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Mao is on the north side of Gulou Dong Dajie, about halfway between Jiaodaokou and the Drum Tower, or about 15 meters south of the corner of Bei Luogu Xiang.

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I was awake for the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit northwest of Chengdu today, and was on the phone at the time with a couple of people who, unlike me, work in tall buildings. Around 2:40 or so, both of them broke off mid-sentence to ask if we felt the ground shaking. I didn’t feel a thing; they both got off the phone and left their buildings in a hurry. According to online contacts, there were evacuations all throughout Beijing’s business district; Imagethief twittered that everyone was “watching [the] CCTV tower nervously” — it certainly looks unstable enough at the best of times.

If we could feel it in Beijing, more than a thousand miles away from where it hit, I can’t imagine what it did at the epicenter. I’m sorry to say, though, that my first reaction was not to worry about the people of Sichuan. My first reaction was, roughly, “awesome!”
And then I thought, hang on a minute: we’ve got disease; we’ve got unrest in the border areas; we’ve now got massive natural disasters — historically, this is about the time that Mongols on horseback or religious fanatics in yellow turbans should be invading and bringing about the end of the dynasty.

And if that isn’t portent enough for you, Joel sent me a link to a news story about a pond in Hubei that knows what’s going down:

Enshi, Hubei: 80 Tons of Water Vanish Suddenly

In a village under Baiguo Township, Enshi City in Hubei province, the Guanyin Pond, several dozen meters deep and approximately 100 meters in diameter, had held water for years until the morning of April 26, when in less than five hours all of the water disappeared after a massive whirlpool appeared in the pond, accompanied by a loud rushing noise.

The pond water is now gone. Only black muck is left.

One villager walked down alone into where the pond had been and scooped up two fish weighing more than 10 kilograms apiece.

Villagers proclaimed it a ‘marvel,’ and waited for experts to explain the occurence.

According to the ‘Annals of Baiguo Township,’ this phenomenon has occurred three times since Liberation — in 1949, 1976, and 1989, respectively.

Note: 1949 is the year the People’s Republic of China was founded. Mao Zedong died in 1976, bringing the Cultural Revolution to an end. The Tian’anmen Square protests took place in the summer of 1989.

Dynastic change, baby. Don’t believe me? Ask the suckhole.

Update: Via Shanghaiist, the Red Cross Society of China is now calling for donations to aid efforts in Wenchuan County.

Account name: Red Cross Society of China
开户单位：中国红十字会总会

For those who want to donate in RMB: you can send money to the RMB account at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China branch below:
人民币开户行: 中国工商银行 北京分行东四南支行
人民币账号: 0200001009014413252

For those who want to donate in foreign currency, you can send money to the foreign currency account at the CITIC Bank branch below:
外币开户行：中信银行酒仙桥支行
外币账号: 7112111482600000209

Hotline: (8610) 65139999
Online donations: Red Cross Society of China website: www.redcross.org.cn

Update 2, 5/13 4:56 PM: Stunning new proof that we are living in the End Times: Seal attempts sex with penguin.

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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 hard

Taoism (Chuang-Tzu):
We’re All Fucked
let’s go fishing

Sun-Tzu:
We’re All Fucked
quick, fuck them from behind when they’re not looking

Mo-Tzu:
We’re All Fucked
fuck around

Corrections and additions welcome in the comments.

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In particular, massive amounts of suckage came from its reinterpretation of a portion of 西游记 Journey to the West in a way which was not only totally inaccurate but provided massive amounts of unnecessary backstory for Chinese audiences. (I realize that the movie was intended for an American audience; I’ll address that later.) From the Wikipedia writeup:

Later that night, seated in a restaurant, Lu tells Jason a story of how the Monkey King caused havoc at the banquet celebrating the Jade Emperor’s forthcoming 500 year period of meditation and drank of the elixir of immortality. The Emperor took a liking to the Monkey King and decided to award him a heavenly title, much to the chagrin of the Jade Warlord (Collin Chou), a heavenly general. The Emperor then left the Jade Warlord in charge of heaven before retreating to his period of seclusion. The Jade Warlord later challenged the Monkey King to an un-armed duel, but turned him into stone when Monkey set aside his magic staff, the source of his powers. But before he was fully immobilized, the Monkey King cast his staff away. Lu ends the tale by stating a person known as the “Seeker” will be the person to find the staff and free the Monkey King.

Let’s try to recast that in a more Western analogue:

2000 years ago, Jesus ran into a temple in Jerusalem and interrupted a birthday party being held by Satan, lord of all that is unholy. The two began to fight, and at first it seemed as if Jesus held the upper hand, as the massive candy cane (the source of his powers) that he wielded was clearly superior to Satan’s Mantis Fist; however, Satan, seizing upon the presence of Jesus’ girlfriend, Mary Magdalen, grabbed her and taunted Jesus by mocking Thanksgiving, Jesus’ birthday. Jesus, now angered, lost control and began to pummel Satan about the head and neck with his candy cane, invoking the mystical “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” mantra, whereupon Satan, exploiting Jesus’ weakness of occasionally being an egg-bearing rabbit, imprisoned him for 5000 years inside a block of stone, saying that only an intrepid Chinese explorer from the 21st century would be able to release him.

Actually, that would be an awesome movie.

Anyway: this reminded me of a god-awful TV movie that aired a while back, in which, again, it fell to a random white dude to save a mythologized China with the help of a wisecracking Monkey King and a remarkably easy Bodhisattva Guanyin, played by Bai Ling. (So I guess one could add to the above description that the intrepid Chinese explorer could only save Jesus with the help of the Virgin Mary, who by the way is totally up for whatever.)

Not that textual and historical accuracy are prerequisites for awesomeness. (I think my outline of the “rescue Jesus with the magical candy cane” movie above proves that.) But really — you’ve got Jet Li and Jackie Chan together; this movie is already super-sweet. Why go out of your way to write a plot “relevant” to the gringos in the audience? For the box office? Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did just fine overseas without needing to graft on plots about callow American teenagers sent back in time to rescue the Qin(g) dynasties. You’ve already got two names - in fact, the only two names - known to foreign audiences for kicking ass and taking names; you could insert them into pretty much any plot you wanted without the need for ridiculous crap like this. Dropping some random white guy into the story, I guess just to fulfill the bildungsroman requirement, only distracts from the ass-kicking.

Another pet peeve, not attributable to the writers: I saw the Chinese-dubbed version of the movie, and the voice used to dub the American lead actor was an egregious example of “foreigner Chinese.” I watched the credits but didn’t catch who they’d got to do it, and so I couldn’t tell whether it was a Chinese person (in which case the guy truly put in a virtuoso performance — wrong tones, clumsy intonation, semi-retarded diction) or an actual foreigner. Either way, it seemed to sum up all of my criticisms of the movie: if you’re going to do something, why not do it right?

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It isn’t quite right to put Beijing into the category of cities that never sleep. Certainly, I saw people sleeping last night: a middle-aged man, against the wall of a Beijing Muslim restaurant on Dongsi Bei Dajie; another man huddled in blankets in front of the temple on Fuxue Hutong; a guy in a bulky army coat in front of the juweihui in my old neighborhood.
But even at that late hour there were people on the streets: a few young men and women piling into a car outside of Yonghegong — coworkers maybe, fresh from karaoke across the street; oldsters sitting in front of a 24-hour malatang food joint, playing cards and gossiping; a small construction crew trucking in bricks for one of the new ancient courtyards on Bei Luogu Xiang; the workers, inferred but not seen, sending down gentle showers of sparks as they put together the new CCTV building on the third ring road. The guard at the military compound on Fuxue Hutong who came out to yell at me when I took a picture of the banner in front of the base that read 百年奥运，中华圆梦 — “A Hundred Years of Olympics; The Fulfillment of a Dream for China.”

I asked him what the first part meant — since this isn’t the hundredth anniversary of the Olympics — and he screwed up his face and said he didn’t know.

If Beijing isn’t a city that never sleeps, it’s a city that can’t quite get to sleep. At the entrance and exit to my housing compound are newly installed LED signs that display the air quality (thus far, only “fair”), the temperature (warming, and fast), traffic conditions (”poor”), and the number of days left to the Olympics. The whole city is counting down, and so I may as well count with it.

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• 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 lot of help from a lot of people who made it their business to see to it that I graduated, particularly Ruth Ost, Ben Stavis, Louis Mangione, and Craig Eisendrath, all at Temple.It’s super-nice to have this out of the way, and as an added benefit, my resume is now 90% less mendacious! (Previous versions said that my degree was “expected June 2005.” This wasn’t exactly a lie — I really did expect it.
• A CD I got for sending a donation to This American Life also finally showed up on my parents’ doorstep.
• I received the contract for a large, fun project that I’m not currently at liberty to discuss, and
• William F. Buckley died.

Later in the day, a massive amount of work threatened to turn it into the Worst Thursday Ever, but then

• I got an email from my mom saying that she was getting ready to send me a care package of butter rum/caramel chocolate bars.

As if that wasn’t enough, I heard that the China Daily was publishing an interview that they did with me at the start of February. (The article came out today, but I’m going to count it under Thursday anyway.) Surely there can be no higher honor.

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So back in December when several of the ChinesePod staff were visiting Beijing, I went out to get dinner with them. It was already dark when I walked out to the street, hailed a cab, sat down in the back seat, and told the driver to go to the west gate of Chaoyang Park. We started chatting, mostly as a way of passing the time while we sat on the Second Ring Road, and about 20 minutes into the conversation, I made some passing mention of “the way things are in the States.”

“Oh,” he said. “You’re a 海归 (returned student)?”
“Um,” I said. “Check the rear-view mirror.”

Silence for a few minutes. Then he started the conversation up again, this time talking about how foreigners could never really learn Chinese. This is one of the few topics that can really piss me off, since it’s so utterly stupid and plays so readily into the notion, common in China and abroad, that there’s just something inherently exceptional and special about the Chinese culture and Chinese language, when in fact it’s not so much that foreigners can’t learn Chinese as that they mostly don’t. Still, I couldn’t help but be impressed that he was going to try to make this argument after having thought I was Chinese for the past 20 minutes.

I pointed this out to him, and he stumbled a bit, but then regrouped with “yeah, but Chinese has a lot of characters. It’s very complicated.”
“Yes,” I said, “And English has 26 characters that it uses to make up all of its 200,000 words. Now that’s complicated.”
“But one character can mean a lot of different things.”
“But every language has polysemous words. Just look at the word ‘go’ in English. Dozens of possible meanings, based on the contest.”
“Anyway,” he concluded. “I just think it’s harder to learn Chinese than other languages.”

Further questioning revealed that he had never actually tried to learn another language.

“Well, I have, and trust me — Chinese is easy. Classical Greek, now — there’s a hard language.”
“But you’ve got Chinese ancestry, so of course it’s easy.”

This was actually not the first time I’ve heard this: I’m short, dark-haired, and twig-like, so I suppose if one really squinted I could just maybe pass for a second-generation hunxue’er, and I’ve been taken for Uyghur before. That said, I do not look particularly Chinese, and given that my name is Brendan O’Kane and that there were, to the best of my knowledge, no Chinese postmen in Buncrana or Roscommon, I feel fairly confident in saying that I have no Chinese ancestry.

“Ah,” said the driver. “But you never really know how far back it goes, do you?”

Faced with such unassailable logic, I decided to change tacks. I pointed out that ethnic Chinese who grow up not speaking Chinese abroad don’t have it any easier when learning Mandarin than non-Chinese. He was going to say something to that, but we were already pulling up to the restaurant where the ChinesePod team was waiting.

“We’ll continue this next time,” I said, and paid him. He looked up into my face.

“You don’t really look all that Chinese,” he said. “Maybe if you shaved the beard.”

(Lest I be accused of bragging, let me be the first to note that my Chinese is very far from native-sounding, and that this paticular driver was clearly just not all that bright.)

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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 bell was silent in the air
Holding its inverted poise -
Between the clang and clang a flower,
A brazen calyx of no noise:
The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand
That stretched around the cups and plates;
The desert was their own, they planned
To portion out the stars and dates:
The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them and the radio waltz
Came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else.

Her fingers flicked away the ash
That bloomed again in tropic trees:
Not caring if the markets crash
When they had forests such as these,
Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good
Be praised that time can stop like this,
That what the heart has understood
Can verify in the body’s peace
God or whatever means the Good.

Time was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.

– Louis MacNeice

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Fun Input Toy, a free IME, was my input method of choice of a while, since it had marginally smarter sentence parsing than QIM. This has all changed now that QIM has made two major additions: first, they’ve licensed a new sentence-parsing method that they’re calling the QIT (QIM Intelligent Transformer); second, they’ve licensed Sogou’s dictionary file, meaning that QIM now knows all of the phrases that Sogou’s IME knows — which is pretty not bad, considering that Sogou is pretty much the best IME out there (with the possible exception of Google’s IME, which allegedly plagiarized Sogou’s).

After John B. alerted me to the new hotness, I downloaded 1.4.0 to test it out — and promptly crashed every program I tried to use it with. D’oh. The issue has since been fixed, and version 1.4.2 works like a charm. After years of painfully slow and inaccurate Chinese input on the Mac, QIM finally makes it possible to type long and complex strings with minimal-to-no need for correction.
Consider the following sentence, “Celebrate the victorious opening of the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th Party Congress,” which QIM 1.4.2 nails on the first try: 热烈庆祝中国共产党第十七次全国代表大会的胜利召开.
Here’s how FIT handles it, for purposes of comparison: 热烈庆祝中国共产主义青年团地时期此全国代表大会得胜利爪开. The IME tries to be helpful by auto-expanding the input string “Zhongguo Gongchan Dang” to “Zhongguo Gongchanzhuyi Qingniantuan,” picking up on the start of the phrase (”Chinese Communist”) and assuming it to be “Chinese Communist Youth League” rather than “Chinese Communist Party.” D’oh.
And here’s how Apple’s woeful default Pinyin input method handles the string:热烈庆祝中国共产党第时期次全国代表大会得胜利爪开. It makes some of the same mistakes as FIT, but to be fair, it also makes them much more slowly, since it can only handle relatively short strings. Boo, Apple. Boo. (I’ve heard good things about the Wubi and Cangjie input methods that OS X ships with, but I don’t use shape-based input methods for the same reason that I don’t speak Lojban, have genital piercings or watch Adam Sandler movies: we avoid those things which cause us pain.)

The sentence above, of course, is using a lot of familiar words that will be in any IME’s default dictionary — even Apple’s pathetically anemic one — so it’s not all that great a test. QIM fares well with ordinary sentences — and even weird ones: it handles the Chinese translation of Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas,” 无色的绿色思想狂怒的睡觉, almost flawlessly, with the sole exception of the adverbial 地 getting confused for the more common 的, a substitution that plenty of native speakers regularly make.
Quickie tests with more difficult sentences from the preface to Yang Jiang’s “Washing” (杨绛，<洗澡>) revealed some shortcomings in the dictionary (particularly with literary terms like 掇拾, of which QIM appears to be ignorant), and a couple of strange parsing errors, but on the whole, performance was about what I would expect from one of the Windows-based IMEs.

I’m new to this version of QIM, and who knows — it may yet do something to piss me off. For now, though, it looks to me like an absolute godsend — the first Chinese input method for Mac not to suck. You can get it at http://glider.ismac.cn/RegQIME.html. It costs $20 to register and would be a bargain at twice that.

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