Felt a pretty decent-sized earthquake here about ten minutes ago…biggest one I’ve felt since the “big one” of 1989. No details just yet, though I suspect some will emerge a bit later. Stay tuned. UPDATE: I pieced together a short piece for GoKunming about the earthquake, to which Chris had added more information. Apparently, roughly [...]
ESWN flagged this funny banner, hoisted by Nigerian soccer fans at the Olympics It says: “Our gymnastics are no good. Our ping pong is no good. But our soccer is good!”
Praxis, the company behind the LanguagePod series, has started a cool new blog called Learning on Your Terms. It’s written by John Biesnecker, a veteran of the China expat blogging scene and a Praxis employee. For insight into learning a foreign language (not just Chinese), there’s a lot of interesting material there. Through a link [...]
I’m of two minds regarding Barack Obama’s selection of Joseph Biden as his running mate. To articulate my mental struggle, here’s an imaginary dialogue: A- Great pick. Biden shores up Obama’s inexperience with foreign policy, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also has been among the most intelligent and rational thinkers on [...]
I still recall turning on the television on September 29, 2004, the first full day I ever spent in China. On CCTV9 (the only channel I got that was in English), I noted with amazement at the number of advertisements there were for the Beijing Olympics, then nearly four years away. After all, the previous [...]
The Wikipedia entry for John Edwards’ extramarital affair, an event Edwards admitted to roughly two weeks ago, has over 100 citations. Think about that- either someone took the time to compile the article himself, or enough people collaborated and cobbled together what was a very well-researched, thorough explanation. Either way, it’s just amazing. While we’re [...]
June Shih has a dispatch in Slate entitled “You think NBC is bad? You haven’t seen CCTV” in which she skewers the state-run Chinese behemoth for its breathlessly patriotic Olympic coverage. While I do agree with her fundamental point, the example she provides to illustrate her point seems a little dubious to me: Instead of [...]
In 1984, the American television journalist Lesley Stahl produced a report that rebutted several of President Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign talking points. Not long after the special was aired, she received a call from one of Reagan’s advisors. Expecting him to be angry at her negative coverage, she was stunned when the advisor thanked her. [...]
The conventional wisdom for the issue of female laowai in China is that finding a relationship can be frustratingly difficult. Why? Because while few Western women find Chinese men attractive, quite a lot of Western men find Chinese women attractive. This, at least, jives with my own observations as well as from countless conversations with [...]