London, not quite my hometown, but a city I know very well, has its own peculiar culture called Cockney, which is evident as an accent, in traditional clothing, and in the idiosyncratic ‘Cockney rhyming slang’. The Cockney accent and mannerisms were famously mis-represented by the actor Dick van Dyke in the Mary Poppins movie, and [...]
Archive for August, 2009
The Forecast for Today: Death from Above!
Mother Nature must show up drunk at China’s doorstep, or she’s on some pills or something. Beijing is said to have year-round weather, but I never knew there were more than four seasons until I flew across the Pacific. To the usual line up of Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, add the new seasons: Boggle, [...]
Ode to the Beijing Garbage Man
In the wee hours of the dusty morn, a hero lurks the alleyways of old Beijing. He has the body of the Spartan and the face of a ghoul. His eyes and cheekbones seem chiseled from granite. shirt and pants are torn asunder and streaked with every oil, chemical, paste and sauce imaginable. With his [...]
The Comfort Zone
There’s a scene in the great 1980s baseball film Major League (I realize that the majority of you readers are unlikely to be baseball fans, but bear with me) in which Pedro Cerrano, a newly acquired slugger, takes batting practice in spring training. At first, he hits each pitch way out of the ballpark for [...]
Photo: White Tigers in Perfect Yin / Yang Harmony
This excellently timed capture of two white tigers in a playful-yet-deadly yin-yang pose is one of many great photos from the Flickr stream of Mark, aka China Lost and Found.
VERY Literal Chinese – and my gummy worms
I absolutely love the simplicity and practicality of the Chinese language. This means that I can read medical journals in Chinese that I can’t even understand in English. Chinese pretty much puts complicated vocabulary into layman’s terms. For example the Coccyx is the 尾臀骨 [wěi tún gǔ] or the “tail butt bone,” and Hepatopathy is [...]
An American in China via Japan
As someone who has just shown up in Japan by way of China, this China via Japan series over on Going Loco in Yokohama is pretty fascinating to me. China via Japan Pt 1 China via Japan Pt 2 China via Japan Pt 3 It looks like there might be more installments of this series [...]
Twitter users help free Chinese blogger
If you read nothing else today, read this: “How Did I Break [out of] Jail?“. The incredible first-hand account of how Chinese blogger Peter Guo (Guo Baofeng), better known as Amoiist, was arrested but managed to get an SOS message out via his Twitter, which then turned into an international campaign to see him released. [...]
Chinese artist takes ‘blending in’ to a new level
No, you’re not looking at some cheese-smothered Photoshop job, these pictures are the amazing artwork of Liu Bolin, a 35-year-old artist from Shandong. Liu’s attention to detail and precision positioning make it appear as if he is invisible.
I’ll let the images speak for themselves.
Time for the Associated Press to buy a decent map
The other day I wrote a quick post about how pneumonic plague had infected and killed residents in a small community in Qinghai province. My post was meant mostly as a joke, as my friend Glen was in Qinghai and complaining about being ill. However, there’s nothing funny about pneumonic plague. Now several more people [...]
The photo’s Flickr page says it was taken mid-October.
