The Feng Shui Detective

I'm reading this series of detective novels by Nury Vittachi. It's not high literature but I find it entertaining.


The stories are actually more comedy than mystery. C.F.Wong, the Feng Shui master, is a veritable scrooge and always looking for ways to earn more consulting fees, all the time penning fables of Eastern wisdom, which provide interludes to the tale, for his magnum opus. He is neatly set off against a teenage intern, Joyce McQuinnie, foisted upon him by a regular client. She is British-Australian but speaks a language called Teenager where Whatever means yes, and As if means no. So the stage is set for the hilarious clash of opposites: East versus West, age versus youth, tradition versus modernity.


The stories are set in Asia, locations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, with excursions to cities like Sydney. Nury Vittachi lives in Hong Kong, and was a magazine contributor for many years so the behaviour of his colourful characters (we meet some members of The Union of Industrial Mystics), his depiction of the locations, the descriptions of the street food, and the rendering of the patois—snippets of Cantonese, Malay, etc., are spot on. I can't vouch for the Feng Shui bits, but the terminology sounds realistic.


C.F. Wong's observation that there should be more destruction, in the sense of discarding of acquisitions, in the later half of life so that one would move from the material to the spiritual, and end life gloriously unencumbered, appeals to me. I suspect that he was giving voice to a piece of the author's philosophy there.

Removing sticker residue

I bought a CD yesterday and found that the security sticker on the opening was old and left behind gum residue when peeled off the box. I applied a trick that I have used before to remove the residue.


Cut off a length of sticky tape, hold it sticky side out with a finger and press it down on the residue. Lift the tape sharply off the surface. The action is small, not sweeping. Hopefully some of the residue should have come off onto the tape. You may need to hold it to the light at a particular angle to see what remains. By repeating this action many times the gum should gradually transfer from the surface to the sticky tape.


This also works for removing price sticker residue from the backs of glossy books.


Sometimes you can even use the just removed sticker to remove its own residue with the same procedure.

The Life of Pi

Yes, that Man Booker Prize winning novel by Yann Martel. Yes, from 2002, and yes I'm somewhat slow in getting to read it.


No, I'm sorry, it didn't do it for me. The first part about Pi's childhood is amusing enough, as is the last part where he's recovering in a Mexican hospital and talking very nonchalantly with the Japanese insurance investigators while depleting them of cookies (baked ones, that is). The problem is that the novel sagged in the middle part. An account of a boy shipwrecked for 227 days in the Pacific in a lifeboat with only a wild Bengal tiger for a companion is hardly an exciting premise, no matter how much magic realism you sprinkle into the tale, and how many allusions to spiritual themes there are. Pi was observant of ritual in the lifeboat but that only added to the tedium. I'm sorry, I sped read through this part.


Martel seems to be the kind of novelist that likes to dazzle you with a recitation of 25 different flowers and that sort of thing. Ok, so I'm envious of writers who can do that, but it's also that I prefer concision. My favourite writer in that department is Bruce Chatwin who said that he learnt the art of maximising the effect of words from writing descriptions of auction lots while at Sotheby's.


Apparently it's going to be a 3D film directed by Ang Lee. We'll see if the story improves in translation to the screen. There's no truth to the rumour that the film will be entitled Eat Drink Boy Tiger.

Help, how do I get out of this song?

I got another book of sheet music the other day and was learning to play How Deep Is Your Love. Only oldies will remember this was sung by the Bee Gees in that Ur-Disco Film, Saturday Night Fever. It's quite a catchy tune actually. But when I started playing it, I couldn't find an appropriate final bar. I decided to investigate why it was taking me around in circles.

The structure of the song looks like a normal A-B-C-B-D, where A is the opening, B is the main section, C is the bridge, and D is the coda. Uh wrong, there is no D, after B, here's what happens: while a Gibb brother is singing how deep is your love, his brother starts singing how deep is your love a 13th down, always taking you into C. So that's why I got stuck in a loop of B-C ad infinitum.

How to solve this? Well in the soundtrack album, they simply fade out the second time on the bridge. In fact the sheet suggests an alternative start to the second bridge consisting of few tacit bars while progressing through the chords Ab Eb Gm7 Ab followed dal segno and fade. I can't do that so I devised my own ending. I play Ab on the arpeggiator and then tack on Eb6 to give it a chord of finality and halt.

I suspect this looping is what allows some dance songs to keep going until the band or the dancers tire of it. It sounded like the same trick I heard in Northeastern Brazil dance music.

Now I have to master that song and stop it running around in my head!

Hetty Kate and Sam Lemann

I just listened to a rendition of that old Italian hit Quando, Quando, Quando that was so melodious that I just had to hit repeat a few times. It was sung by Melbourne-based jazz chanteuse Hetty Kate, accompanied by guitarist Sam Lemann, with help from Leigh Barker and Andy Baylor. Hetty has the clearest "little girl voice" and diction that I've heard for a while. But her improvisations on the melody are also very much her own. Sam's playing is also fantastic. You should have no difficulty finding Hetty Kate by a web search. You lucky Melburnians. I hope she brings her group to Sydney some day.

Spiraling out of control

Why is it that a debacle is usually described in the press as "spiraling out of control"? Given the chaotic nature of events one would think "lurching out of control" or "staggering out of control" might be more apt. Spiraling just sounds too orderly.


I surmise that one reason is that spiraling implies some kind of malevolent impelling force that keeps the object out of reach of the players, thus absolving them of any fault in causing the problem. The mental imagery is also more attractive: the object's trajectory is making people dizzy trying to track it.


Another reason is obvious to anybody who has seen a runaway firework that has been imparted circular momentum; it traces a corkscrew-like path. The images that come to me are from the closing scenes of Koyaanisqatsi where the camera tracks in slow motion the debris of an Atlas-Centaur rocket explosion. But then "corkscrewing out of control" sounds all wrong, and one might even suspect the protagonists of too much drinking. And of course the language mafia would come after you for inventing yet another verb from a noun.

Moses invents the roman numerals

Joking aside, visitors to Manly will recognise this tribute to the Ukranian immigrant John Suchomlin who arrived in Australia in 1911 and from the mid-20s began sculpting in sand on Manly beach. Many of his works are depicted in postcards from that era.
His name is uncommon so a search will easily find material on his extraordinary life such as these: Wishing Well Shelter and Sandman.