A song-in-the-heart haiku

Blue skies and birdsong,
Trees everywhere in blossom:
Spring arrives early.

This is a pretty season in Beijing (well, apart from the occasionally piercing winds, and the frenzy of construction everywhere that fills the air with sand and grit). But it is spookily early this year - a good 2 or 3 weeks ahead of the usual timetable. "Global warming"?? Whatever it is, I fear this means it is likely to become ferociously hot before mid-April. Let us enjoy the mild temperatures while we can.

Missing Goldblatt

It's proving to be quite a week for me to miss stuff that I'd rather wanted to go to.

Penguin is staging a book launch for its English version of Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem at The Bookworm this evening - but, alas, it's a ticketed event and it sold out in no time flat, leaving me marooned on the never-shortening 'waiting list'.

The translator, Howard Goldblatt, is going to be there for a Q&A session. Goldblatt is the doyen of Chinese literary translators these days; or, one might say, the bane of them - he pretty much monopolises the market, and monopolies are never a good thing (especially when the guy can't actually write - I itemised the shortcomings of his rendition of a Mo Yan novel I read recently over on The BookBook). I would have been interested to meet him in person (and perhaps heckle a little). However, there is a very informative interview with him (and also with the author Jiang Rong) in this month's That's Beijing magazine, available online here - well worth a look.

I find the most worrying of Goldblatt's remarks here to be his insistence that one does not have to have an interest in creative writing oneself in order to be a good translator (and he thinks this is especially so of poetry, where a good poet may be too tempted to 'improve' what he's translating; although he does also say - somewhat inconsistently? - near the end of the interview that translating Chinese requires considerably more creativity than other languages to bridge the gap between what the author wrote and what the author meant). He also speaks, somewhat mysteriously, of a need to accept Chinese novels "on their own terms, rather than holding them to Western concepts of writing". If I'd been able to go to the session this evening, I would have liked to have asked him a little bit more about that.

Jiang comes across in his interview as impressively arrogant: his aim with this 'novel' (an unwieldy tome, apparently part Cultural Revolution memoir, part philosophical treatise, part eco-parable) is apparently nothing less than to overthrow the stifling influence of Confucianism in Chinese life and replace it with something more vibrant and flexible - although he finds his model for this new, more competitive ethos not in Western free-market economics but in the traditional harmony-with-nature culture of the Mongolian nomads.

The book was a huge bestseller in China; but the English-language edition, even with extensive edits, weighs in at over 500 pages, which will, I think, deter rather a lot of readers. That, and the dead hand of Goldblatt's plodding English. No, it's naughty of me to disparage it without having even glanced at it yet. I am curious about this book (it just won the Asian Man Booker Prize, after all, so it's probably not a complete steaming pile), so will probably give it a try at some point. I just need a little time to get my courage and stamina up for the task!

Time races on

I haven't been down to Tiananmen recently, so had lost track of the big Olympics Countdown clock they've erected there in front of the History Museum, but...... I've just realised we passed '150 Days To Go' a couple of days ago.

Oooh, the excitement is..... well, thus far negligible. But, give it time.

I wonder if I should start a new Olympics category here on the blog. I think perhaps I might (and then flaunt my massive indifference to the whole silly carnival by failing to add any more posts to it?).

Top overseas consultant to the Beijing Olympics - revealed!

Some feel that he may only have been brought in recently, perhaps as a replacement for Mr Spielberg; but I think he must have been working behind the scenes for some time now.

Consider these recent news stories about the preparations for this year's Olympic Games:

Jane Macartney of The Times tips us off that Beijing is beginning a massive pre-Olympic clean-up of the city's large population of stray cats, which may result in as many as 200,000 animals being put down. Offers from animal rights groups and shelters to provide alternative solutions, or to at least assist with the humane disposal of the condemned kitties have, of course, been spurned. (Likely result: A plague of rats! Do you think Dr E is just messing with Beijing, plotting to visit a string of Biblical calamities upon the city to punish it for its Olympic hubris??)

And then the Financial Times has this story on the lunatic escalation of Olympic Beijing's demands for additional water supplies from the provinces. Much of north central China is a horrendous dustbowl already, and if the capital's depradations continue on this scale (300 million cubic metres of water being demanded just to flush out the city's sewage-clogged public waterways?!), then large areas of the country could be plunged into catastrophic drought. An Qiyuan, a party official from hard-hit Shaanxi province, has had the temerity to speak out about this on the eve of the present National People's Congress session. I doubt he'll ever be heard from again.

It is, of course, somewhat old news (The Wall Street Journal was on the case a couple of months ago) that Beijing has been trying to cloak its disastrous Air Pollution Index figures by taking some of the most smog-dense downtown measuring stations out of the city average, but The Peking Duck blog last week published a letter recently circulated to members of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China by an American environmental consultant offering detailed documentation of this petty subterfuge - a particularly embarassing revelation in view of the fact that one Du Shaozhong, an official of the Beijing Environmental Protection Agency, had recently issued a flat-out denial that this had been done. Ha!

And I think I have mentioned on here before (though I forget where) that the city's approach to clearing up the drug 'problem' is to periodically arrest (and/or beat the crap out of) every gentleman of colour caught on the streets of the Sanlitun bar district. There have been rumours (I haven't seen this written up anywhere yet, but give it time...) that the authorities here would like to rescind all visas issued to Africans (it does seem to be Africans that monopolize the drug dealing here, but this is hardly an appropriate response to that fact) and not grant any more - at least for the rest of this year. I suppose they might just possibly be willing to consider making a few exceptions for people who could prove that they were bona fide Olympic competitors. Then again..... it could be a useful way for China to improve its medal haul in the long-distance running events.

In fact, it seems increasingly as though the Beijing Visa Office is determined to hound as many of us laowai as possible - of whatever skin colour - out of the country before August, by making it next-to-impossible for us to renew our visas (more on this at a later date). What larks!

And of course, the classic 'evil villain' stratagem of manipulating the weather - well, Beijing's been doing that for years! Not content with raping the water supplies of the provinces to the west, the capital also 'steals' water from places further east, like Tianjin (and, er, Korea?), by manically shooting down every single cloud that hoves into view with barrages of rockets and artillery shells loaded with cloud-seeding silver iodide crystals. And annual quotas of 'blue sky' days are regularly met by the simple expedient of closing down all the factories for a couple of hundred kilometres upwind every once in a while. Only in a totalitarian country could you act on this scale - and keep on getting away with it. Dr Evil must be having the time of his life!

Measures like these not only score impressively on the EVIL-ness scale, but are also gob-smackingly misguided, unnecessary, self-harming, downright STUPID..... and an all-around PR disaster. And we're only a couple of months into the Olympic year: there will, I'm afraid, be much, much more of this sort of thing to come.

It is perhaps a little unfortunate that racist 'security' measures against blacks and Muslims, or looming environmental catastrophe, drought, and famine will probably raise fewer eyebrows in the West than the current gatticide. Oh, well - so long as people start taking notice, for whatever reason. If we can start with saving a few moggies, maybe we can then get the Beijing authorities to start behaving more sensibly on some of these other things.

EVIL must be stopped. Where's Austin Powers when you need him?

Because it doesn't get you anywhere... (Why I don't learn Chinese [3])

I met a chap last night who has come to Beijing for a one-week holiday. And he's going to spend it on an intensive Mandarin course. I was flabbergasted! This is not my idea of fun. This is not anyone's idea of fun.

He knows what he's getting himself into. He studied Chinese some years ago (at University, maybe; I'm not quite sure - it was a fleeting party conversation), but it has withered from disuse. He now finds himself living and working in Vietnam - with a Chinese driver and maid who speak no English. So, he'd like to be able to communicate a little better with them. That makes sense. He complains he feels frustrated that although, in theory, he has a great opportunity to keep his Chinese skills in good shape by having daily conversational practice with his domestic staff, in fact he gets bogged down at the level of issuing basic instructions, and can't understand too much of anything they say to him in return. That sounds familiar. And he's not very confident that one week of mind-breaking study is really going to get him over that hump. Indeed not - but I suppose it's brave of him to try.

I was reminded by this little exchange of some of the reasons why, for most people, the attempt to learn Chinese is such a miserable experience - but these should be the substance of a further post.

My point here was meant to be this: Mandarin Chinese - far more than most other languages I have encountered - seems to produce these 'ceilings' of functionality that it can be extremely difficult to break through. To some extent this phenomenon is no doubt engendered by the characteristics of the language. However, I think it is probably rather more the result of the nature of the language environment in China; and in particular, of the fact the Chinese - for whatever reason or combination of reasons - appear to be uniquely obtuse (or mischievous or malevolent??) in dealing with non-native speakers: they rarely if ever make any allowance for your level of Mandarin.

Often (though this is less of a problem in the big cities today than it was a decade ago; I expect it is still quite common in the countryside) they will be baffled, disbelieving that you are attempting to speak their language, and will simply fail to make any attempt to process what you are saying. But then, if they do recognise that you speak some Mandarin, they seem to assume that you speak it well, and will enthusiastically launch into an animated conversation. They won't slow down their speed of speech for you. They won't do anything to soften their accent. They won't simplify their vocabulary. They won't try to think of alternate ways of expressing something. They won't attempt intelligent guesses to rectify your mispronunciations and grammatical slips.

With some of them, it almost seems to be a perverse kind of game: whatever your level of Mandarin is, your Chinese interlocutor will take a wicked delight in finding it and then demonstrating to you that he or she still has a higher level they can speak at. I have seen many good Mandarin speakers almost weep with frustration at this on occasion.

This naivety - or bloodymindedness - about dealing with imperfect speakers of their language goes hand in hand with a certain national penchant for unhelpfulness. Time and again I have seen laowai friends with a really good Mandarin level get involved in protracted arguments over giving directions to a taxi driver, buying a railway ticket, or trying to get a cold beer from a streetside stall. And I am afraid that I have reached the conclusion that - at least in simple, everyday encounters of this kind - the one thing you really do not want is to become involved in a conversation.

In situations like this, my functional level of Mandarin is just about as good as any of my friends'. In some ways it is better. I simply ask for what I want - in the barest, most fractured terms. Then I repeat myself. And, if necessary, I repeat myself again, with a really determined look on my face. And - 9 times out of 10 - people realise that there is no fun to be had with me, and they give me what I want fairly promptly.

But if you get into a conversation - oh, god help you!

My latest protégé

I was recently put in touch with a young Chinese lawyer who is - TODAY - undergoing a selection panel interview for a rather prestigious study-abroad scholarship. So, for the past 10 days I've been giving him a crash course in interview technique.

He's quite a nice chap, and I feel somewhat entwined with his fate after my efforts to improve him.

However, I did find his ignorance and naivety on so many points disheartening.

Admittedly, he did take the step of finding himself a tutor to help him with his oral English - something which probably differentiates him from a majority of his rival candidates. However, he only did so 2 weeks before his interview was due (and only after the salutary experience of crashing & burning in an interview for a similar scholarship programme a month or so ago). And he did think that I might perhaps be able to make his spoken English miles better in just a handful of lessons - I disabused him of that notion right at the start.

No, my more realistic aim was to give him some tips on what topics to expect, and how to present himself (he had been thinking of brown shoes with a blue suit... and maybe an open-necked shirt!) - while trying to lift rather than undermine his confidence. If I'd had a month or two, we might actually have been able to raise his English level a little; but in 10 days, NO. And it would have been nice if he'd thought to seek a native speaker's help in polishing his application form a couple of months back (it was, to be frank, pretty horrendous).

The poverty of his preparation prior to meeting me was quite staggering. He did not know anything about English law at all - he didn't even know the terms 'common law' and 'civil law'. He had never looked at an English law report, and apparently had no idea how to go about finding any online. He hadn't even checked the websites of the institutions organising the scholarship. He had no idea we didn't have the death penalty any more in the UK. He had no idea that legal documents in the West are authorised by means of a signature rather than a company stamp.

These seem to me to be egregious deficiencies, but.... well, I rather fear that everyone else who applied will be just as bad. He did well to make it on to the shortlist for interviews, and he now has a slightly better than 50% chance of being accepted on to the training programme. So, I'm keeping everything crossed for the poor lamb.

It's all clear to me now (Chinese employer crapness explained)

When I showed up to deliver my rescheduled seminar at the University on Sunday afternoon, I learned that the trouble had all been caused by the occurrence of a doctoral 'entrance exam' that morning. In order to give the anxious graduates sitting the test a fair crack of the whip, this had necessitated closing down the entire building in which it was to be held.

Oh, well, that's all right, then.

So long as there's a good reason. And, clearly, this is not something that anyone could possibly have known about any distance in advance. Certainly not the person responsible for "co-ordinating" room bookings!

It seems our contact person setting up the seminar for me had found out about the problem at some point on Friday morning. It is therefore still something of a mystery as to why she didn't let me know about it until FRIDAY EVENING. Or why she didn't inform my employer (the major UK company that was supposed to be arranging everything) at all.

Oh, well. Let it go. This is China.

At least everything went smoothly in the end. Well, apart from the fact that the last-minute rescheduling (or the fact that it was on a Sunday in the first place??) meant that we only had about half as many attendees as had been optimistically projected. And apart from the "organisers" not having set up the computer/projector prior to my arrival - and then, of course, discovering that it didn't work. The IT flunkie was evidently familiar with this problem, and was fairly promptly able to substitute his own laptop for the PC permanently installed in the lecturer's console; and, after only a few more inevitable minutes of faffing around with loose cables, we were up and running. So, we got under way a mere 15 minutes late. Or 285 minutes late - depending on your degree of reverence for keeping to timetables.

A new 'Pick of the Month'

To replace (the still sorely neglected - Mothman, did you ever go take a look at this one? It was "your" story!) I-Spy, I nominate The Question to the Ultimate Answer - in which I solve the great riddle of Douglas Adams's Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy books. Really. Go check it out.

I just put another of these 'golden oldie' recommendations up over on the Barstool too, if you're interested.

And do, please, leave more contributions to the Possible Band Names competition (and have a go also at the not-so-fiendishly difficult What Films Am I Referencing Here? sub-competition).

Albert pops in again

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Damn, that man said a lot of quotable things!

A lost joke

Time for my semi-regular little Sunday downer (Cowboy, you have been warned). This one carries special poignancy because it was indeed inspired by the death of Kipling's own son in World War I, an event which is often seen as marking the moment of his transition from a gung-ho apologist of the Empire to something altogether more cynical, more reflective, sadder, wiser.

A Son (from 'Epitaphs of War')

My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew
What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.


Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Getting in touch with my 'feminist side'

I like to think of myself as a fairly liberal and PC kind of guy in most respects, and in particular as a supporter of the struggle for gender equality. But, you know, I don't go to the meetings all that often, so I'm not up on the latest ideas and the hippest jargon.

It was, therefore, even more of a delight than usual to hang out with my "favourite feminist" last night. She had cried off the Bloggers' Gathering the previous night because she had feared (rightly enough) that there would be a heavy preponderance of men there, and that there might therefore be a risk of the proceedings getting a little too testosterone-heavy for her comfort. Or, as she put it...... "It's going to be a 'sausage party', isn't it?"

I can't get that phrase out of my mind!


Anyway, in honour of the continuing struggle to get all of us chaps to keep our sausages under proper control (yesterday was, after all, International Women's Day - March 8th; although I guess tomorrow, Monday, will be the official holiday for most working women here in China), here's a classic episode of Sexy Beijing, in which irrepressible reporter 'Su Fei' went out on the streets of the city this time last year to find out about Beijingers' attitudes on gender relations...... and in which we learn that the words san ba (3-8, the Chinese way of designating the date of the holiday) have become a common slang term of disrespect for an assertive or troublesome woman. So..... maybe the Chinese aren't yet quite the world leaders in gender equality that they'd like to have you believe.

Roll call

Later this month I am going to be teaching a 'film studies' class to some students at the Communications University, substituting for a friend for a few weeks.

It's been a long time since I did any classroom teaching, so I'm hoping I may have had time to recharge the batteries and recover some of my old zest for it - I had been getting terribly stale and bored with the whole process a year or so ago.

However, it is going to take quite some time just to get through checking the attendance with this lot. I think I may well be forced to give them my patented 30-minute mini-lesson on choosing a sensible English name.

This bunch of students are really quite staggering: almost every single one of them has chosen a classically daft 'English name'.

Some are just about OK, though perhaps just a little too exotic or non-English: Lopez, Hans.

Some are acceptable English, but have somewhat unfortunate pop-culture connotations: Hannibal, Conan.

Some are just horribly out-of-date or uncool (a particular vice among the girls, who seem to raid Victorian novels for their inspiration too often): Doreen, Mavis.

Some are creatively misspelled: Rion, Jammey, Geroge, Urey (was he aiming at 'Yuri' or 'Urea', I wonder), Roye, Jessy, Dephanie. Dephanie?!

Then we get all the 'Summer of Love' hippy names: Summer, Flower, Sky, Rain.

And then surnames used as first names: Kidd, Jolie, Miller, Mackenzie (acceptable as a first name for a Scot).

Then we're into the adjectives: Strong, Brave.

Especially colours: White, Black, Mauve!

And verbs: Sing.

A noun or two: Balance.

The odd wacky film reference: Iceman, Spiderman.

And the occasional 'commercial break': Zippo.

And then we're into the serious bizarrerie: Momo (an African tribe??), Zacol (is that a proprietary drug?), Webzen (a great name for an Internet company, a terrible name for a human being), Desea (is this what the Russians did to the Aral Sea?), Lemonz (perhaps acceptable for a 'rap name', but not for a regular name!).

But the winner, the dumbest non-name in a class full of risible monickers, is: Noodle.

Why, oh why, oh why?

Chinese employers bug me AGAIN!

I am having to relax my usual 'rule' against working on the weekend. This Sunday I am going to be delivering a presentation on behalf of a major British education company at one of the city's leading Universities..... at 9am.

Or at least, I was supposed to have been. Around 6.05pm on Friday evening I received a call from my liaison at the University telling me that it had been switched to Sunday afternoon. Friday evening; barely 36 hours ahead of the event; Friday fucking EVENING! I was vividly reminded of why I gave up working for Chinese universities some years ago.

And the girl mentioned this outrageous bombshell of a schedule change oh-so-casually, just in passing: "So, everything's OK for Sunday? You have all the materials? And you know our address? Oh, and did you know it's going to be in the afternoon now? That's all right, isn't it?"

Well, NO - this shortly before the event, it is most definitely not fucking all right. I happened to have arranged another appointment with a private client for Sunday afternoon, and it was not going to be very convenient to reschedule. Gggrrrrrrr.

This month's possible band name winners

Check out this post on The Barstool for February's highlights in my ongoing possible band names competition.

Please check out the original post to see even more - and leave your own suggestions.

Also, take a look at this related competition.

Blogger summit meeting

Jeremiah has invited me to one of his occasional bloggers' gatherings tonight. I can ill afford the time, since I have a hugely busy weekend ahead of me, but..... it could be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put faces to some familiar blog-names.

Oh yes, it could be quite the Teddy Bears' Picnic. Although, for some reason, I can't help being put in mind rather of The Monster Mash.

This is a performance from the wonderful Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. I couldn't find any videos of the original performers, Bobby Pickett & The Cryptkickers - although there is quite an impressive computer animation accompanying their version here. And The Misfits' cover of it is also fun, although, alas, the picture quality of the video for this is lousy.

An illustrated haiku

Rustling tumbleweed

Skitters down deserted streets.

Blog with no comments.

Things sure have been mighty quiet around here lately. As Tom Waits' lonely Minneapolis prostitute put it, "Everyone I used to know is either dead or in prison." In my case, everyone who used to comment is either ill or on holiday.

Tulsa, the stalwart of my commenters, is away for the whole month. Last time she went walkabout, her friend HiK deputised admirably - but it seems she's now too busy to do so again. OMG is just back from Thailand, but still reeling from the jetlag. Moonrat's snowed under at work, and about to depart on a holiday. The Mothman - where is he? Probably too busy with his hobby of becoming a Bulgarian property tycoon. And my old Oxford drinking chum, The Bookseller, can rarely be goaded into a comment - preferring to be a perpetual 'lurker'. (I hope he is at least still 'lurking'. The last time we had an extended spell of being out of touch, he eventually reported in: "Sorry. June was a bad month. Broke car, arm, and computer. All in separate incidents." Ah, that's why I love him.....)

Cowboy, Snopes, where are you??

Mighty, mighty quiet.

Irritating traffic behaviour (2)

I have been walking a lot lately. Therefore I have been suffering a lot of getting carved up by cars and bicycles cutting corners as they turn into sidestreets - in defiance of traffic lights, ignoring pedestrian crossings, without indicating or slowing down.

Somehow, it is the bicycles that annoy me more than the cars. In particular, I really, really hate the Beijing cyclist's penchant for insisting on aiming for the space ahead of the pedestrian rather than behind - even if they can see you are marching across the road quite briskly, even if the gap between you and the kerb in front is becoming tiny, even if this gap is on the left-hand side of the road (people are supposed to drive on the right here, but it is a rule commonly ignored, especially by cyclists) - the crazy bastards will still try to squeeze past in front of you, rather than behind, sometimes practically running over your toes.

It has happened to me three times today. I am seething.

Irritating traffic behaviour (1)

This morning, as I was attempting to cross the road outside my apartment building in order to hail a cab up to Wudaokou, I saw one of the dreaded (silent-but-deadly) electric bicycles approaching from my left (at least it was on the correct side of the road!), so I thought I'd better wait for it to pass. A second of these death-dealing machines appeared, drawing alongside the first. Evidently the two riders knew each other. They began to chat to each other - slowing to a crawl, no more than about 1.5mph; moving along in line abreast, 2 or 3 feet apart, effectively blocking almost an entire lane of the road; and looking at each other rather than at the road ahead.

A regular bicycle coming up behind this moving roadblock tried to overtake...... but the rider couldn't be bothered to work up a speed of more than about 2.5mph.

So, I now had three vehicles approaching me in line abreast, at less than walking speed, taking up the entire nearside lane. And then, of course, a car overtook all three of them, using the opposite side of the road. At least there was no oncoming traffic, since the light at the end of the street was red.

I could quite easily have got across the near-empty street as soon as I had cleared the nearside bike lane. But I was prevented from doing this by these two idiots pootling along at a snail's pace while having a chit-chat together. It is often thus: the murderous motor cars are comparatively little hassle; it's getting across the bike lane that causes all the grief.

Starting the day wrong

I woke up this morning (yes, it sounds like a blues song already, doesn't it?) at 4.44. The radio alarm clock at the foot of my bed was flickering this ominous row of 4s at me as I resentfully peeled my eyes open. I shut them again. I opened them. Still 4.44. Damn!

Not only was this way too early, but, according to Chinese belief, the number 4 is associated with death (apparently the words sound similar - although many Chinese words sound similar to or indistinguishable from many other words, so I don't see why this should become the basis for such a major hang-up) and is thus deeply ill-omened. Mind you, I have one Chinese friend who bought his European wife a mobile phone SIM card with a number ending in four 4s (it was therefore very cheap), and inventively tried to justify his miserliness by claiming that a double 4 was "death of death, eternal life, very LUCKY", and a repeated double 4 was - obviously - about as lucky as you could possibly be. He didn't convince anyone of this.

I don't subscribe at all to these local numerological superstitions, but.... this was not a happy beginning to the day. I was tempted to remain in bed for 24 hours to try to avoid all the pre-destined disasters lying in wait for me. Or just to catch up on all the sleep I haven't been getting for the past week or so.

Ah well, I've made it through most of the day unscathed........

A 'new' competition over on The Barstool

Actually, this has been around a little while - but I fear it had been overlooked because it was buried in the middle of the burgeoning possible band names game thread.

Now, I've given it a post of its own - please go and take a look.

And don't forget - the closing date for entries for the February segment of the 'possible band names' competition is this Friday.

I remember why I am glad to be out of the UK

I discover (yet again via the reliably time-wasting Webside Gleanings) that there was an earthquake in England last week. KT, the "gleaner", points to this moderately amusing post outlining a distinctively British series of guidelines for gauging the Richter-scale intensity of an earthquake. In the style of the humour and the targets it aims at, it reminds me - refreshingly - of why I do not want to live in that country ever again (not England, anyway; Edinburgh might be tolerable).

The rest of the blog is rather too relentlessly ranty, although I am charmed by the bluntness of the blog's name - I Hate The Earth. And by its slogan - "The unceasing, relentless whinging of an idiot" (might this not apply to 80% or 90% of all bloggers?). And by its banner (below).

Yes, indeed. I certainly know that feeling.

Chinglish ambiguity

I was just supposed to have been doing a short recording gig, but..... it turns out we'd got the wrong day.

One of my lady partners had set it up. She'd been told "Thuesday" by e-mail. Dangerously ambiguous, yes - but she'd had a long telephone conversation about it as well, and thought it was pretty clear they'd agreed on Tuesday, so she hadn't bothered to doublecheck. This is the kind of uncertainty that it is very difficult to clear up anyway, especially if your contact at the publishing house insists on trying to speak English rather than Chinese (my partner speaks very good Chinese; and the Chinese days of the week are numbered, so there's hardly any room for confusion).

I wonder what other calendar conundrums we might find ourselves presented with? Sarnsday? Mensday? Fronsday?

A bon mot on 'art'

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

A great line from the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, who turned 50 last year.

Traffic Report - blog stats for February

Still not much sign of a slowdown......

On Froogville, 49 posts and 16,500 words.

On Barstool Blues, 37 posts and 10,000 words.

I'm never going to get my novel written like this.

List of the Month - faults with pirate DVDs

A new month, a new list.

My happy discovery in Harbin the other week of The World's Greatest DVD Shop (well, in truth, it was The Chairman's find - he's a veritable truffle-hound for this kind of thing), triggered some recollections of the hassles I've had over the years with my DVD buying in Beijing, the bizarre failings I've found in pirated disks here. Here's a rundown of the most amusingly eccentric flaws I've encountered. (I omit the routine 'theatre copy' vice of shaky hand-held video recorded in the cinema. Friends complain of this occasionally, but I've almost never come across it [Once Upon A Time In Mexico would be the only example I've bought, I think]. Perhaps I avoid this annoyance by eschewing the newest releases. If you wait a few months, until an official DVD release, you can usually get a very good quality pirate copy. If a film has only just hit the screens, then you're only likely to be able to get a 'theatre copy'...... or, around Oscar time, a voter's copy that has those irritating 'For Your Consideration' banners across the bottom of the picture. A good DVD shop owner will usually warn you against such compromised versions.)

The 8 Most Bizarre And Annoying Faults In Chinese Pirated DVDs

8) Disk freezes on Start Menu (This used to be quite a common failing; less so now; my copy of Barton Fink is plagued by this, but you can get it to start eventually by repeatedly pressing 'Play' at just the right moment.)

7) No English soundtrack (Sometimes, even when it's an English-language film, you'll find that the soundtrack has been dubbed into Chinese.... or Russian.... or Korean.)

6) No English sub-titles (Sub-titles are often useful, if not essential, to aiding understanding, if - as quite often happens - the soundtrack is poor quality; and Chinese students of English usually find it helpful to be able to refer to the sub-titles.)

5) English sub-titles are in fact Chinglish gibberish, presumably generated by machine translators

4) English sub-titles are taken from a completely different film (I once bought a copy of Finding Nemo which had perfectly good English sub-titles - except that they were quite clearly taken from an ultra-violent gangster pic, with multiple f-words. Not nice for the kiddies.)

3) English soundtrack has been re-dubbed by non-professional actors (Amazing, but true: I had a copy of Titanic once which appeared to be fine in every way, except..... it wasn't Kate and Leo speaking the dialogue!)

2) Soundtrack is overdubbed (My first copy of Collateral became unintelligible towards the end because the soundtrack was over-recorded with a very noisy action sequence [from earlier in the same film, I think] which completely drowned out the dialogue.)

And the winner........ 1) Sub-titles are in good English, but have been created entirely by guesswork (Yes, really. I had a copy of Kill Bill that was like this - the sub-titles were grammatically flawless and perfectly plausible, but they just weren't Tarantino's dialogue. It was like that game on the comedy improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? where the panel members have to make up dialogue to accompany a soundless film clip. Oh, the jobs you can get as a foreign student in this country! "Please don't kill me, Bill!" "I'm gonna." Priceless.)