Happy to hear. Again, not the hot you want.

My furnace is working! I keep checking the radiators and they're fine. Of course, we're having temps near 70 during the day, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

My furnace is working!

Huzzah!

May your showers be hot and generous.

I've gone down two rabbit holes recently, and they're both fairly large holes in my knowledge base and I'm wondering how much of a blank spot these two subjects are in Western learning.

1. Chongqing - City in China. I'm just going to pull up the initial summary from Wikipedia to start:

"Chongqing is one of the four direct-administered municipalities under the Central People's Government, along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. It is the only directly administrated municipality located deep inland.

The municipality covers a large geographical area roughly the size of Austria, which includes several disjunct urban areas in addition to Chongqing proper. Due to its classification, the municipality of Chongqing is the largest city proper in the world by area, though it does not have the largest urban area.

The municipality of Chongqing is the only Chinese municipality with a resident population of over 30 million."

First of all it's one of the four most important cities in China and I've never heard of it.

Second, it's as big as Australia in size and population. It's the only one of the four "direct-administered municipalities" in China which is inland - the other three are port cities.

It's built among the mountains inland so it's a bit like Chicago for interior size/importance, and a bit like Pittsburgh, nestled in the Allegheny valley for its verticality.

It's often described as a very cyberpunk city and parts of it look a lot like Judge Dredd's Megacity. It has the world's biggest Monorail system which runs directly through apartment complexes. It has insane, phobia-inducing freeways that go hundreds of feet in the air.

I started with this Travel vlog: [link]

Bonus: [link]

Extra: [link]

Weird synchronicity - I was walking through Chinatown today and walked past the storefront of one of my old favorite restaurants. Like a lot of Asian restaurants in the City, they are family owned and run and when the couple (usually) who runs it wants to retire, the restaurant closes. Anyway, the new restaurant in that spot specialized in Chongqing's famous spicy noodles.

Are y'all familiar with Chongqing? I was not.

2. The Partition of India. I'm realizing I'm very vague on the details of this hugely important historical event. I know Lord Mountbatten was the decider. I know it happened in 1947, so just after WWII. I'm just beginning to grasp that in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust there were horrific atrocities committed. I know (now) it tried to separate the Muslim population out of India (which had previously lived peacefully with the Hindu and Buddhist peoples) into West and East Pakistan. But these two non-contiguous sectors of Pakistan had a civil war which established Bangladesh.

Are y'all pretty familiar with the partition of India?

I was not.

Simon Whistler did a pretty amazing video about it on YouTube, so I've heard some about it. It ranks up right there with the ass-backwards establishment of Israel in a way that set them up for generations of strife, in the lengthy list of bad political decisions made by the British.

Still have heat this morning! That is not getting old just yet.

in the lengthy list of bad political decisions made by the British

Clip from Yes, Prime Minister [link]
(From 1986! How little things have changed.)

My (great-) Uncle Bill was a mechanic in the China-Burma-India theater of operations in WWII [link] , so I learned about Kunming, and Chongqing by extension, as part of learning about that era.

Uncle Bill came back from the war with very strong and overt bigotry about Indians, Burmese, Chinese, "furriners" in general, and a lingering case of malaria. He could never understand my Dad's interest in that part of the world.

My Dad was a political anthropologist. He did his Ph. D. research in the mid-1960s in Rajasthan. I lived in northern Pakistan starting in 1974, was there for 5th grade through 10th grade, then northern India for 11th and 12th grade. So I grew up in the culture of the aftermath of Partition in much the same way that my Dad grew up in the culture of the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War in western Arkansas -- hearing the (many and varied) stories, seeing the effects, enduring the endless arguments, but emotionally removed.

Thats fascinating dcp! Tell us more!!

David I had heard of that city because of crazy pics and videos. But don’t know much about it. I do not know much at all about partition.

Tell us more!!

Dangerous invitation. 😏 I could go on, and on, and on....

In Pakistan and India we were wealthy and privileged in ways we wouldn't be in the U.S., got to go places and do things and meet people that are experiences I treasure now, but didn't appreciate at the time.

The culture shock I went through when I returned to the U.S. full time was...difficult.

Dad retired from USAID [link] in the early 2000s. In late 2020 he started doing a series of interviews for the archives of the U.S. State Department. The intro is here: [link]

There are a lot of good (IMHO) stories in the transcript: [link]

TCG is still sick and is actually taking a sick day from work, which never ever happens.

I was vaguely aware of The Partition (thanks, Doctor Who!), but Chongquing was just a place name to me with no details attached.

In other news, I forgot to put my trash out last night and can now hear the garbage truck booming its way around the surrounding streets as if to taunt me. "Boom! Ha ha, picked up your street first! Boom!"

Thanks for the birthday wishes, y’all! My sister came down for a visit, so I’ve been mostly off-line for a few days.