I remember a scene in the early 1990s film City Slickers in which Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby are horseback riding slowly through the desert. They were having a discussion about the best and worst days of their life, but couldn’t agree on how to measure it. Daniel Stern’s character said that you [...]
Apologies for going dark (or, as a friend pointed out, white) for about 24 hours. I made a technical mistake while trying to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and inadvertently killed the blog, or thought I did. Fortunately my server host and friend was able to fix things up in no time. Amen. [...]
Hong Kong must be one of the weirder major cities in the world. I think it might actually be possible to traverse all of Hong Kong Island, for example, without ever setting foot outside. Every single square inch of the island and Kowloon is devoted to commercialism. There are beautiful parts of the city, and [...]
So I guess those non-smoking signs on the Beijing-Tianjin high speed trains are more than just decoration: A man was given three days in detention for breaking a non-smoking rule on a new high-speed rail line, Chinese state media said, an unusually severe punishment in a country where smoking bans are routinely ignored. He was [...]
As some of you know, a small bomb detonated inside Salvadors’ Coffee House in Kunming on Wednesday, fatally injuring one man. No one else was seriously injured, as the bomb exploded at 10:30am when there were few customers inside. The police have come but thus far a clear explanation of what happened has not emerged. [...]
A few new- or new to me- China blogs for you to feast on, though only one of them is in traditional blog format. Drumroll please… 1. Chinasmack- what Chinese 姑娘 and ä¼™å are saying on the internet- a useful summary of the more interesting trends on the Chinese interwang, translated into English. 2. Sexy [...]
I was going to write something funny and snarky about the Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at our fair President Bush last weekend, but felt like there was nothing to add. But that- and today’s news that 34 members of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior were arrested for possibly trying to resurrect the [...]
Barack Obama, aged 18. Still hard to believe this is the president-elect of the US
Two interesting articles on China from the American media: 1. From the Washington Post, the Chinese government has arrested a dissident for signing a petition calling for political reform. 2. From the New York Times, Chinese exports are down, signaling worry. The two events might seem unrelated; after all, one is a purely political story [...]
GoKunming reports today that China Eastern has launched a weekly flight between Kunming and Taipei, capital of Taiwan. As Chris notes in the post, this news would have been absolutely unthinkable only a few years ago. In fact, when I moved to China the big Taiwan Strait news was China’s enactment of an “anti-secessionist” law, [...]