A familiar story?

I could have sworn I'd told this one on here before, but.... well, an exhaustive online search seems to indicate that I am mistaken.

Another of my dream stories; this time, one that I had, I think, about a dozen or so years ago, when I was living in Canada.

I am in a desert environment, a hot, dusty plain - almost completely featureless but for a large hill just in front of me.

Half-way up the hill, I see a brawny man grunting and sweating as he struggles to turn over a large, round-ish boulder.  He eventually succeeds in flipping it over once, pauses for just a few moments, and then sets to trying to do it again.  The stone is clearly enormously heavy, and it is painfully hard work: he is endeavouring to move it uphill.

I approach, fascinated.  I'm tempted to offer to help him move this rock, but feel embarrassed as to how to do this; and the man is anyway too intent on his labours to notice me.

At last, he manages to get the boulder to the top of the hill, and then, with one last huge heave, he sends it toppling over the crest and rolling - skipping, bouncing, crashing - down the far slope under its own weight, raising a cloud of dust behind it as it goes, scattering smaller stones left and right, smashing the occasional withered tree or cactus that stands in its path.

The man whoops and hollers with delight as he watches the boulder's descent.  Then he trots down the hill after it.

I catch up to him at the foot of the hill, just as he has once again started toiling to roll it back to the top.

"Say, that does look kind of fun," I say, sheepishly.  "Could I have a try?"

And Sisyphus (for it is he) replies, "Get your own f***ing rock!"

Recently, on the Barstool...

What's been going on over yonder on my 'parallel blog' these past three weeks?

Well, I came up with this roundup of five of the quirkiest and most obscure (and now defunct) bars I have known in Beijing (following on from this analysis of the typical 'life cycle' of a Beijing bar) - a sort of combined nostalgia wallow and trivia challenge for anyone who's been in Beijing as long as me.

Feeling more than usually frisky and frivolous a couple of weeks back, I posted a video of the very silly lurve song Ladies of the World, by Kiwi comedy duo Flight of the Conchords.

Ah, and then (my finest moment - of the last month) I devised a recipe for a cocktail which tastes like a favourite Central Asian salad.

And this week I was highlighting fatty snacks - Texan 'fried beer' and hot dogs with a plus.

On a more serious note, I've also recently discoursed on why FREE drinks are not a good thing and why music shouldn't be TOO loud.

Haiku for the week

The nights are cooler;
White Dew Day heralds autumn;
And the mooncakes come.

Ah, September in Beijing!  It's actually still pretty hot during the day (set to be scorchio next week!), and sometimes a bit too humid for comfort overnight, but you can nevertheless sense a faint chill in the air.  A couple of days ago we had Bailu (節氣), the 'White Dew' day, the beginning of the 8th lunar month in the Chinese calendar, which is traditionally held to be the point at which the temperature starts its inexorable slide towards winter (in fact, I gather Bailu  is properly applied not just to a single day but to a 'solar term', the 15-day period leading up to Mid-Autumn Day - which, this year, by rare cosmic coincidence, falls for once almost bang on the solar equinox).

Let us enjoy our last few weeks of dazzling blue skies and 'Indian summer', and not dwell upon all the fog and smog and arse-freezing cold to come in the second half of October.

The Uncounted

There's less than a week to go now before the end of the census period here in Beijing, and there's still been no sign of a census-taker around my way.

Well, there was someone who came and banged angrily on the door for 5 minutes one lunchtime last week, but I ignored them - on the not unreasonable grounds that I was naked (it was a hot day, and I'd just nipped home for a quick shower between two working appointments). They didn't come back, or leave a notice on my door (as some friends have told me the census-takers do) - perhaps it was only a looney neighbour or a frustrated meter-reader.

So, I'm becoming quite optimistic that I will succeed in my resolution to defy this census nonsense.

Of course, it is becoming increasingly apparent that this isn't a real census at all. As I'd thought all along, the major countrywide census effort is surely going to happen early next year, to fit in with the worldwide population census that is undertaken in the '01 year of each decade. I suspect that what's going on at the moment in Beijing (and perhaps in Beijing only; I haven't heard of anything similar happening in Shanghai or anywhere else) is an experimental study to try to assess the logistical requirements of that exercise. If they can somehow correlate how half-arsed this census was with how incomplete its returns were, they may be able to calculate how much time, money, and manpower they need to devote to a proper census next year.

I wish I could find out the dates of that census - so that I could arrange not to be here. But I rather fear the Chinese government may arrange that for all of us foreigners here, by cancelling our visas.

Obsessed

Who, me??

No, actually, I'm thinking of the film of that name.

Now, you might well ask why I would be thinking of the film Obsessed. It is indeed not the kind of film I would ordinarily watch, stuck-up high-brow elitist cineaste that I am. However.... there's a new bar/café in my neighbourhood that I've checked out a few times recently which is constantly running DVDs on a big TV in the corner. I find this an unlovely feature of the place, but it seems to appeal to the backpacker custom they're targeting.

I like to eat early, so have usually been in at around 6pm, when I have the place all to myself (it's so tiny that it feels unpleasantly packed with only a dozen or so people inside; that's why I didn't get around to going in for the first 2 or 3 weeks it was open). The service is friendly, but SLOW - so, even the most basic snack takes a good 40 or 50 minutes to order and consume. Just long enough to get sucked in to whatever movie they happen to be showing at the time.

As I say, I'd really rather not get sucked in to watching a movie while I'm eating. If there were anyone else in there, I'd probably try to chat with them while waiting for my food. When I'm on my own, I generally prefer to read a book, or bombard my friends with witty text messages, or simply sit in contemplative silence thinking my brilliant and lucrative thoughts - but they have the damned TV turned up way too loud for that. So, despite my aversion, I find myself getting sucked in to their DVD film show.

Not sucked in enough that I'd want to stay and watch the whole thing, mind you; because they choose such dogs of films, trashy thrillers that I've never even heard of. Films like....

.... Obsessed. [Yes, there will now be SPOILERS. Although, honestly, there isn't really very much in this film to spoil.]

It has a modestly interesting premise, centred on sexual harassment in the workplace, with a gender and age reversal (it's a younger woman hassling an older man), and an interracial twist (the stalker's white, her victim's black). Alas, this being a Hollywood would-be money-maker, this subject can't be treated as a serious domestic drama; no, it has to become an over-the-top thriller, with the anti-heroine being an endlessly resourceful, immoral, implacable (and utterly motiveless) supervillainess - just an inept re-tread of Fatal Attraction (but without the sex, and the concomitant guilt, that made that film so psychologically arresting).

The mechanics of the she-wolf's skullduggery, though, are amongst the least of the plot's implausibilities. No, the thing that really shoots down the fragile hot-air balloon of disbelief-suspension is the staggering naivety of her chosen target, her boss, Derek (the very good English actor Idris Elba almost visibly squirming with embarrassment in this dreadful part). I know we chaps can occasionally be a bit short-sighted about when ladies are interested in us... but NOT when it's this obvious. What's more, Derek is handsome, rich, and powerful (and married - another big turn-on for many women): he ought to be used to having women come on to him; he's the kind of guy who would expect it, and might well relish such attention even if he's not going to act on it (but this film has no interest in any such depth of characterization).

Perhaps even more implausible is the suggestion that he could remain so stolidly virtuous in the face of the girl's advances - especially when his wife is shrewish, controlling, and rabidly jealous, with no trust at all in the superhuman fidelity he displays towards her. And especially when the girl coming on to him is Ali Larter! Yes, that's Ali Larter, the former supermodel and promising young actress who has regularly featured in the higher echelons of World's Sexiest Women polls for the past decade. It really is difficult to conceive of any red-blooded male being able to turn down Ali Larter, even if she did appear to be a bit mentally unstable.

The writing is just awful throughout. Larter's character has no back-story at all. Derek's wife (Beyoncé, once again proving that she can't act) morphs abruptly from demure home-maker into a trash-talking ghetto harpy. There's a token gay guy in the office, who seems to be being set up as an important confidante (and potential accomplice?) to Larter, but disappears from the film after a few scenes. And the police officer who later becomes involved, Detective Reese (Christine Lahti, who really deserves better), seems to serve no other purpose than to exacerbate Derek's domestic troubles by asking him impertinent questions in front of his wife.

The whole thing appears to have been cobbled together in a hurry. There's no suspense, and precious little logic to anything that happens. In particular, there are two pivotal (you'd think!) scenes - one where Derek and his stalker are seen by a co-worker as she tries to rape him in a toilet cubicle during the office Christmas party; and another where she appears to have succeeded in raping him in a hotel room, after slipping some Rufenol in his drink - which are never referred to again. This script's not even inept enough to be amusingly bad; it's just dull and incoherent.

Oh, perhaps I shouldn't really judge - since I didn't see the beginning or the end (although I think I saw more than enough to gauge the general calibre of the film). I gather it concludes with an epic catfight where Ali Larter and Beyoncé are smashing furniture over each other for several minutes. But I doubt if that alone could justify the price of admission.

I imagine this film did fairly well at the box office in America because of its star names. And because men will enjoy the fantasy of having a beautiful woman begging to go to bed with them (particularly when it's Ali Larter, in a succession of revealing costumes). And women may perhaps enjoy the fantasy of a perfect husband who would never, ever commit adultery - even with Ali Larter. But it will attain no lasting place in the history of cinema. Oh no. When we start running short of digital storage capacity in a few decades' time, this will be one of the first titles to be permanently deleted from the record of human achievement.

Don't underestimate the Daily Llama

Just because they're small and cute doesn't mean they can't take you down. Oh no. You don't want to mess with a llama.

This unlikely sporting scene put me in mind of the inspiring religious tableau below, which I first featured on here a couple of years ago.

Things Word won't do for you...

Over the weekend I was toiling away at yet another of those turgid and insightless foreign policy papers I occasionally have to edit.

It was a more than usually whingey one (and the ones on Sino-US relations are usually very whingey indeed), its basic thesis - so far as you could discern one at all - being, "That Obama, he acts all nice and friendly and says 'China's rise is a good thing' - but then he goes and meets with the Dalai Lama! It's SO UNFAIR!!"

I joked to a friend on Sunday evening that as my author worked himself up into a lather of self-pity and wounded pride at the climax of his paper, I had pictured him weeping tears of impotent rage on to his manuscript. In fact, I had wanted to add tearstains for him - to highlight the emotion of the passage. It seemed so appropriate.

But then I realised, of course, that Microsoft Word doesn't provide any facility for you to do that. Why not? How hard can it be??

I immediately began working on an add-on program for Word that allows you to customise your text documents in various cute ways that make them look more like the paper copies we all grew up with. I imagine the Coffee Mug Ring will be the most frequently used option. Although Dog-Ear might also prove quite popular, I think. And Whiskey Spill and Cigarette Ash Smudge may be favoured by more 'serious' writers. I'll also include a Half-Consumed By Fire option for those really angstful types who toss their manuscript on the grate in moments of despair and almost immediately repent of it. Naturally, there'll be a Dog Ate My Homework feature for high school and college students who want to skimp on their assignments. And, of course, the Tear Stains effect for over-emotional Chinese academics.

Any other suggestions?

Unfortunately, since I'll have to spend quite a bit of time learning programming languages, I imagine it will be at least three years before I can bring this to market. I hope someone else doesn't get in on the idea first!

Bon mot for the week

"Don't play the blame game; play the revenge game."

Froog

Desert song

This morning, in a protracted spell of half-waking, I experienced an extremely vivid dream of sunrise over a vast city in the middle of a desert plain. In the foreground was an enormous and ancient mosque, a rich reddish-brown colour in the pale pre-dawn light; the sheen of its polished stone so contrasted with the deep shadows around it that it looked as though it was hovering in the air just above the desert sands. The rest of the city, though, was all austere modernity: lots of chrome and marble; expansive parks and plazas dotted with skyscrapers and huge abstract sculptures. In the convenient way of dreams, I'd fast-forwarded a bit - from admiring the vista of the whole city from a mile or two away just as dawn was breaking to walking around the downtown area in mid-morning. The place was strangely devoid of people; and the few I did encounter all seemed to be Indians rather than the expected Arabs. Perhaps the local populace were all enjoying the air-conditioned coolness of underground walkways - it seemed to be that kind of place (although the outdoor temperature was not excessively hot, I found, and relieved by a light breeze). The plaza I was walking through, flanked on either side by a small lake, seemed to have a lot of museums (one, in a black marble tower, was labelled 'The Museum Of Electronic Weaponry', which I suppose hinted at a future setting - although everything else about the dream seemed quite contemporary).

Even more intense than the sensations of the dream environment was the conviction - inexplicable internal knowledge, not derived from any information in the dream - that this place was Amman in Jordan. I've never been to Amman, and know very little about it. In fact, I've never been anywhere in the Arab world, apart from a few tedious layovers in Dubai airport. Thus, it's something of a mystery as to why my subconscious should latch on to this as the necessary location for my dream.

My dream city didn't really look anything like present day Amman. It struck me as a 'model city' built with colossal amounts of oil money - impressive in its scale, but rather antiseptic and soulless.

Well, it didn't look anything like present day Amman, but it did look a little like this - a projection of the new downtown they're building in the Abdali district. Strange the way my brain works.

List of the Month - Elements of 'Englishness'

I'm currently doing a series of trainings with the Beijing staff of a UK-based professional institute, and the emphasis is supposed to be, rather than on merely teaching them some English (since they're all pretty good already), on stretching their English by confronting them with some unexpected and challenging reading articles and discussion topics, on seeking to motivate them to use English more (both inside and outside of the workplace), and..... to give them some geographical, historical, and cultural background on the UK so that they will be able to relate more easily to their colleagues in the home office.

The latter has been stressed, by both the British and Chinese staff I've liaised with, as a primary goal of the course; although I fear this is somewhat misguided, or at any rate over-optimistic, since these guys - like every other group of mainland Chinese students I've ever worked with - seem have a massive incuriosity about anything outside of China.

Nevertheless, I'm doing my best with this seemingly hopeless task. I'm actually rather enjoying writing a series of 'cultural briefings' notes for them to digest and discuss once a month or so. Before I took on this project, I'd seldom consciously reflected on what it meant to be 'English' (or 'British' - and that's a whole bag of worms in itself!); so, I've often been surprising myself a little with some of the ideas I've come up with on this.

Here are some of the main points I've isolated so far:

Elements of Englishness

Rooting for the underdog

Are we the only nation on earth that invariably supports the likely loser in a contest, when we have no special reason to affiliate ourselves with one side or the other? It seems a strange thing to do. I have facetiously suggested that perhaps we do this because it mimics the masochistic experience of following our own almost invariably disappointing national sports teams.

Being 'sports mad'

We were, for curious historical reasons, the birthplace of most of the world's major organised games, and managed to export them all over the globe via the influence of the British Empire in the later 1800s. I think only the Americans rival, or perhaps exceed us, in their enthusiasm for sports - but their self-invented games haven't travelled nearly so well.

A sense of fair play and good sportsmanship

I think this is probably the aspect of our culture of which I feel most proud - the veneration for the spirit of the game, the conviction that how you play the game is more important than winning. There's a remarkable amount of 'self-policing' expected in many of the British-invented sports. Americans and others may have imbibed some of this ethos from us, but it was originally our idea.

Making a virtue out of failure

Again, I think there's a likely relationship with our admiration for underdogs to be found in our celebration of 'noble failures'. It does seem rather perverse that the disastrous Captain Scott should be the most venerated of our Victorian/Edwardian era explorers, or that the defeats at Dunkirk and Arnhem should loom largest in our shared narrative of World War Two.

The "Bulldog" spirit

The keynote of our national character seems to be this ideal of tenacity and resilience, a fighting quality that perhaps has less to do with conventional bravery than with a stubborn refusal to accept defeat. It is epitomised by our defiance of Nazi Germany during World War Two, and personified in the bulldog-like physique of our rotund and jowly wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

Reserve

Most of the stereotypes the Chinese, and other nations, hold about us are largely inaccurate, I feel; but this one is still mostly true. We're just not a very outgoing people; our emphasis on privacy (both in a reluctance to impose upon others, and an unwillingness to share our personal thoughts and opinions) tends to make us rather socially restrained. I'd like to think that this is changing slowly, as people travel more, become more 'internationalized'. But when I first hit the road in the 1990s, this difference soon became very apparent to me; you can sit in a bar in Britain for hours at a time without entering into any substantial conversation with another customer, or even with the bar staff; that just doesn't happen anywhere else in the world I've been.

Chivalry

We don't wear hats that we can doff any more, and the feminists are slowly beating us out of our drilled-in-childhood instincts to open doors for them or offer them our seats; yet courtesy towards women still seems to be at the core of the English/British sense of polite behaviour. I'd be curious to know how many other countries/cultures really push the 'women and children first!' policy in a disaster as much as we do (or how much we'd abide by it when actually faced with such a crisis!).

Individuality, eccentricity, idealism

We do revere the oddball, the obsessive, the 'great British eccentric': we have way more than our fair share of such exceptionally gifted and determined individuals, both in the useful field of technological innovation (Trevor Baylis, James Dyson), and in useless ones like setting Guinness World Records in pointless activities like brick carrying and beermat flipping. We also have a proud tradition of radical social and political innovation: abolishing slavery, improving conditions in factories and prisons, developing universal free education and healthcare, etc. I like to remind people that all of the most radical ideas associated with the French Revolution had actually been anticipated during the English Civil Wars nearly 150 years earlier.

Disdain for the French

Well, they ask for it. The Parisians are probably the most disdainful group of people on the planet: they even disdain the rest of their fellow countrymen. The rest of the French pass on that disdain to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world disdains them right back, with interest. Of course, we do it better, or at any rate more, than anyone else, because we have the additional (dis)advantage of being their close neighbours. And we have a longstanding territorial dispute (Britanny - that's obviously ours, right?), which led to 100 years of fighting with them. And in more recent times, De Gaulle was a complete arsehole. However, I suspect this historical antipathy may have been softening in the last few decades. We Englishmen have always had a bit of a weakness for French ladies (and I mean always: Shakespeare's Henry V got all soppy over a French princess!), and we probably resent French men primarily because of the better access they enjoy to French women. Lately, we've been warming up a bit more to French men because they play such darned good football: the success of Thierry Henry and other French players in the English Premiership over the past decade or so has done a lot to restore some cordiality to cross-Channel relations, I believe.

To be continued (possibly).....

Yet more Friday frivol

Another outrageous visual pun (again taken from the online Viz anthology of 'Crap Jokes') to end the week; this one dedicated especially to my old Oxford drinking buddy The Bookseller - recently 're-skilled' as a Bookbinder.

Haiku for the week

All flows to the sea;
Swimming upstream can't defy
The hungry ocean.

New Picks of the Month

In our journey through the archives we've now reached the month of September 2007 - when I flirted with giving up blogging. Yep, after passing the blogs' 1st Anniversary I gave up posting for two or three weeks. So, there's not so much to choose from in this month.

Nevertheless....

On Froogville, I point you towards this account of one of the most annoying things a Chinese person has ever done to me.

And from The Barstool, I'm rather fond of this celebration of Edinburgh's Rose Street, my regular summer hangout there when I visit for the Festival, and surely the best bar-crawling area in the world.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for August

Oddly enough, despite my giving up drinking for most of the month, August proved to be an especially productive month on my 'drinking blog', Barstool Blues - whereas I was often struggling for inspiration rather on Froogville. The two blogs ran neck and neck the whole way, and finished the month - for the first time ever, I think - in a dead heat.

Yes, there were 39 posts and close to 12,000 words on both Froogville and Barstool Blues last month.

We've just passed our 55,000th recorded visitor on Froogville (at least, according to the deeply flawed Sitemeter counter over there in the sidebar), while The Barstool is now lagging badly behind, still just shy of the 35,000 mark.

However, we did 'enjoy' an unexpected flurry of comment activity on The Barstool when a Canadian singer recently relocated to China got miffed at my balanced review ("70% right, 30% wrong") of one of her shows here and incited her demented fan club to come and flame me. Check out that spike in the traffic.

Gosh, yes, I haven't had so much fun since that run-in with the KKK back in '96.

How not to do it, in PowerPoint

This week, I find myself helping a number of groups of software engineers to prepare PowerPoint presentations about their company or its products.

You might think that people who work with computers every day would be pretty au fait with all the common programs that are part of the Microsoft Office Suite - but that would be a dangerous assumption.

Well, maybe it's not so much unfamiliarity with the program that's the problem (I think most of my charges today probably knew their way around it at least a little better than I did) as not having the slightest idea how to use it to present visual information.

Here are just a few of the (fairly obvious, in any language?!) DON'Ts which I encountered today:

Don't use unnecessary text on your slides

(I saw one today that began "This slide includes...")

Don't include things which are far too small to read: either enlarge them, or remove them altogether

(This applies particularly to labels on graph axes and keys to colour schemes on charts, etc. When you lift graphics like this from a Web page or a Word document, they are usually tiny; they need to be much, much bigger if there is to be any point including them on a slide; but most of the time, you really don't have to - you can explain the significance of the colour scheme in your spoken accompaniment to the slide.)

Don't have more than 4 or 5 bullet-points maximum on any slide

(The record today was taken by a guy who had a list with 14 items crammed on to one slide. Either simplify a list like that by cutting it down to the 4 or 5 most important points; or break it down into 2 or 3 separate slides.)

Don't leave a lot of white space on your slides

(Quite a number of today's students had their entire list of contents - for example - in the top left quadrant of their slide, and were going to leave the remaining two-thirds or more of the space entirely empty. You only need fairly small strips of white space around the edge of your slide; try to make the content on the slide as big as possible.)

Don't make it a struggle to read your slides

(Choose high-contrast colour schemes and large font sizes. Try to keep the text to a minimum [use headlines or bullet-points as much as possible: single words or short phrases rather than extended sentences]. Leave generous spaces between bullet-points, etc.)

Don't include too much detail - particularly complex tables of statistics, bibliographies and Web page references, etc.

(It's much better to give out information like this on a printed handout.)

Don't attempt to put on the slides everything that you intend to say during the presentation

(If you do that, you will struggle to hold your audience's attention; why should they listen to you, if they can just read your slides instead?)

Pretty elementary stuff, you'd think, but..... I could probably make a decent living just from teaching this!

Coming to my census

There have been colourful 'big character' banners all over Beijing for the past few weeks exhorting us to cooperate fully in an upcoming population census. Most of these banners are bilingual, so it would appear that we foreigners are to be included.

However, no dates were mentioned. Since the major worldwide census effort takes place in the '01 year of each decade, I had been assuming that this was not going to bother us until next year. But no - it seems that China is starting early, conducting its census NOW.

This fills me - and most of us foreigners living here, I would imagine - with considerable trepidation. Just how much information will the census-takers be asking for? Will this lead to bothersome checks into our nominal employers (those 'kind' people who help us get our visas) or our tax records? Will it become a pretext for 'spot fines'?

Of course, seeking to avoid or obstruct the census is the height of civic irresponsibility, a reckless and profoundly unharmonious kind of act. "Harmony," many of the banners remind us, "is essential to the harmonious society." Quite so. (The Chinese don't seem to be troubled by the notion that tautology might be a bad thing.)

So, I wouldn't want to be guilty of such antisocial behaviour myself, nor to incite others to such acts of defiance.

Well, yes I would.

In fact, my friend Nigel the barman nicely summed up the attitude of most foreigners (and most Chinese too, I suspect) the other day, when he declared with his usual refreshing forthrightness:
"F**k the census!"
(Hmm, could be a band name?)

Since the Chinese authorities have almost certainly not assigned any significant amount of manpower to the census-taking effort, and since the whole process is supposed to be completed within just one month (and we're already half-way through that period, with most of us having not seen hide nor hair of a census-taker), I think it should be relatively easy to avoid the attentions of these prying government busybodies. I gather they are mostly coming around in the mornings - when everyone's at work. Now that I am drinking again, I'm going to be out almost every evening as well. And if they come knocking at my door when I happen to be in, I'll probably just ignore them.

Directionless again

I have remarked before on the almost universal cluelessness one encounters among the Chinese with regard to reading maps or giving directions.

The latest twist on this?

I'm subbing a few business classes for a friend this week at an IT centre up in the north of the city. Not being sure of the address, I was anxious to check with the course liaison as to where exactly I should be going - on which side of the street, Xueqing Lu, should I look out for this building?

"The south side," my contact told me by SMS.

Hmm. Xueqing Lu runs north-south.

Bon mot for the week

"It's not the load that breaks you down - it's the way you carry it."

Lou Holtz (1973 - . A very successful college football coach in the States, I gather.)

Film List - short animation festival

When I posted a link to an online roundup of '50 Best Animated Films' as my monthly 'Film List' back in June, my blog-pal JES kindly sent me some links to a couple of similar but much more interesting lists (check out this original post, and the comments).

That got me to thinking about some of my favourite animated shorts, and I decided to try to corral a few together for you for a special end of the month treat. [Please make time to check out all of them. They just get better and better towards the bottom of the post.]

I kick off with Jérémy Clapin's moody parable of urban alienation, Skhizein, which won last year's Manhattan Shorts film competition (unfortunately, divided into two parts).

And part two is here:

This one, Knickknack, was one of Terry Gilliam's personal '10 best' animated shorts in this article in The Guardian back in 2001. It was one of the very first digitally animated films from John Lasseter, a demo made in 1989 to promote his newly set up Pixar studio (which, of course, went on to produce the Toy Story series and much more). It's the tale of a lonely snowman in a snowdome who becomes smitten with a buxom bikini-clad babe on a neighbouring shelf ornament (later editions of the film trimmed down the extravagant breast size of the original) and determines to break out of his glass prison to be with her. It's an homage to the over-the-top physical comedy of classic Warner Bros. cartoon heroes like Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote.

And this is Pony, a film school project from the very talented Dony Permedi. I was first tipped off to him when the inescapable JES posted his cult favourite Kiwi a few months back. Pony, his previous effort, is a bit rougher around the edges, but even more delightfully dark. Yes, really dark: I think this is the most disturbing black joke I've ever seen in an animation.

And here's The Flower, a wonderful short film with a message. (I haven't been able to find out who directed this yet. Perhaps he or she is lying low for a reason....)

And finally (saving the very best for last?), here's The Sandman, (this version appears to have better picture quality, but embedding is disabled), Paul Berry's 1991 stop-motion classic, which was nominated for an Oscar the following year (how did it not win?). Paul had cut his teeth making a charming animated series based on The Wind In The Willows for British TV in the '80s. After the success of The Sandman, he was recruited by Tim Burton to work as one of the lead animators on The Nightmare Before Christmas, and would appear to have left a deep impression on the style of that production (and of the later Corpse Bride, although he was not actually involved in the making of that). Sadly, he died of a brain tumour in 2001, at the age of just forty. [He made another wonderful short illustrating the Charlie Daniels Band's classic tale, The Devil Went Down To Georgia; but I haven't been able to find that anywhere online.]

Don't have nightmares. Hahahahahahahahaha.....

[Supplement: It's also worth checking out this Chinese cartoon, rather cryptically titled See Through (the original Chinese title is, alas, even more nonsensical). Unfortunately, it's a bit long (16 minutes); and I couldn't find any embed code for it. However, it does have some brilliant sequences in it. And it is an amazing labour of love: it was made single-handedly by a dedicated young tech-nerd, working on an old computer in his bedroom for three-and-a-half years. The full story behind this - and his current success establishing his own digital animation studio - is on the linked page. (A bit hat-tip to Stuart of FoundInChina for sending me this link.)

My 'personal search engine' JES also helped me to find a link to Paul Berry's The Devil Went Down To Georgia.]

The same the world over

The slogan above has long been a popular - if somewhat bitter, rueful - joke in Britain. No doubt it occurs in most, perhaps all other countries around the world too. The version below is from Norway.

I wonder if someone (Weeble?) can offer us an idiomatic Chinese rendition? I'd love to see the chaps down at Plastered T-shirts add that to their product range.

88 days and nights

Last night was the 88th night that my friend Wu Yuren has spent in custody.

88 is considered a lucky number in Chinese numerology. It would have been nice to hope that this could have been his last night in jail; but, unfortunately, it looks as if the powers-that-be are determined to proceed with the prosecution. Barring a miracle - the miracle of someone high up in the government realising that petty acts of persecution like this accomplish nothing but to make China look like a tin-pot dictatorship, seeing sense, ordering the case to be dropped - it seems that the best we can hope for is a speedy move to trial and a "light" sentence (1 year is usually the minimum for the offence he's likely to be charged with).

We have to keep working for the miracle. I don't want him to be gone for one year, or two, or three, or more. He should be released as soon as possible - not just for his and his family's sake, but for China's. Every day he stays in prison, the credibility of the Chinese legal system, the credibility of the Chinese constitution, the credibility of the Chinese government, the credibility of China as a 'modern power' and a 'responsible stakeholder' in world affairs sinks further into the mire.

Wu Yuren has been in jail quite long enough. It's time someone in the CCP leadership recognised this, and put an end to this madness.

Haiku for the week

Uneasy pleasure:
Days improbably perfect,
Doubts of what's to come.

This is, without doubt, the most blissful last week of August I've ever experienced here in Beijing. But there's a nagging sense of something not right about it. Our summer has been truncated by 4 or 5 weeks this year; spring scarcely happened at all; there's now a mounting fear that something will 'go wrong' with our autumn - that it will grow chilly way too soon, perhaps with a raging bitch of a winter following on its heels.

For now, I'm enjoying the sunshine, getting a tan. But the displacement of our ordinarily very stable weather patterns this year is becoming a bit of a worry.

A memory fragment

[It was Madame X's birthday the other week. This prompted recollections of my painful three-and-a-half-year rebuffed infatuation. Well, one recollection in particular.]

Pingu was in snowy black-and-white. Quaintly appropriate for a cartoon penguin. But her daughter protested. She missed the richly rendered hues of his igloo home, the jolly stripes of his knitted hat and scarf. A colourless Pingu distressed her, blighted her soul's joy with its hint of many other unfathomable not-rightnesses in the world she would grow into.

Calling one afternoon for tea - self-invited; as pushy as I dared to get - I applied myself to the problem of the TV set, the colour TV that showed only black-and-white. The remote control - product of illogical aliens, and profusely labelled in their arcane script - was a daunting puzzle. I tried this, and that, and the other thing. I tried everything I could think of, twice.

And then, through persistence more than cunning, I finally cracked the riddle. The screen glowed with colours again: little Pingu once more had a red bill and orange feet, and waddled happily beneath a blue sky.

The daughter was ecstatic. The mother offered me another cup of tea.

I wonder sometimes, will her daughter - the daughter that I craved for my own - one day remember me only as The Man Who Fixed The Telly?

Who are you calling 'strange'?

Further to that last post (one of my occasional Gosh, this country freaks me out sometimes ones), I feel I should mention this recent article (another recommendation from my indefatigable truffle-hound of the Internet, JES) about a study by social psychology researchers from the University of British Columbia which highlights the fact that most experimental data in their discipline is potentially rather flawed by the fact that it focuses solely on Western Europe and North America (the great majority of such data, indeed, being derived from studies carried out on students in US college towns). Statistically, they say, it's us 'Westerners' who are "unusual" - compared to the majority of the world's population living in less 'developed' societies.

This ought not to be a particularly revelatory observation (I was - surprise, surprise! - rather sceptical as to the value of the study), but this team have garnered themselves some publicity by coming up with an amusing and catchy acronym to denote the narrow parameters of this typical constituency of experimental subjects - WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic).

Do they mean us??

Well, what the hell - I'm WEIRD and I'm PROUD.

I'd much rather be WEIRD than CHINESE (Corrupt, Hierarchical, Illogical, Nepotistic, Esoteric, Superstitious, Evasive).

Good China, bad China...

I just managed to get out of a local branch of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China in only a little over half an hour.

In the restless, hectic, impatient 'West' we might complain that that's a rather long visit for a single, very straightforward transaction (particularly when there were only four people in the queue ahead of me), but in China..... well, I think it represents quite substantial 'progress'. Most expats I know - and most Chinese, too - absolutely dread having to go to the bank. Getting in and out in anything under an hour is likely to fill you with the euphoric conviction that the gods are smiling on you today.

Even more uplifting for me, though, than the relatively short wait was the counter service I then received. The charming Ms Wang politely ignored my bumbling attempts to speak Chinese and responded to me in English throughout. What's more, she dealt with my principal transaction (I paid my phone bill at the same time, but that's a fairly trivial matter) in under a minute. I was depositing a fairly large sum of cash to an account of my landlord's to cover my next quarter's rent. At the very minimum, this requires checking and filing a paper record of the deposit, putting the money through the cash-counter twice and then bundling it before putting it into the cash drawer, swiping the account passbook, and then printing the transaction into the passbook and on to the tear-off receipt slip from the deposit form. It also involves - if the clerk is taking their job seriously - perusing your passport to make sure that you are who you say you are; and, usually, throwing out a few impertinent and pointless questions about why you are trying to pay money into somebody else's account.

Gosh, it takes me over a minute to write it all out! I don't think I've ever before encountered a bank clerk who could accomplish this in much under 5 minutes. Ms Wang, I think I love you.

Has China finally discovered time & motion studies, I wonder? Or was this just an insignificant statistical blip in the generally prevailing culture of extraordinarily surly and slow-moving customer service in China?

After my errand at the bank, I went shopping. That immediately burst my short-lived bubble of optimism about the upward trajectory of China's 'social development'.

I've complained before about the erratic stocking policy of Chinese supermarkets. Even the most basic items will suddenly disappear off the shelves for weeks at a time, for no conceivable reason. Today, it's onions!

Nope, no onions today - either loose or pre-packed. And it's not even as if there's an empty space on the counter where the onions might go, an indication of temporary shortage soon to be redressed. When nearby staff members were quizzed about the possible whereabouts of onions (Would they perhaps have started shelving them amongst the canned goods, just to keep us customers on our toes?), the reply was a brusque meiyou yangcong - "We ain't got onions." Not even a qualifying "now" or "yet" to give you a ray of hope, just the blunt finality of a "not got".... accompanied by that incredulous or outraged tone and expression which seem to say, "What do you think this is? The fruit & vegetables section of a food shop?!"

Ah, China, I'll never get the hang of it.