.

All of the above.

I was a distance runner in my youth, so I'm used to ridicule.

Let's keep our fetishes to ourselves.

I've done both.

In the last year med school a good friend of mine decided he wanted to learn to fly. One day he asked if I wanted to accompany him on his first solo flight. I said yes. There are times when I have questioned my intelligence with some degree of skepticism. This was one of them. WTF was I thinking. I obviously survived but it was not a pretty flight.

Talking of strange foods, this European horse meat scandal is funny. I joked about it to some people here and the jokes were met with stoney silence. Then someone broke the awkward silence and asked what's wrong with eating horse.

Do you do marathons?

What was your answer?

"Anyone want another burger?" I was in Burger King at the time and Burker King in UK was found to be selling horse.

Maybe your joke wasn't funny.

Not anymore. 5k is pretty much it these days. However, I'm training for a Spring 10 mile event. We'll see how that goes.

Rubber tyres on clean, dry pavement--that's how cycling is meant to be.

I would work for Fox news for a $1m. Maybe I just have less scruples.

Amen.

There are great railfanning opportunities right from the balcony here. I really need to move into this place.