The Many-Headed Tulsa

My mega-commenter, Tulsa, was going through a worryingly schizophrenic phase a while back - adopting numerous different aliases to post her regular contributions to my comment-threads. Heck, she even has different sets of aliases for different blogs that she frequents as a commenter. 'Tis a strange hobby, to be sure.

If some of you were confused or startled by the apparent burgeoning of my band of commenters, that was the reason. The plethora of obscure place names (and often unlikely-sounding ones, too - 'Cut & Shoot' is a town in the Mid-West??) recently used by commenters were all her. Or nearly all her (I got confused by 'Mariposa' the other day: that sounds like one of hers, but is actually the nom de plume of an English med student of my acquaintance).

No, 'Tulsa' - or however she chooses to name herself - is still my ONLY regular commenter on this site. Caren and Georg and Leah are much more infrequent visitors, and my old boozing buddies JohnA and The British Cowboy hang out almost exclusively over on the Barstool.

So, thank you (yet again), Tulsa. And it seems she's back on the medication now: the multiple-personality quirk is being laid to rest. Or so she assures me; although we haven't been able to put that to the test since she has been unable to comment recently because of China's ongoing Blogspot ban (and has instead been sending me her remarks by e-mail; I have promised to transcribe them as soon as I get my 'comment' access back...... Later today, with a bit of luck!).

Ah yes, thanks to the timely assistance of my tame 'Net Doctor', Jiri, I have finally got the infamous Firefox dodge working, so should be able to access Blogspot and Wikipedia free of hassle again from now on. So, watch out for the belated appearance of a rash of 'delayed' comments from Tulsa.

She has also accepted a new challenge from me (I was taunting her the other day, disbelieving her claim that she's read everything on my two blogs):

She is going to compile a 'Top 10 Recommended Posts' list for Froogville and Barstool Blues.

Watch out for it. (It may take a while.)

More hilarity from the studio

An unusual circumstance in the recording booth last week - we actually got a brand new, never-been-seen before script to read. Ordinarily, the major threat to our sanity during these marathon taping sessions is that we are doing the same tired old (Chinglish-ridden) dialogues - with just very slight variations, here and there - again and again and again and again and again.

It's exciting, refreshing to be given some novel material once in a while. But also a little wrong-footing - the 'comfort zone', the ability to 'do it in your sleep' is suddenly gone.

On this occasion - also somewhat unusually - my recording partner, Dishy Debs, and I got to read an entire Business English book from start to finish: a satisfying sense of completion that we are generally denied. And so, for once, we were really able to start enjoying the quite well-developed linking storyline about the lead character: an American manager posted to Britain, a single father bringing up a young daughter, the emerging romantic tension between him and his vivacious young nanny/housekeeper.

Now, one of the big problems with this work is that it is all done on a very tight schedule: you don't have any time for such wasteful nonsense as pre-reading and script-editing and getting in character. Oh no, you have to sight-read. We get used to this. We develop standard ways of differentiating our voice - just a little - when we suddenly discover a second (and sometimes even a third) character of our gender in a dialogue. (Children are the worst: my voice is too deep to play 9-year-olds - but sometimes I have to try!)

With this book, however, there were several dialogues with 3, 4, and even 5 characters of the same gender. Some of them were recurring characters throughout the book (I don't think Debs and I even tried to be very consistent in our voice characterisations for most of them). We had no option but to go into regional accents. Debs has a pretty good 'ooh-aaah-m'dear' West Country burr, so most of the minor characters ended up sounding like denizens of darkest Zummerzet. Almost unconsciously, I followed suit. Just for variety, we threw in a bit of Welsh, Brummie, Scouse, Scots and Cockney as well. Half-way through the book, we discovered the main story was set in Manchester - the one accent neither of us could even make a stab at!

Oh well, nobody really cares.

The pièce de résistance, though, came after 4 hours in the booth: in the final chapter (dashing single dad having belatedly confessed his crush on the nanny and proposed to her) there was a wedding - with a cast of thousands. Well, a dozen or so, anyway. Another volley of accents from a tea-room in Yeovil. And I got to read extended excerpts from the marriage ceremony - AS A VICAR.

What larks! Talk about ambitions you didn't even know you had!

I did go for the effete, worldweary, sing-song voice stereotypically used for English vicars (what else was left to me??). It was only with difficulty that I restrained myself from adopting the extravagant speech impediment of Peter Cook's frail Archbishop in 'The Princess Bride' - "Mawwidge...."

A poem with "Chinese characteristics"

Or, rather, a poem with a few details that point specifically to a China setting - which is why I've had to suppress it until now.

The motorcycle-and-sidecar reference is, I think, very Beijing. There may be other cities where this phenomenon exists as well, but in all my travels I've never noticed it to anything like the extent we see it here. Old-fashioned motorcycle-and-sidecar combinations, putt-putting 'Wallace & Gromit' jobs, are a major cottage industry here: there are 100s of the things on the roads. Their popularity is perhaps now finally on the wane just a little (as mopeds and small motorcycles have been introduced in the last few years), but I think they will long hang on to a decent market since they are such a stylish and far, far cheaper alternative to a car. I've always hankered after one myself.

The fake 15th Century world map (link to the intermittently interesting East Asian history blog, Frog In A Well) - that, of course, was a topical reference from a year or so ago, tied in to Gavin Menzies' laughable book about the Chinese supposedly discovering the Americas a couple of generations before Columbus et al (but then forgetting to tell anyone - actually, that would be quite typical).

And the hand-grenade?? Well, there is a surprising vogue for 'army surplus' stores here. There was one on Dongdan my buddy Big Frank and I used to visit, run by a rather creepy young Chinese guy we dubbed 'Herman', after the character in The Simpsons (he kept a few snapshots around the store of himself in full Nazi regalia!). Live ordnance is probably not that easy to come by, but dummy hand-grenades abound.

I think I have commented on here before that "list poems are easy". Well, yes and no. See what you think. I really like the combination of funny & bleak here.

Don't ask me why I like the number '17' so much - I'm really not sure.

17 (or so) Things To Do Before I Die

Learn to yodel
Shave my head
Climb the Great Wall
(And startle tourists with my yodelling)
Run a Marathon
Write a novel
Buy a case of good scotch to celebrate
Buy a work of modern art
Buy a fake 15th Century map of the world
Buy a hand-grenade
Buy a motorcycle-and-sidecar
Buy an inflatable woman
Buy a bikini (two bikinis!)
Ride around town on the motorcycle
With the inflatable woman in the sidecar
Both of us wearing bikinis

Ditch the inflatable woman, try to pick up girls
Offer them a ride
Ask them to wear the bikini
Learn to endure the repeated rejections

And when I have grown good at that
I will come and find you
Hear your side of the story
Forgive you
Sleep with you one last time
Forgive myself
Pull the pin from the grenade

Disclaimer: I know this takes a turn towards the dark and stalker-ish at the end. This really isn't me. I don't brood on things excessively, and I'm certainly not a grudge-bearer about failed relationships. Writing allows us to live other lives. However, there were some references to myself thrown in; I think a few of my friends got a bit alarmed when I wrote this at the beginning of last year - because I had just shaved my head and started training for a Marathon.

A 'Bad China Day'

Every expat over here has a 'bad China day' from time to time. Even the ones who are most in love with the country, the ones most "in touch with the culture", the ones wearing the spectacles with the deepest rosy hue. Sometimes you get whole sequences of them together, and you start to wonder whether every day isn't a 'bad China day'. At that point, you should probably leave.

It hasn't happened to me yet, and I don't think it will - but I have had some rough times here. This time of the year, in fact, is always particularly bad: work is slow to pick up after the two or three months of disruption caused by Christmas, New Year, and the Chinese Spring Festival following so closely on one another; dwindling savings start to jeopardize your plans for a summer holiday back home; trying to find something more stable and permanent in the employment line for next year is a perennially fruitless task, yet each year there will be new illusory possibilities to taunt you briefly with the prospect of security, before ambushing you once again with disappointment; and then, of course, just around the corner is the annual or semi-annual ordeal of visa renewal (a topic for another time, I think).

You see, all of these examples are fairly specific to the situation in China; so, when stuff like this happens to you, you can justifiably say "China gives you a hard time sometimes". I was cruising around some of the 'China blogs' last week (just to reassure myself how worthless most of them are), and found quite a few examples of the 'bad China day' story. Except that NONE of them really were. "I lost some money." "I've got a bitch of a cold." "I got some bad news from home." "My girlfriend dumped me." "My mobile phone's broken." Hello, people - that shit isn't China-specific at all; that shit happens everywhere. When you have a day where a lot of things like that go wrong for you, that's just a shitty day, it's not a 'bad China day'.

Trust me on this, I know about 'bad China days'. When you discover - by chance, at the very last moment - that 3 of the next 4 one-day-a-week teaching gigs you have at a private high school are cancelled for various obscure reasons that you could not possibly have foreseen, and you weren't told because the headmaster doesn't give a damn about your existence unless you miss a class, and, this being January and you having no other work at all on at the moment, you could otherwise have taken a nice holiday - that's a 'bad China day'. When a teaching colleague of yours becomes mentally unwell, and your employer summarily sacks him, and kicks him out of his accommodation without paying the return half of his airfare reimbursement, and revokes his visa, and he turns up on your doorstep gibbering and weeping and begging for succour on the eve of one of the week-long national holidays - that's a 'bad China day'. When your best friend gets attacked by a murderous psychopath with a hatchet, and then the taxi driver doesn't want to take you to the hospital because he's worried about getting his seat covers messy - that's a 'bad China day'.

Just this weekend, I had what threatened to be a more minor kind of 'bad China day'. I went to get a haircut at my usual barbershop - and they gave me shit. I go there every month or two. My Chinese is lousy, their English is lousy, but they know me, we get along (this is one of those situations where I am very sceptical as to whether it is much help to learn Chinese; I don't think any of my Chinese-speaking foreign friends could really hold their own in conversation with a hairdresser). Except this Saturday - they're blooding a new boy, so none of the guys who've cut my hair before are coming anywhere near me. The new boy is a bundle of nerves. He thinks he's got to somehow force me to have the hairwash first, for the extra few RMB - even though I never do that, even though it's obvious I've just washed my hair. Then he wants detailed instructions on the cut in Chinese. When he doesn't get them, he retires in a panic, and has to be goaded by the more experienced cutters into coming back to get started. He's not too bad once he finally gets going, although the 'tidying up' threatens to take forever. And he seems to keep wanting to completely fuck up my parting (I discourage him, gently but firmly). I have explained at the outset (I have just about this much Chinese, although pointing and miming usually works just fine) that I have somewhere else to go and that I expect 10-15 minutes to be plenty of time to complete the cut. He takes nearer 25 - and would have taken 25 more if left to his own devices. I have been through this rigmarole countless times before, but it is still kind of irritating - especially when you're in a hurry. And it doesn't usually happen at this shop - I thought they knew me there now!

So, it's now the middle of the afternoon, and I want to take a taxi to the centre of town to catch an art exhibition. Ordinarily, this is a great city for taxis: there is a generous over-supply of them, and you very seldom have to wait more than 30 seconds to flag one down. Not this afternoon, however. It's quite a warm day, so perhaps people are taking cabs even for very short hops, to avoid getting too sweaty (this does become a serious factor during the summer; many cabbies are reluctant to take you on long journeys, because they can make more money with multiple short, minimum-fare trips when the weather is very hot). A couple of vacant cabs go by, but don't want to stop for me. I HATE it when that happens. Eventually, after nearly 5 minutes, I get a cab. I get one of the new drivers, bit of a dipshit, doesn't know his way around the city; if I had more time, and the cab situation were better, I'd probably get out and try to find another, but..... I figure I'll take my chances. I get distracted by a phone call from a friend. I've never been to this gallery by taxi before anyway (it's walkable from my apartment, but I'm running late). The driver thinks he's somewhere near, and keeps asking me if he should stop. I'm getting tired of this. I think he's somewhere near too. I tell him to stop. Fuck it - it's probably another half a mile or so, but I'll walk.

I don't know any of the street names in this part of town, and I'm rather further away than I thought I was. Also, I manage to miss the right turning (because the names of the streets change quite unnecessarily every block or two, and sometimes even on the same block, depending on which street sign you're looking at - another rather China-specific or Beijing-specific problem), and end up walking in a big circle all around the place until I finally find it. This wouldn't be so bad if the city blocks weren't a mile or two long (another very Beijing-specific problem).

So, I arrive at the National Art Museum Of China (or Namoc, as they like to abbreviate it - sounds like a character in The Lord Of The Rings to me!) to catch the penultimate day of the big 'History of American Art' show - and I find that two-thirds of it has already been packed up; only the landscapes of the American West on the 3rd Floor are still on show. This seems to happen a lot at Namoc: only three of its multiple floors actually have display space, and every damn time I go there two of them will be closed. Still, you don't expect such a major exhibition as this to close a day early.

So, yes, that was shaping up to be a pretty 'bad China day' (and there was some more to come later), but..... you know what? I found I didn't really give a damn. I am too well inured to these petty annoyances now: you can't keep letting them get on top of you. And I know how to balance blame: it was partly, perhaps mostly my fault that the barber got so nervous around me, that I couldn't give the taxi driver better directions, that I couldn't find my way there on foot, that I missed part of the exhibition (heck, I've known it was on this past month, and have kept on not getting around to going to see it for the 2 or 3 previous weekends).

And above all, it was such a gorgeous day. Clear blue skies, bright sunshine, refreshing breezes, trees everywhere heavy with blossom. It's very difficult to stay in a grump for long in such conditions - instead, this became a 'good China day'. It's worth reminding ourselves that we do get quite a few of those as well.

Any 'New Town'

The aerial photographs of my home from GoogleEarth that I posted at the beginning of last week put me in mind of some of the more sinister uses that such satellite reconnaissance has been put to in recent years, and thus I headed the post with a quotation from the opening of this piece by the popular English poet, John Betjeman (Britain's Poet Laureate during my childhood, and an occasional, avuncular presenter of TV documentaries).

This is one of his angriest works, one of our first and ugliest 'new towns' (even its name is unpleasant!) becoming a pretext for an excoriating attack on all that he found unwholesome in modern life. However, it's direct and straightforward enough in its language to be reasonably accessible to some of the students I've taught here in China. Of course, they do all (ALL, without exception) fondly suppose that it is just about England. Oh, no: this is so painfully relevant to modern China: the tackiness of all the new building, the anomie and soullessness that a consumer culture engenders. I doubt if any Chinese poet has so well encapsulated the growing pains of the urbanization process in this country today as Betj did here, 70 years ago. "Tinned minds, tinned breath" - that's China.

Even the cabbages might seem to have a special relevance for readers here. Cabbages are hugely popular (the elongated, Chinese kind); here in the North, at any rate, they used to be way the most common vegetable, just about the only vegetable many people had access to - a staple of the common man's diet. The mass influx of cabbages into the cities used to be one of the early signs of Spring, and you'd see piles of them, sometimes standing several feet high, in any and every available corner. This was, apparently, still quite a common sight in Beijing as recently as 10 or 12 years ago. There's a nice description of it in Tim Clissold's book, Mr China (a classic on the perils of doing business in China - though Clissold himself seems superhumanly resilient despite the horror stories he suffered here). In the poor neighbourhoods around me, you do to this day occasionally see a stack of cabbages big enough to feed a single family for a few months.

The earth exhales.



Slough

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town—
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

John Betjeman (1906-1984)

A top tip

Yesterday was a day of Szechuan hotpot. Today is a day of regret.

Not regret for the sore arse, which was entirely expected, but for my failure to heed the sage advice of my buddy The Choirboy when he said: "I think I'd better put some loo roll in the fridge tonight."

Yes, I'll have to try that next time.

A poetical thought for the week

Four be the things I were better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

I'm not with Dottie on this one. I've never been prone to freckles, but have no objection to them in others; in moderation, they can be quite charming. Doubt has never been much of a problem for me. Curiosity, I suppose, often leads me into problems, but I wouldn't be without it. Ditto, love: I'm definitely of the "better to have loved and lost" school. Strange how one can so admire a smart joke, even when completely rejecting its content!

Pulling out nails

The story of the Chongqing 'nail house' reminded me of this poem by the Croatian, Vasco Popa (or should it be Vasko? Most of the references to him on the Net seem to favour this spelling, but it was 'Vasco' in the poetry anthology, The Rattle Bag, where I discovered him. There's not much information on him out there - his Wikipedia entry is a stub. Does anyone know anything more about him?). It's part of the macabre 'nursery rhyme' sequence, Games, others of which I have quoted here before.

The Nail

One be the nail another the pincers
The others are workmen

The pincers grip the nail by the head
Grip him with their teeth with their hands
And tug him tug
To get him out of the floor
Usually they only pull his head off
It's hard to get a nail out of a floor

The workmen say
The pincers are no good
They smash their jaws and break their arms
And throw them out of the window

After that someone else be the pincers
Someone else the nail
The others are workmen

From 'Games' by Vasco Popa (tr. from the Serbo-Croatian by Anne Pennington)

Goodbye to the 'Nail House'

Amazing picture! This has been quite the cause célèbre in the Chinese blogosphere for the last month or so. I only caught on to it at the very end of the saga, via Chinese blogger Yee (who I've been reading for help in defeating Chinese Net censorship). The place was finally torn down last week.

'Nail house' has become a common expression in China over the past decade to describe lone standouts against development, the last householder to defy the bulldozers being like a stubborn nail you just can't pull out of a plank of wood. With all the new building projects going on around the country, this is a very common phenomenon. We have them here in Beijing: there was still one (last time I looked, anyway) in the otherwise desolate waste of what was once the 'South Sanlitun Bar Street'. There are one or two conspicuously tatty old buildings somehow still standing on the snazzily redeveloped Jiugulou Dajie around the corner from me. There are, I suspect, a few still desperately hanging on in Qianmen, the latest area of Beijing to be visited by the wrecking ball.

However, it doesn't often happen that the developers press ahead with the new building while a 'nail house' is still there. In this case, as you can see, they dug out a 50ft deep foundation pit all around it, leaving the house isolated on a pinnacle of earth. It was such a striking image that it attracted a lot of attention all around China, and many people sought to exploit this to highlight their similar grievances, making a pilgrimage to the scene in Chongqing municipality and posting their own complaints at the entrance to the building site. The Chinese media were banned from covering the event (how much attention has it received overseas?), but a young Chinese blogger called 'Zola' decided to go there to cover the story as a 'citizen reporter', taking photos and videos with his phone camera. You can read his story on Global Voices. And there's a series of pictures of China's most famous 'nail house' here.

The Chinese legal framework is pretty ramshackle. Laws are often unclear or contradictory, and their practical consequences can be entirely at the whim of a local court's interpretation. It is only relatively recently that private citizens have acquired the right to 'own' property; but in fact ultimate ownership still resides in the state, and property owners only purchase fixed-term 'land use' rights (currently it's a 70-year period for residential property). Assessing appropriate levels of compensation when land is 'reclaimed' for major construction projects is of course problematical (I have heard here in Beijing, for example, that there are standard compensation scales used based on the type of property and square footage, but that no account is taken of the value of a business based there), and 'compulsory purchase' procedures are rather a muddy affair. There seems to be a lot of argument at the moment about whether the court in this instance had the right to order the demolition of the house. I'd like to try and find out more about the legal ins and outs of this.

Cool picture though, eh?

Another milestone

The combined total of posts on my two blogs has now passed the 500 mark. I thought I'd give the honour of passing that threshold to the 'little brother' of the two blogs: the early morning post over on the Barstool today was No. 500.

Ain't no stoppin' us now!

I had originally planned to run these blogs, just as an experiment (an experiment in what, you may well ask), for "about a year"; but I can see myself now getting tempted to try to surpass the 1,000 posts tally.... and that might take a little more than year. Then again, maybe not, at the rate we've been going lately.

Thanks for your support over the past 7 months. And if you've just stumbled upon us for the first time - you've got a lot of catching up to do.

Burn this

This week was Qing Ming, China's big ancestor-worship holiday - traditionally a time for family outings to ancestral graveyards to "sweep the tombs" (although that seems to be a custom that prevails more strongly in South China; up here in the North, people are not that enthused about travelling anywhere for the holiday). The festival is also celebrated by burning grave offerings: play money despatched by fire, to keep your forefathers solvent in the Great Beyond.

There are one or two other smaller festivals during the year which involve similar rites.

And then there are the semi-regular "rubbish burning days". It would seem that a lot of domestic trash - at least in the poor slum districts around where I live - is just burned by householders on the edge of the street outside their front door. This happens about once a month, and I am told that the city authorities decree approved days for it - though on what, if any, rational basis I cannot begin to imagine.

"Rubbish burning days", and the "money-burning" religious holidays, never seem to happen on days of clear skies and fresh breezes (of which we've had a lot for the last 2 or 3 weeks). No, they always fall on the isolated day of cool damp overcast - so that all the smoke will be trapped at ground level. And believe me, if several million people are burning Monopoly money all at once, it makes A LOT of smoke.

I have commented on this before. I may well comment on it again. The shocking levels of pollution are probably the most inescapable and dispiriting negative feature of life in China today.

Hmmm, I suppose this is the first time I have written a post like this and actually named the country. I'm not sure what 'Label' to give this new phenomenon, now that my old 'Where in the world am I?' strand is defunct. 'Token China Rants' perhaps? Maybe not - I hope that I generally achieve a fairly tolerant and detached perspective in these posts, more wry than raging. This particular offering is more of a China Wheeze than a China Rant, with my lungs rasping as they are.

Perhaps just 'China Observations' will do. Yes, I'll plump for that.

Leaping over The Great Firewall

I have taken to calling it Kafka Central (because its motivations, its 'logic' are so impenetrable), but the regime of Internet censorship which we suffer in China is more generally known amongst the expat community here as the Net Nanny, and the collective apparatus of interference with the free flow of information via the Net which it wields against us is mockingly termed The Great Firewall Of China.

Although the decisions about what to block, and when and why, are taken in obscure government departments, the actual implementation - so I understand - has to be carried out by the Internet service providers; and although there are only two major players (are there any minor competitors? I don't know!), China NetCom and China Telecom, their corporate structure is highly regionalized. The elaborate architecture of the Internet, and the myriad different methods of fucking it up (thank you again, Cisco), also make the question of just how The Great Firewall works a rather complicated one: there is often A LOT of local variation in what is blocked, and when, and how effectively. There are probably some good books to be written about this issue; perhaps there already is one - all I could find in a quick search on Amazon was this: You've Got Dissent! Chinese Dissident Use of the Internet and Beijing's Counter-Strategies. I also turned up this article from BusinessWeek from a year or so ago. [Update: This article from The Atlantic at the beginning of March 2008, "The Connection Has Been Re-set", provides quite a detailed explanation of the techniques our Chinese Net censors use to do what they do.]

So, what do we do? Well, many people swear by Tor, a software that allows 'secure browsing'. The free demo version is, alas, CRAWLINGLY slow (pretty much unusably so in China, where connection speeds are mostly pretty poor anyway). I may just have to bite the bullet and subscribe to the 10-bucks-a-month version - as soon as I get myself a credit card again.

Proxy services are a lifesaver..... up to a point. They all seem to be 'non-secure', which means that they can't give you access to any page with a sign-in feature (and thus, you can't comment on a blog). Moreover, they don't support large file transfers for video or music downloads. And Nanny does have some tricks up her sleeve for interfering even with these brave champions of a Free Internet: Proxyline (recently my favoured service, because it was faster than Anonymouse, and free of the annoying, embarrassing pop-ups for porno that pay for the free version of that German-based anonymizer) seems to have been torpedoed for good this last week, and even the extremely nimble and resilient Anonymouse was knocked out of action for a little while. (It may well be that Nanny can completely block a site - even via anonymizers - whenever it chooses to, but doesn't often choose to do so. A Chinese blog I was recently referred to is currently unavailable even via Anonymouse; however, with a China-based blog, of course, it is entirely possible that the authorities managed to get it deleted from its server.) There are articles on Wikipedia (blocked! Use Anonymouse!) about the GFW here and here. And Andrew Lih, an American Chinese academic who is researching a book on Wikipedia, keeps an interesting blog (if mostly too technical for the likes of me!), which often comments on issues of censorship in China.

I mentioned the other day that Chinese blogger Yee has been advertising a 'workaround' which involves modifying the settings of the Firefox browser to access popular blocked sites via alternate IP addresses. This should give you a fast, straightforward connection, and allow you to post comments, download files, and view video clips as normal. In theory..... One blogger I know here in Beijing tells me that he eventually got this to work, but it took him a whole morning of frustration and profanity, and he has no idea what he did differently the final time he tried it. I'm getting nowhere with it. Neither is Yee, come to that. He's chasing up his hacker chum, Fermi, who originally suggested the dodge, for more information. I wait anxiously for news.

There's also an interesting discussion on Bruce Schneier's blog about security issues, from around this time last year (Why does Net censorship always become such a big problem in China around the middle of the year? Go figure. Is there a certain anniversary coming up that gives the CCP leadership the heebie-jeebies? You betcha!). It would seem that you can defeat the GFW by changing your firewall settings to ignore 'reset' messages. Yes, great, guys. HOW?? Can anyone help on this?? I am completely un-techie, I'm afraid (I may be faking it a bit in this post - but I am in essence a complete Luddite: I use computers grudgingly, only because I have to, and have next-to-zero understanding of them; nay, I fear them - almost as much as I fear bicycles, and that's saying a lot!).

Anyway, if you're in China (or somewhere else with such a stupidly repressive regime) and trying to read me (or anything else on Blogspot - I'm not vain; just trying to do a public service here), use Anonymouse: that seems to be the most reliable and resilient of the common proxy services (if you know of a better one, please share the information); it also has the advantage over some of its rivals of automatically anonymizing any links that you follow. If you want to read the Comments on a Blogspot blog, just click on the post title - that takes you to a page showing only that post, complete with the comments (I don't know why, but it does - very useful in these trying times). Clicking on the 'comments' button, alas, won't work if you're using an anonymizer.

If you want to leave me a comment..... well, you can't, for now - unless you can get Yee's/Fermi's Firefox dodge to work for you. You could, however, (since you probably know me) send me a comment by e-mail...... and I'll post it for you one day (this is how my comment-junkie Tulsa is now getting her daily fix). If you want me to reply to a comment of yours (which you have managed to leave because you are lucky enough to live in an uncensored country) - please BE PATIENT. At the moment, I am locked out of the 'Leave a comment' facility on my two blogs as well. I will find a way around it eventually. Or maybe Kafka Central will just lighten up a bit. In a couple of months, perhaps.

Update 17/01/08: I've just written a new post summarizing the various methods of beating the Great Firewall blocks, and added links to them in the blog sidebar. Yee's Firefox workaround can be fiddly to get working, but is worth persisting with; it has long been my favoured method of viewing Blogspot blogs (though unfortunately it has stopped working for Wikipedia). The Tor software I mentioned is rather better these days (though the free version is still a bit slow at times), but now renamed XeroBank xB Browser. I've also been recommended to try a similar application called Hotspot Shield. However, for a quick fix to the censorship problem (no downloads!) you should try "Method #2" on the Kallahar's Place proxy page. Fuller details of all this in the new post - check it out.

A recommendation

I don't often do this, but.....

Well, a month ago, you may recall, I recommended a couple of very funny posts on Leah's American-based but (often, slightly) China-focused blog.

So, now, I'd like to recommend 'Dave' - or 'davesgonechina', as he likes to refer to himself. 'davesgoneloopy' often seems more appropriate these days.

A couple of years ago - I think while researching a possible holiday, which did not ultimately take place - I turned up a fascinating blog on Xinjiang, one of the western provinces of China. Well, actually it is an 'Autonomous Region' for the Uyghur people, one of China's 56 officially recognised ethnic minorities. The 'autonomy' doesn't really count for much, since there has been a vigorous colonization programme over the last 50 years - 'Han-ification' - which means that the Uyghurs are now outnumbered in their homeland by ethnically Chinese Han people. Anyway, 'Dave' (an American, I suppose, although he's niggardly in giving out any biographical details) was teaching out there, and had started up this blog called 'Musing Under The Tenement Palm'. And it was fascinating: consistently well-written, intelligent, concerned, formidably thorough in its research (there was a particularly good series of articles on the bingtuan out there - a kind of paramilitary 'pioneer corps' which had managed most of the initial Han colonization and is now a 'state within the state' with an elaborate adminstrative and judicial apparatus of its own; it also happens to control most of the economy of the region). Alas, Dave's excellent blog ran into problems - I don't know whether they were personal, technical, or censorial - and disappeared.

It was gone for a year or 18 months, I guess. But at the beginning of this year, suddenly he was back. I think he's now in the southern coastal province of Fujian - which is kind of a pity, because I miss the commentary on Xinjiang. However, the relocation doesn't entirely explain the radical shift in the 'personality' of the blog. Whereas the old 'Tenement Palm' was pretty serious stuff, mostly on the culture and politics of western 'China', and of Central Asia generally, its reincarnation - now styled 'Mutant Palm' - is far more diverse, more left-field, more goofily eclectic. 'davesgoneweird'!!

However, though less educational than his previous blog, it is still well-written and extremely entertaining, and provides fascinating insights into Chinese 'pop culture'. He admits that he's doing it largely as an incentive to improve his Mandarin skills; so he's spending a huge amount of time trawling the Chinese Internet for interesting tidbits. In this post, for example, he investigates the recently burgeoning Chinese fascination with Ufology, and discovers that they now have an emerging Erich von Daniken figure of their own in the ludicrous (but soon-to-be-very-wealthy) Zhang Hui. And here he links to a video of a trio of young Chinese guys calling themselves 'The Crazy Migrants', who make hilarious home-made, lip-sync'ed music videos; this one makes fun of Zhang Yimou's latest turgid martial arts epic 'Curse of the Golden Flower' (how can you not love a post entitled 'Crazed Migrant Workers Spoof Gong Li's Breasts'?!).

I am impatient with or disappointed in the majority of 'China blogs'; many of them, in fact, I actively dislike. They tend to be tedious, self-important, and indifferently written. They are often far too obviously pleased with themselves, and, in particular, prone to exult in their prowess in getting to grips with Chinese language and culture. Dave's not like that: he wears his erudition lightly; he has a very unobtrusive blog persona. He just likes to share cool stuff that he's found.

He is, therefore, well worth recommending to my other readers. I just hope I haven't jinxed him. At the moment, 'Mutant Palm' is on Blogspot, so there have been problems of access recently; and he hasn't posted anything in over a week. Come back, Dave; I miss you.

A seasonal haiku

Spasm of colour,
New blossoms scenting the breeze:
The brief hopes of Spring.

Day of celebration, day of mourning

I didn't notice at the time, but yesterday evening's long post in praise of Wile E. Coyote (my 'avatar'!) was No. 300 here on the increasingly prolific Froogville.

Alas, the celebratory mood this instils in me is quickly crushed by the discovery this morning that Kafka Central has resumed its campaign of obstruction against us denizens of Blogspot.

The really bad news is that the Kafka Boys appear - for now - to have worked out how to block Anonymouse too. (I hope that's only going to be very temporary; they have in the past managed to interfere with the operation of Anonymouse, at least for selected destination sites; but those fine German anonymizers always seems to have got one step ahead of them again quite quickly, and restored their proxy service within a few days or so. I shall miss Wikipedia, if they don't.)

The really, really bad news is that the hacker 'workaround' for Firefox - being widely circulated and adopted in blogging circles here in China over the last couple of weeks (see the rather interesting English-language Chinese blogger Yee for details) - also seems to be no longer functional. Or maybe I'm just crap at tweaking my browser settings. But no - it seems like a fairly straightforward, idiot-proof procedure: I'm sure even I can handle that. I must suppose that the recommended proxy IP addresses for fast and secure re-routing to top blog sites have been noted by the Kafka Boys (that's the trouble with posting this stuff publicly: the censors are bound to cotton on to it almost as quickly as the 'underground' blog fans who are seeking to evade them) and targeted for blocking also.

I understand that there is a constant battle for the control of the Internet between would-be censors and the censorship-defiers, and that usually the censorship-defiers come out on top, mostly sooner rather than later. Let's hope that continues to be the way of things. I haven't previously had such an intimate personal interest in the struggle.

Strange to reflect that, in this instance, the Kafka Boys assume the role of Wile E. Coyote, constantly unwrapping their new and ever more elaborate censoring toys from The Acme Corporation (well, I'm told most of them come from Cisco, actually - check out their less-than-convincing defence here, and some of the accusations against them summarized here), but always being quickly outstripped by the astonishing speediness of response from the Chinese hackers and bloggers. For once in my life, I am praying for the Coyote to get splatted by his own technology!!

At least, for the moment, Blogger is open again. It's just that neither I, nor any of my friends in China (the vast majority of the tiny readership), would seem to be able to view them.

I am annoyed. Very annoyed. And plotting my revenge.....

What cartoon character are YOU?

My friend Kris recently e-mailed me one of those divertingly silly little 'personality profile' quizzes which purports to categorize you definitively within the space of just 10 questions - and to do so in terms of the traits of a well-known cartoon character.

I don't need to do a silly quiz to tell me that. Quite obviously, I am Wile E. Coyote. I might aspire to the insouciance and suavity and (mostly) triumphing over my enemies of Bugs Bunny or The Pink Panther, but I can't fool myself - I am Wile.

According to the quiz, I am SpongeBob Squarepants. So was Kris. So is just about everybody, I would imagine - that is very much the range where most of the responses are likely to fall. I'm a little pissed off I didn't make it to being Charlie Brown. Just a couple more points and I would have been there. If only I hadn't perversely insisted that a rock gig is a more fun date than a candlelit dinner, I would have been. (But how come Charlie Brown is supposed to be even more strait-laced and neurotic than Spongebob? That doesn't sound right!)

Of course, the problem with this quizlet is that - being fashioned in America - many of the characters are unknown to me. Apparently Kris's husband is 'Elmo'. Who the f*** is Elmo?! And, of course, it shamefully overlooks characters from British cartoons. Dangermouse & Penfold, Wallace & Gromit, Captain Pugwash, Zebedee, Windy Miller - these would all have been useful additions to the range of possible personality types.

Even amongst the American canon, there are some heinous omissions: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, The Pink Panther, Snoopy, Duckman, Bart and Homer (yes, OK, you could probably run the whole thing on characters from 'The Simpsons').

But how could they miss out Wile E. Coyote? That was, I think, quite simply the greatest cartoon series ever made: such elegant simplicity in its characters, location, and premise; such tireless inventiveness in wringing new gags from the same endlessly repeated situation. Aristotle would have approved: it conforms nicely to his tenets of classical tragedy; the Coyote's 'flaw', his excessive confidence in his ability to overcome any difficulty by using his superior brainpower, is in fact precisely that of Oedipus Rex - though cannily updated by marrying it to the modern world's preoccupation with trying to use technology to solve all its problems.

The Coyote is rather admirable in his resourcefulness, his perseverance, his indomitable spirit - even if his obsessiveness so often blinds him to his own peril. He is, I think, a more completely sympathetic character than Bugs or The Pink Panther, who are both sometimes prone to selfishness and smugness (with Bugs, you often find yourself rooting a little bit for Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam, and certainly for Daffy Duck). They, of course, are typically 'unreal' heroes who can breeze through life enjoying almost continual success. The Coyote - this is his great charm - is exaggeratedly fallible, a put-upon Everyman.

And he might not be the first or only cartoon character to use the gag of being able to defy gravity until he notices he is running on thin air - but he made it his own. I never tire of that joke.

There are so many wonderful things about this show: it has resonances far beyond its 10 minutes of apparently trivial chase comedy. The constant misadventures with products purchased by mail-order make a universal connection with the audience: we all know that experience of having the excitement of a new purchase evaporate within seconds of our getting it out of the box - finding that the instructions are inadequate, parts are missing, it's hellishly difficult to assemble, it just doesn't darn well work like it's supposed to. The moment of realisation, of resignation - so brilliantly captured on the Coyote's face - when he sees that there's no longer any ground beneath his feet, or that the Roadrunner has once again bested him, or that his latest ACME contraption is about to backfire on him, reminds us all of the sinking feeling in our stomachs as knowledge of our latest failure or disaster dawns on us. And the long, long fall to the canyon floor, disappearing in a tiny puff of dust, is the journey that we all make to oblivion.

Yes, in many ways, the Coyote ought to be a profoundly depressing figure for us to identify with: he presents us with a view of life as a Sisyphean round of constant endeavour, constant setback, inevitable failure. And he suffers some appalling violence. Luckily, he is physically indestructible. What makes the show so oddly inspiring, though, is that he is also indestructible in spirit. There is something very touching, very uplifting about the way in which the Coyote is always undaunted by his many misfortunes; getting up, dusting himself off, and trying again after each new calamity.

He also benefits from having such a uniquely unlovable nemesis. The Roadrunner has no redeeming features, almost no character (beyond an apparent brainlessness, and an occasional propensity to taunt the unfortunate Coyote). Its only distinguising trait is its hugely irritating Beep-beep cry. It is a mere cipher, representing everything that annoys us in our lives: every aggravation at work, every goal that eludes us, every problem we can't solve. I can't think of a single other show - cartoon or live action - where audience sympathy lies so exclusively with one character (and a character who lacks obvious attraction himself, at that).

[Well, a former girlfriend of mine, The Buddhist, did once tell me that she preferred the Roadrunner to the Coyote, but I really struggle to believe that; surely she must just have been saying it to wind me up?]

Some 20 years ago, the English 'adult' comic Viz advertised in its back pages a T-shirt (probably unlicensed) featuring the Coyote having finally caught the Roadrunner, picking it up by the throat and leering at it savagely. Although, of course, another key part of the appeal of the show is that it is a 'silent comedy', here - in his improbable moment of triumph - we allow Wile to have a speech bubble. He snarls: "Beep-beep now, you bastard!"

I thought that would make a great jogging shirt for me, but I never did get around to buying it - one of the few regrets in my life.

Yes, I am Wile E Coyote. I may not be quite so obsessive-compulsive as he is, nor do I share his faith in modern technology; but I have made him my role-model - in the elevation of failure to an art-form, and in the refusal ever to be cowed by the world's constant unfairness and unkindness. I may be a failure, but I am a resilient and strangely optimistic failure.

The things that please me

I just recovered one of my favourite books, Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman', from my drinking pal The Choirboy (also a fan, re-reading), after a couple of weeks bereft.

I understand it has recently acquired a new - and much larger - cult following as a result of being referenced in the American TV series 'Lost'. Oh dear - 'my' secret no more.

Although I haven't yet read all O'Brien's books, I have read a fair few, and this one for me stands out head-and-shoulders above the rest. All of them, even his extravagantly praised (by Graham Greene, anyway, in an early review) first novel, 'At Swim-Two-Birds', are fairly random mish-mashes of material left over from his Irish Times funny column, 'The Cruiskeen Lawn'. Only 'The Third Policeman', for me, actually hangs together as a novel (and that only just).

But the writing is just exquisite. Flipping through it just now, mildly pissed and nostalgic for the time of my last reading of it a decade or more ago, I found something striking, marvellous on almost every page. Every page. Every paragraph, almost every line. This is extraordinary writing, and extraordinarily funny - if you get how he is at the same time both pastiching and celebrating traditional Irish phraseology.

I particularly loved this bit, about a momentous, windswept nighttime bicycle ride:



"Other winds were moving about in the stillness of the evening, loitering in the trees and moving leaves and grasses to show that the green world was still present in the dark. Water by the roadside, always overshouted in the roistering day, now performed audibly in its hidings."

Honestly, I almost weep for joy. The observation, the phrasing is so magical. I have to read this book again.

Music visible

My passing reference to Charlie Parker the other day reminded me of this well-known micro-tribute to the great man by the English poet, Adrian Mitchell (often considered as one of 'the Liverpool poets' of the '60s, in style if not in geographical origin - the Wikipedia article on the group points out that Mitchell was born in Sussex). A bit of a naff rhyme, but a nice image nonetheless, and undoubtedly heartfelt.

He breathed in air, he breathed out light;
Charlie Parker was my delight.

Coming out

Oh, all right, then, I admit it - I'm in China. The capital, Beijing, to be exact.

I've been describing it as 'an exotic city' in my 'blogger profile' for the past 6 months, but that is perhaps over-glamourising it. I'm not sure that it is all that exotic, really; not in the way that you associate with many other East Asian cities, anyway. No - weird, engaging, exasperating, constantly changing, but perhaps not really 'exotic'.

There are reasons why I have chosen to keep my location a secret until now. Fear of attracting the attention of the censors was a small part of it (not that I have any expectation that my tiny, unread blog could ever deserve their wrath.... but I'm sure that if I become too openly a 'China blog', they will start monitoring me now and then, and that will be plenty irritating enough).

I am deeply wary of becoming a 'China blog', anyway. It can, I think, be rather too easy a ploy to boost site traffic, such is the intensity of interest in all things China around much of the rest of the world. And nearly all 'China blogs' from time to time (even the best of them; and there are some - not many - that I like) get a little drunk on this largely unmerited attention and veer towards self-importance. I don't want that to happen to me (though it probably will do, at some point).

Above all, I just don't want this to become a blog about where I am; it's almost always been so far a blog about what's going on in my head. And that rarely has very much to do with where I am; far more to do with what time of the year it is, what I've been reading or watching or listening to, who I've been hanging out with, what substances I'm under the influence of.

And such it will, I hope, continue to be.

However, though laying to rest the popular 'Where in the world am I?' strand, I will from time to time offer some observations on life in China. I'm not sure what category label I'll give them yet; we'll wait and see until I've written one or two of them.

And for those of you who were skim-reading...... I'M IN BEIJING.

The view from my window

Well, from my balcony, anyway. If I open the sliding windows, lean over the railing, crane my neck a little.

The architectural style is quite distinctive. And these twin watchtowers - just inside what would have been the main north gate of the old Imperial city - are quite a famous local landmark. This is a great neighbourhood to live in, only three-quarters of a mile or so away from those towers, and from the trio of small lakes that lie to the west of them (my regular jogging route).

Does anybody recognise this? Was anybody sharp-eyed enough to decipher the name of the city on the GoogleEarth photo I posted yesterday?

Oh, all right, all right, I'll come clean. In a minute.....

Playing with the switches....

The Kafka Boys are still playing silly buggers with our Internet here. Or at least, they were yesterday.

On Monday morning, shortly after the Boys arrived back at work - after a weekend of dreaming fondly of what new irritations they might inflict on the country's netizens - Blogspot was unblocked (again). Blogger, however, was blocked in its stead.

Except..... that they forgot about me! I had remained logged on to Blogger throughout the weekend, and that connection was still in place, unaffected by whatever new filter they had implemented down at Kafka Central. All I had to do, it seemed, was to leave my computer permanently switched on, permanently connected to the Net..... and I would be able to thumb my nose at the dratted Kafka Boys. Yes, I was really rather looking forward to the prospect of being the last person in the country who could use Blogger.

But then, the Kafka Boys tired of their little game, and unblocked Blogger again in the afternoon. At the moment - after two weeks of teeth-gnashing and scouring the Internet for hacker tips to bypass the blockade - we have 'normal service' once again.

They really were just twiddling all the knobs for the hell of it. "Now, I wonder what this one does...."

Where have all the readers gone? (A traffic report for March)

I fear there has been something of a tailing off in the number of visitors here at Froogville lately. Certainly there has been a dwindling in the number of comments, apart from those from the dependable (and many-headed) Tulsa, of course.

Of course, it's hard to know. For most of the last fortnight the blog has only been accessible in my country of residence via proxies like Anonymouse, and I think many of these proxies somehow fail to register as hits on Sitemeter or Statcounter. (Certainly, when I'm viewing the blogs through Anonymouse, the sitemeter is not displayed, which is probably a sign that something is amiss.)

Also, many of my friends are so lacking in Net nous that they may have been unable to proxify their way around the block, and may simply have given up reading me.

However, I do fear I may have been driving people away also with a surfeit of posting. Too much to digest at one time? Yes, I'm sorry. I have been overdoing it rather. Partly, I think, it was a sense of needing to compensate (overcompensate!) for the two months of relatively lean posting in January and February; partly it was just having too much time on my hands, since I am currently without regular employment.

Yes, last month I put out an astonishing 74 posts on this blog (and 48 on brother-blog Round-The-World Barstool Blues), a total of nearly 26,000 words.

Expect things to settle back down to around 40-50 posts a month from here on.

The total number of recorded visits now stands around 2,450. But for the censor's interference with Blogspot here, I think we would have surged well beyond the 2,500 mark by now.

Not bad.... but we can still do better.

Come, friendly bombs.....

Thanks to the wonders of GoogleEarth, I can now offer you some aerial views of my home.

Froog Towers is the flat-roofed, U-shaped building in the middle of the bottom picture, looking out over the little park ('Weird Stone Park', I'm told it is called!). Well, it's not all mine, of course; I have the top-floor apartment in the south-east corner.

Anyone recognise this? You do need very sharp eyes to read the name of the city on the top picture. I'm such a tease.....

Weekly bon mot

"All girlfriends are temporary. It's just that sometimes you die before you dump them."

I came out with this in conversation with my buddy The Choirboy last night, and promised to post it before I forgot it. Yes, yes, horribly cynical, I know - but a good line.

Here in the world am I

Haven't you worked it out yet?

Inane government censorship, a childlike unsophistication of taste, an obsession with 'lucky numbers', a remarkable ability to get through life without kitchen towels, bin bags, or can-openers.....

Yes, it could only be......

Well, perhaps I'll keep you all hanging on a day or so longer.

Any guesses??