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Though I’m up late—I’m looking to call a professor with office hours from 1:30 to 3:30—the cough isn’t quite so bad. My strategy of lethargy may be working (or I may just be getting over it).

Today I worked on law school applications, finding myriad errors in every one. The “detail-oriented” nitpicking possible on these is mind-blowing. One application will ask for a date in MM/YY, another in MM/DD/YY, another in MM/DD/YY. Invariably the Common Information Form will fill in the date with an incorrect format.

I had McDonalds today. I know. But they had something I really wanted to try—the Fàn-tastic (where fàn is rice). Take a relatively normal chicken sandwich or beef burger (relatively normal means “including red cabbage,” I’ll admit) and replace the buns with patties of rice and mushroom, “grilled to perfection.” So it’s kind of a mushroom-burger-bun burger. It wasn’t that bad, I guess. I was also able to replace the fries with four big slices of pineapple. It’s still a sad meal, but I had to know what it was like.

While in Fu Tai (where I visited the McDonalds) I stopped by Manning’s and Park n’ Shop, Fu Tai’s representatives of the Hong Kong pharmacy and grocery duopolies (their “competitors” are Watson’s and Wellcome, if you were wondering). At Manning’s I picked up some cough tools, which I may not need, and found that the bait-and-switch practices of Mong Kok extend to simple pharmacies in the semi-rural surroundings of Tuen Mun: a bag of cough drops, tissues, and Robitussin was conspicuously marked $20 but rang up at $36.50. My knowledge of the point-n-grunt method got me the news that the big sticker saying $20 doesn’t matter. If I didn’t know the price would be identical in the Park n’ Shop’s aisles…

In Park n’ Shop I picked up a bag each of dried mango and potato chips. They’re gone. Oops.

This evening I knocked off The Professor and the Madman which was as good as I’d expected. I guess it shouldn’t surprise most of you that a book about a dictionary would excite me. Thanks for the unconscious rec., commenter I shamelessly ripped that book from.

Ten minutes until office hours. Time to go ahead and try (and be humiliated by having recorded an incorrect extension). Here goes.