The thoroughly weird, thoroughly brilliant 'Mutant Palm' had been in hiatus for 10 days, and I was beginning to fear it might have disappeared forever. But now....... davescomeback!
Yes, 'Dave' returned from his two-week holiday (parents visiting) yesterday with two long, thoughtful (scarily earnest!) articles (here and here) on the Chongqing Nail House saga.
(By the way, I found quite an interesting article on the 'Nail House' story on openDemocracy the other day. It's written by Li Datong, supposedly one of China's most progressive and free-thinking journalists [he was famously sacked a year or so ago from his job as editor of a magazine called Bingdian, for treading on the government's toes once too often], although here he is contriving a somewhat pro-government spin on the story.)
He follows that up with a comparison between China and Sicily (and, by implication, between the Cosa Nostra and the CCP?), and with some alarming news of an environmental-disaster-in-the-making in the coastal city of Xiamen.
All rather heavy stuff. But the depth of research, the quality of writing is always impressive. And I'm sure he'll be returning to more oddball pastures soon - if you want skateboarding pandas or alien abductions (or skateboarding aliens and panda abductions), this is usually the place to find them.
Welcome back, Dave.
2 comments:
hey, thanks for the appreciation post. It's good to be back.
I'm not quite into skateboarding pandas, unless they're involved in some Chinese military project. But I'll probably do Chinese UFOs and abductions again (I have some stuff on a Beijing abduction lying around here somewhere).
Oh, and there will be Xinjiang stuff again. You probably noticed the posts on Al Qaeda in XJ and Uyghur pop star turned suicide Murat Nasirov.
I see you have an unstarted novel too. Bloody albatross, innit?
I'd be intrigued to know about 'abductions' in Beijing. Interest in UFOs doesn't seem to be mainstream thing yet; or at least, it wasn't a couple of years ago. I quizzed a bunch of my students at Bei Shi Da about it once, and they were only dimly aware of it, said there were a few magazines on it out there, but for weirdoes, not the kind of thing they would ever read. They were a little slow to put 2+2 together, as well. They initially professed complete ignorance of the 'Area 51' idea, but, when prompted, they all recalled encountering it in the film 'Independence Day'.
I have just discovered that under the 'rules' of the Googlewhack game, your pair of search terms are not supposed to be joined. Strange. It seems to make far more sense to me to seek out distinctive phrases on the Web rather than just unique pairs of unrelated words. This post is currently a unique return for "panda abductions". Let's hope it remains so.
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