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Benefit concert for Sichuan earthquake
For Beijing readers: There’ll be a benefit concert at Mao Livehouse tomorrow night from 8:30 on. The Verse, Sand (a fun talking blues-style band), Rando(m), and IC Girlband are playing. Tickets are 50 kuai. Spread the word.
Mao is on the north side of Gulou Dong Dajie, about halfway between Jiaodaokou and the Drum Tower, or [...]
88 Days: Portents (Listen to the Suckhole)
I have no luck at all with earthquakes. Philadelphia is a stubbornly immobile city and has been since the Jurassic or so, my brief time in San Francisco wasn’t spiced up by even the faintest tremor, and when a small earthquake hit Beijing a couple of years ago, I slept straight through it.
I was awake [...]
92 Days: We’re All Fucked
A while ago I had an idea for a series of bumper stickers about Eastern philosophy — all variations on the theme of “We’re All Fucked.” (Note: not accurate, particularly in the glossing of Mo-Tzu’s 兼爱.) For example:
Buddhism:
We’re All Fucked
pray for oblivion
Taoism (Lao-Tzu):
We’re All Fucked
don’t let them know they’re fucked
Confucius:
We’re All Fucked
unless you study really [...]
98 Days: Bollocks
As mentioned yesterday, Li and I went to see The Forbidden Kingdom, the new Jet Li/Jackie Chan movie. It did have a couple of saving graces — the fight scene between Jackie Chan and Jet Li is absolutely worth the price of admission; the slapstick scenes in which Jet Li and Jackie Chan fight by [...]
99 Days: And All That Mighty Heart
It’s spring, and less grittily so than usual. Not that the air is clean, of course, but the days are warming and lengthening, and the skies are blue or something like it, and we appear to be in the middle of Beijing’s spring allotment of nice days.
Li and I went out to a late showing [...]
The best Thursday ever
Yesterday was the best Thursday ever. Consider:
After what felt like years but was actually years, I finally got my BA from Temple University. Cum laude, even, which was a pleasant surprise since I would’ve expected something more like pedicabo et irrumabo (my Latin is probably wrong there) . This wouldn’t have been possible without a [...]
White Guy Speaks Chinese; Film at Eleven
I’ve had my eye on ChinesePod for a while. I don’t necessarily agree 100% with the way they’re going about things, but they’re doing wonderful work in popularizing the study of Mandarin and helping demolish the notion that Chinese is unlearnable, and they’re producing supplementary materials that I would’ve loved to have when I was [...]
For Li, in lieu of a better Valentine’s present
Meeting Point
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs)
Time was away and somewhere else.
And they were neither up nor down;
The stream’s music did not stop
Flowing through heather, limpid brown,
Although they sat in a coffee shop
And they were neither up nor down.
The [...]
QIM 1.4.2 makes Chinese input on Mac usable
Freelance gigs are keeping me busy at the moment, but I just wanted to let everybody know that even if Google and Sogou aren’t porting their Chinese input methods to the Mac, and even though Apple seems to be satisfied with a default IME that might as well be wearing bell-bottoms and muttonchop whiskers and, [...]