Chinese pedestrians, please take note

(And bicyclists too, of course. And drivers as well, come to that - though they never take any notice of anything!)

Runners do not have brakes.

Even if you're only plodding along at a modest 6 or 7 mph, it's almost impossible to stop or slow down significantly in less than 4 or 5 strides. Changes of direction, even quite small ones, are also next to impossible - particularly if your knee cartilages are shot, as mine are.

I know it is 'the Chinese way' to studiously ignore everything and everyone around you, and to just assume that others will notice you and take necessary evasive action. That might work surprisingly well most of the time with the types of traffic you're used to encountering on the streets of Beijing. I'm afraid it doesn't work with runners. We are not able to do much in the way of taking evasive action, even if we desired to.

No, if you step into my path one yard in front of me when I'm running.... you are going to GET HIT. I'm sorry - but there's nothing I can do about it.

The weekly haiku

Millions of people

Clog streets with their aimlessness:

Chinese holiday.

The crowds get worse every year, I swear. Given a whole week off, workers and students feel they ought to do something with this unaccustomed free time. But most of them have very little idea what to do, nor any significant disposable income with which they might do anything. So, they just dawdle up and down the streets in their thousands and millions, idly gawking at stuff in a zombified trance for hours at a time.

The weather has been gorgeous this week - but it is painful to set foot outside. In my - admittedly very touristy - district, it takes twice as long as normal to get anywhere because of the shuffling crowds blocking your path; the sidewalks are often completely impassable, and I have to walk on the roads most of the time, running the gauntlet of the homicidal traffic. It's all over tomorrow, thank heavens.

I wish I'd thought of that

Oh, I did. But - as so often - it seems I didn't move fast enough on it.

This graphic was featured in a recent piece on DesignShack about 50 Fantastically Clever Logos - but I can't find anyone actually using it yet. Maybe it was just an example piece for a portfolio?

In searching for the 'Anti-Social Network' online today, I turned up this curious sculpture - Antisocial Network 1 - a 2010 piece by the Congolese artist Maurice Mbikayi. Alas, poor Zuckerberg!

Sometimes the Post Office gets something right

I just put up a rather longer post over on The Barstool in appreciation of one of my favourite writers, the Irishman Brian O'Nolan, whose centenary it is today.

I was pleased to discover that the Irish Post Office has issued a commemorative stamp. One of the more deserving recipients of such distinction, I feel.

Many ways to skin a cat

The propaganda messages the government here delivers to China's youngsters through school textbooks are not always as glaringly obvious as the stuff I was dealing with last week ("Train is THE BEST way to travel, because it's so SAFE.")

This morning, I had to record a dialogue ostensibly about the merits of exercise, and the different forms it could take. One of the speakers claimed that his father swore by a cold shower every morning, and this method of "keeping fit" was then accepted and warmly praised by both speakers.

Exercise? Really? I rather think this has more to do with bolstering the One Child Policy.

Know your customer

Ah, Asian food labelling in English - a neverending source of belly laughs and blushes!


[Well, actually Jamaican, by the look of it. Second language English speakers - what a naughty bunch they are, eh?]

Bon mot for the week

"I'm not much of a one for beach holidays. If you've got the ocean on one side and the jungle on the other, why would you stay on the beach?"

Froog

(Possibly yet another of the reasons why I find it so hard to find or keep a girlfriend...)

New Picks of the Month

Time for a couple more recommendations from the archive, a 'best of' pick from three years ago this month.

On Froogville, I choose Not exactly a poem... - a whimsical piece of verse prompted by an ominous picture I found online, and prompting in its turn a rumination upon one of the great unanswered questions.

And from The Barstool, I'll pick Cynthia?? - a touching recollection of my first room-mate in Beijing.

I hope you'll enjoy revisiting these, and perhaps a few other adjacent posts as well. I fancy that October was a particularly rich month for my blog output - as I was recovering from the ill health that had dogged me throughout the Olympic summer, but still had rather a lot of free time on my hands due to a very slack spell on the work front.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for September

The month of dual 5th Anniversaries was relatively uneventful. The only 'special' posts I managed to contrive were this frivolous outline for a film based on the conceit of rendering the typical expat TEFL bum in China as an action hero, and The Barstool's new 'audience participation' thread on the theme of What's your unusual super-power? Thanks to an uncommonly heavy business and social schedule this last month, my blog output was somewhat towards the lower end of the scale.

There were 34 posts and around 11,500 words on Froogville.

There were 32 posts and just over 9,000 words on Barstool Blues.

In my traffic stats, I am intrigued to discover that I have recently acquired a new regular reader in Sydney, Australia; indeed, if the scarily specific 'visitor map' feature on Statcounter is to be believed, our new friend lives in the Darlinghurst district, on the corner of Hill Street and Maiden Lane. Please de-cloak and say hello, whoever you are!

Since it's that time of year again...

As China's National Day holiday is upon us once again, I cast around for something topical to post, and discovered YouTube user ThDubya, who specialises in short parodies of national songs. Here's his version of the Chinese anthem, March of the Volunteers. Quite fun.

This guy is an 'equal-opportunity offender': he does (nearly) everyone. Here are his versions of the British national anthem and the rather more rousing Rule, Britannia! I think his O Canada! might be my favourite.

The 'momentous month' draws to a close...

There hasn't after all been much of an air of 'celebration' about this landmark month in which my two blogs passed their 5th anniversaries. Commenting, it seems, is all but dead in this new Era of Ephemera where "everybody" tweets instead.

Also, alas, I have been just too gosh-darned busy over this past month or so to devote very much time or thought to the blogs (these days, I seem to churn out 30 or so posts a month autonomically). I have this year, somehow or other, become a more or less full-time professional writer: just in the last four weeks, I have written two business articles totalling about 8,500 words, and begun work on another two; I've written PPT slides and handouts for a series of seminars, again probably amounting to at least 8,000 words or so; I've written a critique of a company prospectus, and knocked up some sample copy for a website to be based on it; and I've edited (= heavily rewritten!) 5 or 6 long academic articles, running to about 25,000 words all together. RSI is becoming a significant concern.

The one piece of anniversary frippery that has enjoyed some modest success is the What's your unusual super-power? thread over on The Barstool. I've had to do a fair amount of chivvying of old friends and semi-dormant commenters to get them to contribute, but it's been ticking over nicely, and we're now closing in on 30 comments.  Please go and add yours!

Remain calm, all is well

Just when I thought my 'recording career' was over (no work at all in that field for 4 or 5 months now), out of the blue I got a gig this week to do some listening practice dialogues for Shanghai middle schools (it seems Shanghai is one of the very few administrative areas of the country that still favours British English over the American variety - hurrah!).

Transport, of course, is a fairly typical topic in materials of this sort. Usually, there will be a simple comparison of the different options, with rail usually being applauded for its cheapness but air travel invariably winning out for its speed and convenience. But not any more. Oh no. Now the rail network seems to have become definitively the best option, warmly praised for being both cheap and SAFE. That message came up three times in one fairly short book we recorded yesterday.

This is how the state propaganda machine works. It is quite awe-inspiring, in its way. Before long, people here will have quite 'forgotten' this summer's Wenzhou train crash.

Haiku for the week

Autumn came early.

Now the wind whispers winter.

A whole month stolen!

It is officially COLD this morning. Not just cool, but decidedly parky. What the hell has happened to the weather this year?

The thing that annoys me most about China

Well, a little nexus of related things, I suppose...

The lack of respect, the lack of foresight, the not-being-able-to-organise-a-pissup-in-a-brewery

Throughout the early summer I'd been teaching a series of Business English classes at a foreign tech company, intended to culminate in the students - in teams of two or three - preparing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation on some suitably work-related but engaging-to-a-general-audience topic. The presentations themselves had been scheduled for Week +1, the week after the end of the course proper; the whole idea was that the course, or most of the second half of it anyway, was geared towards practising the sort of language forms and analytical skills needed for such a task, and the last three weeks would be spent on my guiding them through the preparation of their talk and a final dress rehearsal; then, they should do the thing in earnest - before various of their managers - a week or so later, while what they'd learned, and the work they'd put in on assembling the presentation, was still fresh in their minds. But... the powers-that-be at the client company put the final presentations day off to the next week, the week after, the week after that...  It ended up being nearly a month after the end of the course (which was pretty much pointless, or at least very much non-ideal, because the students would all have gone stale on the material by then). But they were still very eager that I should attend, to act as MC, and to help assess the performances. And I was very eager to do it, since I was curious to see how well my charges would do under pressure, and I wanted to show my support for their efforts (although I was not going to get paid anything for this 'extra-curricular' participation). Unfortunately, the 'organizer' of the event shifted the goalposts so many times that my patience was quickly strained to breaking point. The date, the venue, the time available, and the starting time were all discussed endlessly, all changed needlessly (after we seemed to have reached an agreement). Eventually, reluctantly, I'd agreed to the date and time finally set, even though it meant having to re-jig my holiday plans in August a little: the event was now supposed to take place on the one day that I was in Beijing between two gruelling out-of-town excursions. Then, they told me on the morning of the event that they had shortened the running time (annoying, but should be manageable - and, actually, a better thing for me!), changed the venue (particularly annoying, since all the previous wrangles about start and finish times had been based upon the limited availability of the large conference room we wanted to use; if there was a suitable alternative venue, why had there been all that brouhaha? if there wasn't, what kind of broom-closet were we going to find ourselves in this afternoon?), and moved the start time forward again (to the middle of the lunch hour: very, very annoying). I was fuming, but.... I had promised to go, so... Then, after I had set out, and was in fact almost at the venue, I received a message that they had screwed up the room booking for the new venue, that there was another meeting in progress there, and it looked like we were going to have to start 40 or 50 minutes later than planned. At this point, my tether snapped: I hadn't slept well, I had a dose of gippy tummy, it was a ferociously hot and humid day, and I had about a million and one other things I needed to try to shoehorn into the next few hours (not least, visiting a travel agency to pay for the ticket I'd booked for my flight the next day, and claiming a refund on a flight that had been cancelled the week before). I decided NOT TO GO. Jeez, people, I rearranged my whole f***ing holiday schedule for you, to be available on this day, between these times.... and you can't even stick to that.... and you can't even let me know that there's a problem until 20 minutes before showtime??!!

Bearing silly grudges

Now, the client company didn't give too much of a good goddamn. My students were disappointed I couldn't come to support them, but I think they appreciated that, a month after the end of the course, and after so many reschedulings, it was a tad unreasonable to suppose that I would be available. I'd never met any of the 'organizers' of the presentations competition or the senior managers who were supposedly going to be present. And my liaison with the client was supposed to have apologised for my absence, and explained that I was unwell (which was in fact true). So, there shouldn't have been any problem there. But my employer, the guy who'd set the course up, he got in a ridiculous tizzy with me. Some sort of 'loss of face' thing, I suppose. He'd promised the client I would be there (even though it was clear that it was going to be very difficult for me to be there, impossible for me to guarantee it [owing to the uncertainties of travel in China]; and even though he had refused to pay me anything for this), and so felt embarrassed when I wasn't. And he blames me for it terribly. And he will probably never forgive me - even though we'd previously enjoyed a very warm relationship, and the feedback on this and a couple of previous courses I'd done for him had been extremely positive.

Lying so blatantly

When I finally got around to collecting the last tranche of money this employer owed me for that course - two months after I'd finished teaching it, a month after the aborted 'guest of honour' appearance - I was hoping that he might have cooled off a little, got over his peeve. Alas, no. I asked him how plans were shaping up for a repeat of this course (it had supposedly been a done deal months ago, with four groups being lined up for this training, and us only being able to take on two at one time; and there had already been discussions about the same or similar course being run shortly for even more groups). And he muttered about 'Nothing having been decided yet', while avoiding all eye contact. It was the most painfully transparent lying I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot in this country).

Ah, well... at least it put me in mind of a song...

Weird China (2)

Last week, I was strolling through the Sanlitun district in central Beijing when I came upon a line of three or four tour buses parked up, end to end.

In the leading one, the four drivers were playing cards.... in the luggage compartment.

Granted, it was a moderately hot day. And I suppose they didn't feel they could run the air-conditioning in a stationary bus just for their own convenience. But.... I'm not at all convinced that the luggage hold would have been less warm than the cabin of the bus... or the breezy sidewalk.

I wondered if it was some sort of forfeit game. The next time somebody screwed up, perhaps they'd all have to try to climb inside one of their tourists' suitcases to continue their game?? 

Weird China (1)

This lunchtime, I saw the strangest... erm, accessory, I suppose I should call it.

It was an outsize bow-tie. Cream and pink. Crocheted.

It looked like a child's toy, something to adorn a particularly gay teddy bear, perhaps. Well, actually, it was so old and dirty looking, I was reminded rather more of a dog's chew-toy.

But a woman was wearing it as a hair-band!

An otherwise quite expensively dressed office worker type, at that. It certainly didn't 'go' with anything else she was wearing. In fact, it made her look like a crazy cat lady.

The mix-and-match thrift store chic of the modern Chinese woman occasionally throws up some rather striking (and inadvertently stylish?) combinations. But more often it throws up the most horrendous and embarrassing incongruities. And then, just once in a while, it produces something like this, which is disturbingly suggestive of mental illness.

The fashion philosophy here seems to be anything goes. Unfortunately, it just doesn't.

Ah, that reminds me of a song...

The march of "progress" - stalled?

Yahoo Mail is foisting another "upgrade" on us. Or, it has been trying to.

For two or three weeks, every time I tried to access one of my accounts, I'd have a promo page thrown in my face, wheedling me to make the switch early. It took a minute or two of close scrutiny to identify the tiny "Don't bother me with this crap, I just want to get to my Inbox" link.

Then, a week or so ago, we stopped getting that annoyingly over-familiar but now easy-to-bypass promo page popping up in our faces, and instead found a new obstacle page denying access to our Inbox: this one did not appear to have any links or buttons allowing you to exit it, other than the dratted 'Upgrade Now' option. I tried everything I could think of to get around this obnoxious cyber-roadblock: backtracking and attempting to re-enter e-mail, crashing the browser and deleting all cookies before trying again, spitting in palms and muttering favourite passages from the Necronomicon... But it was quite beyond my limited IT ingenuity. Eventually, I had to "accept" the upgrade option.

Well, in one of my e-mail accounts I reluctantly "accepted" it. In another, it seemed to impose itself automatically (unless I somehow clicked the damn 'upgrade' button inadvertently? I suspect that the whole of that page may have been turned into a live link for the upgrade acceptance - a particularly dirty trick!).

As a further incentive to switch to the new system "voluntarily", the Yahoo people seemed to be making their regular service almost unworkably glitchy (although that's something that tends to happen from time to time here in China anyway). Thus, the supposed advantages of the new system - "twice as fast" - could seem mighty tempting. But, of course, I was sceptical as hell.

And with some justification - the new e-mail system is currently free of the maddening glitches that have recently been plaguing its predecessor, but it does not appear to be significantly "faster" in any other way. And, in fact, since several elements of the functionality have been needlessly changed, in practice, it is rather SLOWER for many day-to-day operations. The most egregiously pointless change has been the removal from the 'E-mail sent' page of the ability to do anything further with the e-mail you were replying to; there used to be a simple options box allowing you to return to reading it, or delete it, or send it to a folder; but now you have to go back to the Inbox to select further actions for that e-mail - TWO unnecessary further clicks. As a piece of UI design, that is just.... MADNESS.

There's a new colour scheme as well (horrible).  And a lot of the buttons have been repositioned and/or relabelled, so it's taking a while to get used to navigating my way around again (the 'Move to Folder' button now bears a picture that looks like a garbage bin or a toilet, and it is very hard to overcome the conviction that this must be the 'Delete' button - more MADNESS!).

Dear Yahoo, 

I have been using your e-mail service for something like 13 years. By all means, "improve" your service by making it FASTER. But do not change anything else. After 13 years, I like it just fine the way it is. Even if I don't completely love everything about it, I am content with it - because I know exactly how it works... and most of the everyday operations I conduct on it, I now do AUTOMATICALLY. Any changes you make to the layout or the appearance or the functionality - even itty-bitty little changes - are a HUGE F***ING ANNOYANCE to me, because I have to unlearn what I've been doing almost daily for 13 years.  Do you have any idea how hard that is? DO YOU???

As I have observed before (when Yahoo destroyed its Yahoo Photos facility a few years ago), upgrades of website facilities should leave the look & feel of the user interface ALONE!!!

But these idiots will never learn.

However, I find that I am still able to continue my Canute-like resistance to the rising tide of Yahoo stupidity. Somehow or other, one of my e-mail accounts (the one that I use most) has been spared either an automatic 'upgrade' or the devilish coerce-you-into-accepting-an-'upgrade'-by-locking-you-out-of-your-Inbox ploy. I am still able to enjoy using the old - much better, much easier, much faster - interface.

And I figure I will continue to be able to do so until I have to re-enter the site; so, I am endeavouring to stay logged in FOREVER. Or until the Yahoo drones forget about their forced upgrade protocols and allow us handful of stick-in-the-muds to continue with the old system.

Who else is with me in this fight?

Bon mot for the week

"When you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that makes it good or bad."

Miles Davis  (1926-1991)

Oh, there are all kind of metaphors in that! How come I'd never come upon this line before in all my years of listening to Miles?

[A musician acquaintance of mine somewhat spoiled things by explaining that MD might just be acknowledging that the saxophone is a relatively easy instrument to play. Well, he said saxophone, which is what he plays - is it the same with the trumpet? He told me: "You can't be more than a semitone off; so, if you just keep on playing, people hardly ever notice a single bum note." I prefer to think that the great man was talking about musical logic, about how an inadvertent misstep might become a springboard to an unexpected but more satisfying development.]

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Zuleika Dobson

As an old 'Oxford man', I found that Max Beerbohm's celebrated femme fatale in the eponymous 1911 satirical novel - the irresistible but not-so-innocently destructive siren who could drive all mankind to despair and suicide - necessarily became an early archetype for me of the unattainable beauty. I think I first read the book at the age of about 12, and it probably had a damaging effect in shaping my expectations of what undergraduate life, and my first experience of romantic love, might be like. We had a Zuleika figure in my year at Corpus, and she took a mischievous delight in breaking my heart and the hearts of several of my friends when we were Freshmen; at least having a confraternity of victims able to console each other eventually helped us to get over our moping, and prevented any of us from succumbing to the fleeting impulse to chuck ourselves in the river to end our misery.

I don't think I'd ever seen John Singer Sargent's Impressionist evocation (above) of the Edwardian belle before, but I rather like it. I also turned up some of Beerbohm's own sketches (though there's no indication as to whether they are supposed to be of Zuleika) which suggest a rather more Pre-Raphaelite vision. *

My favourite, though, is this illustration from The Folio Society's edition of the book.

*  The Beerbohm sketches come from the dangerously addictive 'commonplace book' blog of Canadian Mark Woods - well worth a look (but make sure you haven't got anything else important to do for the next two or three hours).

The numbers don't add up

Last week, I had to write a business report on the growth of the Internet in China (a lucrative but all too occasional gig for an international management consultancy, spinning their researchers' raw data into a coherent narrative overview of a particular industry sector).

And one of the figures they threw at me was that Tencent - one of China's most successful Internet companies - has a customer base of  >800 million people.

I transcribed it without engaging my brain in my initial draft; but on a readthrough, I found that a big mental speed-bump - what the hell?

That's a figure that is often bandied around, often repeated uncritically by Chinese and foreign analysts alike. But is it.... um, plausible?

Well, NO. The entire population hasn't reached 1.4 billion yet, for heaven's sake. The key data point at the outset of my article was that China had allegedly surpassed 400 million Internet users last year (most estimates put the number at something just over 420 million as of the end of 2010).

So, Tencent's online customer base is around twice the number of actual Internet users?! How did this happen?

Tencent's Internet empire is based on its QQ instant messenger service, which has been around for 12 years and completely dominates the domestic market. OK, but a large proportion of China's 400+ million Internet users (maybe 480 million now) are only very recent adopters, and an even larger proportion are probably only occasional rather than regular users - the kind of people who'd be unlikely to use an IM service. And it's difficult to know what the impact of the smartphone/tablet PC explosion in the last year or two has been, but I'd guess that traditional IM services are losing ground to microblogging platforms like the hugely successful Sina Weibo.

QQ has an 80% share of the IM market, but I'd guess that probably no more than 60% of China's nominal Internet users bother with an IM service.

The customer base Tencent can tap into via its QQ constituency has certainly got to be a lot less than 800 million. That figure is supposed to be the number of "active user accounts" - but I think anyone who makes that claim is being careless in their research or wantonly economical with the truth. Tencent in its annual report acknowledges that this number includes a lot of defunct or duplicate accounts, though it can't say exactly how many. 

The most useful measure for gauging the true number of QQ customers, I believe, is the "peak concurrent user" total - which they currently give as 136 million. I would think that mid-week, during the working day, probably at least 80% of QQ's users would regularly be logged in; and the record high would probably be something above 90%. And again we may have the figure being inflated by some people logging in under multiple aliases simultaneously.

I'd be very surprised if the customer base Tencent can hope to tap into for its e-commerce ventures is any more than 150 million. That's still a HUGE number - more than twice as many as the total registered users Sina Weibo currently claims. But it's a believable number, a number that makes sense.

Unlike 800 million - which is clearly IMPOSSIBLE, clearly off the mark by a factor of at least 3 or 4, if not 6 or 8 times.

And yet so many people fail to notice this sort of thing, they note and pass on statistics like this without ever questioning them.

The weekly haiku

Inadvertent insult

Salts wounds with its bitter truth

Taunting from afar

An occasional e-mail correspondent summed up my life here the other day in one devastating word - inertia. I would be reeling from the shock of it, but I don't even have the energy for that.

Favourite posts from the 2nd quarter of 2010

Another round-up of my best posts from a little over a year ago...

Pick of the Archives:

Favourite Posts, April-June 2010

1)  Inappropriate laughter  -  1st April 2010

One of the things I find hardest to deal with in China; one of the biggest disincentives to persevering with trying to learn the language...

2)  Friday Frivolity  -  2nd April 2010

Thanks to blog-friend JES, I discover OK Go's marvellous 'Rube Goldberg machine' video for their song This Too Shall Pass.

3)  China and Me (How it all began...)  -  3rd April 2010

An epic post describing the history of my fascination with the country (on or about the 16th anniversary of my first visit here).  I followed up with some more soundbitey 'explanations' in my April List of the Month. And there's another even pithier - and more idealistic! - answer here.

4)  The dog ate my homework  -  6th April 2010

Or... how the eccentric work schedules of Chinese accountants can be used to avoid paying you.

5)  It really ought to be a word  -  7th April 2010

I come up with the perfect word to describe my career-fecklessness.

6)  One for JES  -  9th April 2010

My great blog-friend has a weakness for puns; so, I dredge up a favourite story remembered from my high school days, what might very well be the worst pun in the world - but brilliant.

7)  What are they thinking?  -  12th April 2010

The HR department at the British Embassy in Beiing, that is. Although, god knows, HR departments the world over seem to have a strange knack for concussed bee behaviour.

8)  The Hurt Locker  -  22nd April 2010

I did NOT rate this year's Oscar winner, and here's why.

9)  Faces  -  29th April 2011

Two favourite cinema moments, incredibly powerful uses of extended close-ups: Gérard Depardieu at the beginning of Tous Les Matins du Monde and Glenn Close at the end of Dangerous Liaisons.

10)  Ultimate bank queue nightmare  -  30th April 2010

An hilarious-but-true Chinese news story about a man who bought a bus with small change.

11)  Face - not such a good thing?  -  6th May 2010

I have little time for the Chinese obsession with "saving face", and here's why.

12)  There's Alot about  -  7th May 2010

The Alot, I discover, is a cuddly furry monster - at least in the conception of cartoonist Allie of the wonderful Hyperbole And A Half blog, my 'Website of the Month' recommendation.

13)  The Chinese way  -  13th May 2010

A favourite anecdote about one of the bizarre inefficiencies which seem so rife in this country.

14)  My Fantasy Girlfriend - Miss Scott  -  22nd May 2010

The formidably poised and outrageously sexy personal assistant (extremely well played by the beautiful English actress/model Tracy Reed) to George C. Scott's manic Air Force general in Dr Strangelove is the latest of my fantasy swoons.  [Alas, the clip I'd embedded from the film including her memorable scene has now been deleted from YouTube, and I haven't yet been able to find an alternative.]

15)  Who do you think I am?  -  28th May 2010

I am offered another 'token foreigner' gig - but my ethics stand firm.

16)  Film List - Crowning Moments of 'Awesome'  -  29th May 2010

Stumbling upon this definition of 'Crowning moments of awesome' on the TV Tropes website, I am inspired to compile this list of 10 of my favourite 'tough guy' moments from the movies.

17)  List of the Month - Beijing types  -  5th June 2010

A ruthless dissection of the expat community here: a category for everyone but me!

18)  My Fantasy Girlfriend - Louise Brooks  -  12th June 2010

The silent screen siren is one of the most fascinating selections I've had in this series; and I found a wonderful compilation video of clips from her greatest film, Pandora's Box, to embed at the end of the post.

19)  The view from elsewhere  -  18th June 2010

I wonder how the Football World Cup is being covered in North Korea...

20)  The Chinese have a word for it  -  22nd June 2010

My enjoyment of the World Cup had been rather hampered by the dismal coverage on the local CCTV5 sports channel, but the limitations of Chinese commentators provoked a little nostalgic reverie about sports commentaries back home in the UK.

Is it that time of year again?

Yes, goddammit - less than two weeks to go until Chinese National Day.

In the last few years, government anxieties about possible 'subversion' in the vicinity of the great annual pageant of isn't-the-Communist-Party-wonderful? have been even greater than they are in the lead-up to June 4th. And so the crackdown on Internet traffic has been even more extreme.

My trusty VPN appeared to get squelched for a while this morning (although that might have been just a temporary 'local' problem); it has been serially losing proxy servers for some time now, with most of the North American options and increasing numbers of the European ones denied me. My Internet connection, often vexingly intermittent, has been crashing on me every few minutes today. And even when it is working, pageloads are treacly SLOW.

You might not be hearing much more from me for a while...

Only connect

A week or so ago, my online meanderings brought me to this article (in The Chronicle of Higher Education) on the fascinating work of a team led by two biologists, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West, and a physicist, Martin Rosvall, who have developed sophisticated algorithms for weighting and mapping cross-citations between academic articles in various fields "to reveal larger patterns in the scholarly literature... tracing the flow of ideas among disciplines, or identifying fields as they take shape. For instance, using citation data from about 7,000 journals, the team pinpointed a period in 2004-5 when a distinct neuroscience literature emerged" as a stand-alone discipline (more detail on that example in this scholarly paper by the team).

The graphics they produce are strangely alluring (and, occasionally, inadvertently amusing: how can you not feel sorry for poor old 'Slavic Studies', so pitifully isolated - at least in American academe - from Literature, Linguistics, Art History, or Anthropology?!). I thought this seemed a particularly apt follow-up to this morning's quotation from Herr Einstein.

A double bon mot

"Out of clutter, find simplicity."

Albert Einstein  (1879-1955)

"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."

T. S. Eliot  (1888-1965)