Grey Humor

Many times over the years, my last name has been mis-spelled as "Tien", instead of "Tian". This included credit card bills, water bills, you name it, all kinds of bills. What else do you get in your mailbox these days? Nothing but bills,  advertisements or advertisements disguised as coupons or checks. Our email inbox is not that much better either and is probably more creepy. Because in physical mailbox we usually get random ads, so random that sometimes you laugh at those who sent them. However, our email inbox is an entire new ballgame. The ads were much more precise and targeted, almost like the advertisers were reading our minds somehow.  So precise that I almost suspect somebody was spying on me. Although they got my last name spelled wrong occasionally too, and without exception, they always mis-spelled it the same way: Tien. I wonder why. One day, before boarding a flight from Newark Airport, I was passing by a TSA staff checking my passport before allow...

Ready to take on our first adventure in Madrid, I fired up Uber and expected to see a horde of cabs around the hotel, waiting to be summoned by my spell of UberX. Well, what I saw was this: Notice the car looked like a bat. And yes, it was the day of Halloween, thank you Uber for reminding me that. Just when I thought I could sleep well with a spook-free Halloween by flying all the way across the Atlantic to Spain! Upon arriving at the front entrance of Museo de Prado, we saw this sculpture of a man as short as shrank Ant-man, his name is Goya. I was utterly confused for a moment. Isn't Goya the brandname of a famous canned bean? Afraid that I might be more terrible in names than what I already pessimistically assumed, I resort to google. And here is what came out from ancestry.com regarding to the name "Goya": Japanese: found mostly in the Ryukyu Islands, this  name  is usually written with characters meaning 'barbarian room' or 'give room'...

One of the things that stroke my attention when I walked into a bathroom (el Bano, Aseo etc) in Spain was the second quasi toilet next to the normal toilet. "What was that thing for?", my son Eddy asked me. "well, with my wild guess I think it's used to clean people's assholes. You see, here is how the water flow gently without splashing", as I turned on the faucet. The projection of the curved water flow seems to have the single purpose of cleaning the delicate part of your body, which is prone to be dirty on a daily basis. With the small towel hanging next to it, and the low elevation of the bowl, I can hardly imagine it was meant to be used for washing faces -- you'd have to really kneel down so low to put your face anywhere close to the faucet. Eddy wasn't convinced it seems. I was reluctant to be too religious in defending my opinion either, because I wasn't so sure myself either. Not until I saw the narrow-sized toilet paper next ...