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07 Nov 09
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Winter is Icumen In Winter is Icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm.
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
— Ezra Pound, noted... |
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04 Oct 09
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1 Day: Crowds at Tian'anmen Thoughts on the Olympics and the ways in which I’ve collided with it will come in later posts, I’m sure. For now, here’s some footage I shot around Qianmen and [Unnamable?] Square north of there this evening. Sound quality is lousy and... |
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04 Oct 09
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T+12 – Opening Ceremonies 8:00 – Liveblogging ACTIVATE. Set phasers to MAXIMUM SNARK!
Boy, Jiang Zemin looks old.
Sweet-ass fireworks at the beginning.
Flying apsaras escorting an Olympic logo. Well, that’s tacky, but if that’s the worst of it then –
Hey,... |
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04 Oct 09
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After the Olympics: What's Next? Now that the Olympics are over (and how about those closing ceremonies? Those of you who found my comments on the Opening Ceremonies distasteful should count yourselves lucky I didn’t blog the closing ceremonies) everyone is asking what will be... |
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04 Oct 09
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John DeFrancis, 1911-2009: You Can't Do That Anymore The Sinologist John DeFrancis died recently at the age of 97. You can read more about him elsewhere – in the NYTimes obituary or on the memorial site set up for him – but I thought I’d write something, as a student of Chinese, about what... |
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30 Sep 09
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Morning, October 1 Last night’s dismal attempt at rain — whether artificial or manmade — doesn’t seem to have done much: the sky is distinctly overcast, though the air at least doesn’t seem to have the velvety quality it did... |
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26 Jan 09
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[Help], [Help], [Help] the Police! In response to the sub-high-school-newspaper New York Times article about Hip-hop in China (and partly inspired by the execrable Jay Chou/Song Zuying performance on last night’s CCTV gala), I present to you a video that perfectly sums up, for me... |
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17 Jan 09
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John DeFrancis, 1911-2009: You Can’t Do That Anymore The Sinologist John DeFrancis died recently at the age of 97. You can read more about him elsewhere - in the NYTimes obituary or on the memorial site set up for him - but I thought I’d write something, as a student of Chinese, about what he meant to... |
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03 Sep 08
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After the Olympics: What’s Next? Now that the Olympics are over (and how about those closing ceremonies? Those of you who found my comments on the Opening Ceremonies distasteful should count yourselves lucky I didn’t blog the closing ceremonies) everyone is asking what will be... |
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08 Aug 08
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T-Minus 2 Hours: Holy Shit People are twittering online (via retweets through @gvoolympics) that:
Chaoyang Park and the small parks around Tian’anmen Square are closed for viewing.
There’s heavy security in Ditan Park.
No food (i.e. beer, as @AdrianeQ notes) or sitting... |
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08 Aug 08
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T+12 - Opening Ceremonies Boy, Jiang Zemin looks old.
Sweet-ass fireworks at the beginning.
Flying apsaras escorting an Olympic logo. Well, that’s tacky, but if that’s the worst of it then –
Hey, time for the singing minority children gathered around the Chinese... |
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08 Aug 08
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T-Minus 5 Hours: Crowded and Grey CCTV 5 — sorry, ‘CCTV Olympic’ or whatever they’re calling themselves — is broadcasting a succession of reporters standing in front of the Bird’s Nest stadium and pontificating into the camera about the Olympic Green,... |
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08 Aug 08
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1 Day: Crowds at Tian’anmen Thoughts on the Olympics and the ways in which I’ve collided with it will come in later posts, I’m sure. For now, here’s some footage I shot around Qianmen and [Unnamable?] Square north of there this evening. Sound quality is lousy and... |
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04 Jun 08
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64 Days: 19 Years |
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13 May 08
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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... |
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12 May 08
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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... |
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07 May 08
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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.)... |
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02 May 08
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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... |
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01 May 08
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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... |
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29 Feb 08
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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... |
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29 Feb 08
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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... |
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14 Feb 08
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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... |
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11 Nov 07
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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... |
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29 Oct 07
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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... |
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04 Oct 07
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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... |
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01 Oct 07
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Postcard to my grandmother Hi, Gran –
It’s National Day - the 58th anniversary of the day Mao Zedong proclaimed from the dais in front of the Forbidden City that the Chinese people had stood up - and I’m writing this on the midnight ferry between Hong Kong and... |
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22 Sep 07
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HALP HALP O HALP Dear all:
How can I cheer up my crazy, talented artist girlfriend?
Suggestions that are not “flowers” will be welcome. That is all. |
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12 Jul 07
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searching-thought-earth-skin-virtue. Via the chinese@kenyon.edu listserv, two articles in which American journalists write lazily about Chinese in ill-considered English. The issue at stake: whether or not Massachussetts should provide ballots on which candidates’ names are rendered... |
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09 Jul 07
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more soon Real life and the day job have been keeping me busy of late, but there’s some cool stuff coming up. Eric Abrahamsen, Cindy Carter and I have started up a new blog, Paper Republic, that aims to be a resource for Chinese literature and translation.... |
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17 Jun 07
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missionaries So John was in town with his folks over the weekend, and I had the pleasure of hanging out with him while his parents and wife visited the Forbidden City. John was quite understandably unenthused at the prospect of visiting the Forbidden City a third... |
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18 May 07
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Live Ink and Chinese Literacy A long time ago I noticed that even though I’m much more comfortable with simplified characters than I am with complex-form characters, I find columnar Chinese to be much more comfortable to read than horizontally printed Chinese when it comes to... |
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15 May 07
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Why I’m not afraid of Google Sure, Google may be beating up Yahoo and Microsoft and taking their lunch money, and it may be plagiarizing part of its Pinyin IME wordbank from Sogou, and it may be growing and spreading into every industry it can find — but I’m pretty sure... |
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16 Apr 07
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OMG teh promised one!!!!1! On my way to the subway this morning, I passed a guy sitting on the steps of the local branch of the Construction Bank with his head in his hands. He was a large - hell, a fat - Chinese gentleman, apparently middle-aged, with a shaved head and a long,... |
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12 Apr 07
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Google Sogou Pinyin is also pretty good After the whole kerfluffle where it turned out that Google copied all or some of its wordlist from Sogou’s Pinyin method, I decided to download the Sogou IME at work and give it a spin. Results: 听完了这个消息我便下载了搜狗的拼音输... |
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04 Apr 07
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Google Chinese Input And just as I prepare to go to bed, I see in my inbox, via the Chinese@Kenyon.edu listserv, that Google has just come out with its own Pinyin-based Chinese input method. This looks awesome — if only they could put out a Mac version.
Chinese input... |
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04 Apr 07
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Standard Chartered needs a better Chinese name I’m getting ready to go to Hong Kong for a couple of days for visa reasons — not the usual visa run, as I’ll explain later — but first a quick post:
At my soon-to-be-former job today, we did a report on the four foreign banks... |
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29 Mar 07
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Classics and a beer and the best cabbie ever I’ve been trying to clear my plate of all of my freelance gigs and other obligations as I prepare to take on a new job next month, so over the past couple of weeks I’ve pulled more than a few all-nighters on things. All-nighters tend to be... |
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09 Feb 07
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Idea! Trendy restaurants are all the rage in Beijing these days - both fancy-dress joints and “high-concept” restaurants. Among the latter are places like the all-new “dark” restaurant, romantically named “Whale Insides,”... |
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06 Feb 07
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Hypotheticals Blogging about work is rarely a good idea, so I’ve generally tried to hold off from writing anything about my job (or my various freelance gigs) on here. I will say now, though, that hypothetically, if my co-workers and my boss and I had gone for,... |
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06 Jan 07
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Nerdy thought for the day Friends and I will form a heavy metal band whose songs are all about Chinese paleolinguistics. We will be called “Homophonous Weapon.”
(After we break up and re-form for one last farewell performance, we can call the concert album “The... |
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