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 [...]
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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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Fucking Stationery
John’s got some nice examples of local stationery products up in his latest post at Sinosplice. Children’s notebooks are particularly good comedy value here, combining as they do bizarre Pokey the Penguin-type illustrations with excellent specimens of Chinglish translated and typeset by guerrilla Dadaists. (One of my six year-old students back in Harbin had a [...]
Greetings from Shenzhen Airport
To: Jane, Patrick, Jane, Jon, Richard Greetings from scenic Shenzhen Airport, where there is at least a Starbucks. This being Shenzhen, the area outside the airport is teeming with migrants offering various services and not taking ‘no’ for an answer. When Li and I got here a few days ago, we got a couple of [...]