Call me paranoid

I know you all do already, don't you?

This morning I received my first - probably only, this year - Christmas parcel from overseas (abundant thanks to my old Oxford chum, The Nags, and, more particularly, to Mrs Nags). It had only taken 12 days or so to reach me. It had, however, been brutally ripped open (for 'routine inspection' by China Post??). Packages of confectionery inside (which, I think, is not strictly legal to bring into the country) were ignored, but the gift-wrapped package containing a book and a CD had its top chopped off (smashing the corner of the CD case and significantly distressing the top end of the book - although, given the evident violence of this operation, I suppose I should be grateful that the top 2" of the book wasn't sliced clean off!). Over the years, I have had quite a few parcels from friends abroad fail to reach me altogether. A writer friend in America claims that she twice tried to send me advance copies of her debut novel a couple of years ago, but neither one reached me (she'd called her book The Dissident - do you suppose that might have been the problem?).

This, then, was quite a distressing start to the day.

I also suffered a power outage today. Most inconvenient. Unlike last time, I couldn't see any obvious maintenance work on the power lines in progress, so I was briefly inclined to wonder if the powers-that-be were beginning a campaign of petty persecution against me (perhaps for being foolhardy enough to publish some positive comments on you-know-who just recently?). I soon discovered that the power to my entire apartment complex had been cut (but, hey, you know - in this country they really might be willing to inconvenience 100 people just to put the wind up one troublemaker..... happens all the time....). But..... well, the power was restored after only 5 or 6 hours, so perhaps it was just 'maintenance' after all.

But then.... as I was heading off to work just before 9am.... I found the neighbourhood crawling with cops! 2 vans and 3 or 4 squad cars, and perhaps more on the way: 15 or 20 uniforms suddenly descending on the row of shops at the end of my street! Definitely something afoot!!

But it couldn't have been anything to do with little old me, could it? Could it??

More football joy

Bereft of playmates and at a loose end of a Monday evening, I once again found myself watching the CCTV5 'World Football Evening' tonight.

Last week, we got a barely intelligible 40-minute mishmash of highlights from recent Barca v Real Madrid matches: great moments of football, but no real story - it was difficult to distinguish the different games, or to keep track of the score in any individual one of them. Tonight we had a retrospective of the career of the great Brazilian striker Ronaldo. Again, there was no kind of coherence of presentation: clips from his recent spell at AC Milan were jumbled up - seemingly quite at random - with bits from the early and middle phases of his career. However, this didn't really matter too much, because essentially it was ALL GOALS. And what goals! The man had such power and pace as well as poise and balance, such a deft touch, such an overwhelming confidence. Almost all of these goals (probably 30 or more were shown) involved him picking the ball up 25 or 30 yards out (on quite a few occasions, perhaps 40 yards or more out; once, in his own half!), sensing a possible gap in the defence ahead and just making a bee-line for goal in a surging, unstoppable run. Time and again he did it. He must have scared the crap out of defences: square passes across the back line were definitely not a good idea when he was anywhere around.

However, the ultimate example of this sort of grace & power goal - tearing the guts out of a defence with devastating pace and unshakeable composure on the ball - has to be this one, from the phenomenal Liberian player George Weah, when he was playing for AC in the '90s. He wins the ball in his own penalty area and runs through the entire opposing team to score. I remember the Italian media dubbed it "the coast-to-coast goal". OK, it's only against lowly Verona, but still..... as one of the YouTube commenters observed when I first found this posted a year or two back, "sheer football pornography"! Also worth bearing in mind that many might have thought of him as being in the twilight of his career at this point, having enjoyed several prime years in France with Monaco and then PSG: this is the beginning of his second season in Italy, and he's just about to turn 30: but he would play another 4 seasons at Milan and rack up a total of 46 goals for them. There's more of 'King George' here - 10 best career goals.

Bon mot for the week

"Everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."

Margaret Atwood (1939- )

Beware of Spellcheck!

A Cautionary Tale

Eye halve a spelling chequer -
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write -
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite.
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it,
I am shore your pleased two no.
Its letter perfect awl the weigh.
My chequer tolled me sew.

Anon

Oh, grow up!

More free advice for the Chinese leadership

We haven't had any for a while. But then, you-know-who hasn't been in the news for a while.

The latest outpouring of (government-inspired) anti-French sentiment here is just so depressing.

Even Yang Rui, a TV talk show presenter who is usually a toadying mouthpiece for the government, seemed to be expressing an uncommonly sceptical viewpoint about the wisdom of the Chinese response to Nicolas Sarkozy's recent meeting with the DL (although he may just have been setting up the objections so that they could be easily batted down by his guests).

He did, however, begin his programme by claiming that "the Chinese people are outraged" by this meeting. Oh, bollocks! The majority of the Chinese people are completely unaware that this has happened. Many of those who know really don't give a rat's arse. For the most part, it is only the crazy nationalist youth - the fen qing - who are outraged; and they live in a state of almost permanent outrage about everything anyway, just waiting for the government propaganda-mongers to prompt them towards a new target.

1) China has no right to dictate to foreign heads of state who they should or should not meet with.

2) China has no right to take offence over such trivialities, or to use the possibility of taking such offence as a stick to beat other nations with in its diplomacy.

3) The DL is a spiritual leader as well as a political one. He is a spiritual leader not just for the Gelugpa sect or for the Tibetan people, but for all Buddhists everywhere; indeed, he is viewed as a spiritual leader - or an inspiring role-model (and, yes, oops, as an icon of non-violent resistance) - by adherents of many other religions; and also by adherents of no religion, such as myself. There is therefore no necessity to represent his meetings with the likes of Sarkozy as having a political dimension.

4) Even if this was an essentially political - rather than personal or spiritual - discussion, it is of absolutely no significance at all: it does nothing, NOTHING to advance the cause of Tibetan independence in practical or even in PR terms. (Get this into your heads, Communist Party numbskulls: the DL does not advocate Tibetan independence; even if he were secretly striving towards that goal [as you so fatuously maintain], he has no way of achieving it; even if there were some hope of his achieving it, his meeting with Sarkozy has no impact on that process. You are getting your knickers in a knot over NOTHING.)

5) Cancelling the EU-China Summit because of this is puerile and self-harming. GROW UP!

The Chinese leadership really needs to acknowledge that there is a 'Tibet issue'. In fact, there is a whole raft of interrelated issues.

There is an issue about how best China can govern Tibet for its own advantage (maintaining a full-on military occupation just isn't a viable option in the long-term - cf. Iraq).

There is an issue about how to improve the living conditions and the contentment of the Tibetan people (if they're really so f***ing proud and happy to be 'Chinese', why do we need dozens of squads of sub-machine-gun-toting soldiers patrolling the streets of Lhasa and Shigatse?).

There is an issue about how China could improve its public image around the world in this regard (persisting in ludicrous attempts to demonize the DL is not the way to go).

As I've said before, I think engaging with the DL could go a long way towards addressing all of these issues. I think it's probably the only way to break through the current impasse.

Even if the leadership here can't get their heads around that, they could at least stop hamstringing their foreign policy by making such a ridiculously big deal about everything the DL does and everyone he meets (Really, nobody cares: who the DL meets with is a matter of no significance whatsoever unless you choose to make it so.). Honestly, chaps, chucking your toys out of the pram like this just makes you look STUPID.

List of the Month - Things I wish my mother had told me....

It's 'List of the Month' time again, but this month I was rather at a loss to come up with a topic - so, this is a rather random collection.

Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me

1) Milk goes off.

2) If you stand too close to the front at a rock concert, your ears will hurt for two days.

3) Sometimes you only get one chance.

4) Football teams may break your heart more often than girls, but the girls will hurt you even more. (Slightly different kind of heartbreak, but similar inevitability.)

5) Learn Spanish.

6) If you spend too much time with anyone, they'll start to piss you off.

7) The more you practise, the luckier you get.

8) 'Save' your documents regularly.

9) Depression is mostly suppressed anger; sometimes it's better to let the anger out.

10) Women will mob you when you are in a relationship, but it's almost impossible to find a girlfriend when you're single.

11) Sometimes it's better to be right in secret.

12) Always get a receipt.

Pulgasari

One of the few advantages of yesterday's evening lecture fiasco was that its cancellation left me free to go and check out a free screening (in a bar in Sanlitun, arranged by the fine chaps from Koryo Tours) of this 'cult classic' - a rarely seen 1985 monster film from the DPRK, generally referred to, not surprisingly, as 'The Korean Godzilla'. I love the cheesiness of those Japanese rubber-suited monster films (most of them were shown on teatime TV during my late '70s childhood). And I've never seen any product of North Korean cinema before. So, how could I refuse?

The film is chiefly notable as being - ostensibly - the climactic achievement of director Shin Sang-ok's controversial stint of working in North Korea. Shin (who later moved to America, where he continued to direct under the name of Simon Sheen) was a South Korean film-maker who claimed that he - and his actress wife - had been kidnapped at the end of the 1970s on Kim Jung-il's orders, and brought to the North and forced to work for him there to try to raise standards in its fledgeling film industry. The couple finally managed to escape around the time this film was being finished, but Shin found himself widely disbelieved and vilified in his home country - hence his move to the States shortly thereafter. Hence also, perhaps, the elaboration of his claims about the amount of duress he and his wife had suffered, and his attempt to assert that he had only worked in a consultant/executive producer role and not actually directed anything for Kim himself. The North Koreans, I believe, maintain that Shin directed this (and several other propaganda pieces), although they acknowledge that some scenes and the post-production work were handled by a North Korean director after Shin's flight.

Yep, the background story is much more interesting than the film.

The film is, however, as with most of these monster romps, a damn good laugh - even if mostly unintentionally so.

As Simon Cockerell (of Koryo) said in his introductory remarks last night, "It was made in the 1980s, but looks like a 1960s film - which, actually, isn't bad for North Korea." Indeed not, given that even today most of country still looks as if has barely made it into the 1960s.

Outlining the plot is really not going to take anything away from anyone's potential enjoyment of this, but purists should be aware of possible SPOILERS below.

At an unspecified point in Korean history (looks like 1700s or 1800s to me - anyone know if this is inspired by actual events?) there is a peasant rebellion against an unjust governor and an uncaring king (well, I'm not sure if there were two characters or one, actually: the subtitles seemed to start off talking about the governor, but later on it was the king....). The king/governor orders his soldiers to confiscate all the peasants' farm implements, to melt them down for new weapons - thereby exacerbating the famine they are suffering. (Later, the rebels - having taken refuge in the hills without pausing to take any food with them - are reduced to making grass stew and peeling the bark off trees. This does all seem rather too uncomfortably prescient of the famine the DPRK has suffered in the past couple of decades, and of KJ's 'Army First' policy which has arguably made this even worse. However, I suppose this must be just a cruel cosmic irony. I suspect Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' was the intended reference.) The local blacksmith refuses to cooperate in this, and starves to death in prison. His dying act is to craft a tiny statuette of the mythical monster Pulgasari. Later, this statue comes to life when the blacksmith's daughter pricks her finger while sewing and drips some of her blood on to it. The little critter proves to have a voracious appetite - for metal. It grows very rapidly as it devours more and more iron, and soon it is a 60ft tall monster battling on behalf of the rebels. However, of course, this creates a dilemma for the rebel farmers - since their would-be salvation threatens to chomp up all of their cooking utensils and farm tools, just as the evil king's soldiers had been doing.

It is, thus, a pretty interesting allegory. I imagine that KJ intended it as a commentary on the ills of capitalism: yes, it might improve the lot of the peasants and help to displace feudalism, but its relentless appetite for raw materials would lead to colonialism and international wars, and eventually engender its own destruction. A nice enough thesis - except that it is industrialization rather than capitalism that creates the appetite for raw materials, and communist regimes have proven just as likely as capitalist ones to pursue aggressive colonialist/expansionist foreign policies. A rather muddled and unconvincing metaphor, I fear.

The overall look and feel of this is rather like a Hammer Horror film - a bit creaky at the seams, but not too badly done. And with just a bit of Hong Kong wushu cinema thrown in too. Oh, and Godzilla, of course (it is indeed the wonderfully-named Satsuma Kenpachiro - who played Godzilla and a number of similar monsters in most of those Japanese classics of the genre - stepping into the rubber suit once more). There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of extras in some of the battle scenes - so, at times, there is almost an epic sweep to the thing; unfortunately, these scenes are not very well staged, and most of the combatants seem to be charging around aimlessly rather than actually fighting. Also, the special effects are considerably less than special: some of the back-projection is laughably atrocious. That having been said, though, Kenpachiro knows how to get the most out of that rubber suit, and the classic Godzilla stuff - smashing things up - is actually rather more realistic than in most of the Japanese films in the genre (perhaps because here he's trashing ancient palaces and temples rather than modern skyscrapers: wood and brick splinter and pulverise so much more impressively!).

The film drags in places, and at 95 minutes it is a good 10 minutes or so too long. There are a few lapses in narrative coherence (too many of the characters look too similar, I found, which is certainly not a help to following what's going on). There is some truly terrible acting. There are a few amusing glitches in the (mostly very serviceable) English subtitles: "Get into the cage already!"

is just a little too colloquially American, I find. The rudimentary synthesizer score and ludicrous sound effects are always worth a few laughs. And even the credits are a source of some mirth (ah, Korean names! The young hero is called Inde - apparently pronounced Indie! [Do you not think of 'Independent' or 'Indiana Jones'? I'm afraid I thought of both!] - and is played by an actor called Ham Gi-sop.... no kidding).

The main obstacle, though, to taking this film at all seriously is that the monster is just way too cute. When he first appears, he's only 3 inches high - and everybody says how cute he is! And it's true. It's the same costume and the same actor throughout, just rendered at different scales; and even when he's 60ft tall and squishing people underfoot, he's still CUTE.

Apart from the film's place as a 'landmark' in North Korean cinema (to date, still their only 'horror film', I believe), and apart from the fascinatingly melodramatic background to its making, and apart from the hours of discussion you can indulge in about its political subtext - this is basically just a thigh-slapping romp that will give you a tears-of-laughter good time, if you watch in the right circumstances and the right spirit (I would recommend: heavily drunk and/or stoned, along with several of your buddies).

Trivia challenge: How many times do they say the monster's name in this film? I wasn't counting - but I'd guess it's well over 100!

By the way, if you've happened upon this post while Googling for 'Pulgasari' or 'North Korean cinema', and you live in Beijing.... Simon Cockerell (of Koryo Tours) is planning next year to start up a more regular series of screenings from his extensive collection of North Korean and North Korea-related films - features, documentaries, and propaganda shorts. He urges you to drop him a line if you're interested, as he'll be starting a new mailing list for this.

The weekly haiku

Waking late, waking
To unaccustomed silence:
Building site quiet?!

I thought at first it must have snowed overnight, but no. I've no idea what has caused this, but the building site outside my window is almost deserted this morning - no activity at all.

Rather as with banging your head against a brick wall - an experience to which it has been remarkably similar - it is nice when it stops.

Chinese universities piss me off AGAIN

I will do my best not to make this a long-running series, but....

On Tuesday, one of my regular employers (a major British education company which I'd better not name) asked me if I could do a presentation for them. I always try to be accommodating, because they are a pretty regular source of income for me.

When was it? This Thursday! (OK, I'm getting a little annoyed already. I think it's ridiculous to be trying to organize events at such short notice - and, frankly, it's inconsiderate, unreasonable, impolite to be trying to impose on your presenters with less than 48 hours' warning. And I just know that this means the "organization" at the venue is going to be even more chaotic than usual. In China, unfortunately, 48 hours' notice is quite a lot.)

Well, OK, maybe. What time? In the evening. (Doubleplusungood. However, it is going to be 500 kuai plus travel expenses for a half-hour appearance, so I figure I can crowbar it into my cramped schedule somehow.)

Oh, yes, and it's going to be in a university. One of the universities, as it happens, that I used to work in - and swore never to work in again. Never mind: I think this event is being staged by a private school that just happens to be using part of the campus. It should be a survivable ordeal.

I'm annoyed about the short notice. I'm annoyed about it being in the evening. I'm annoyed about the (habitual) lack of adequate briefing from the employer (English company but all Chinese staff - communication not good!): no explanation of what this school is, what the intended purpose of the presentation is, who the likely audience is or how large it might be. I am especially annoyed about the timing (the presentation I have been asked to give should run to 3 hours; our clients are always too tight-fisted to pay for the full session when they're only running it as a non-fee-paying promotional event, so we fairly regularly condense it into 1 or 1.5 hours - but these guys have asked us to do just half an hour!!). But I am used to this kind of thing by now: I can busk it somehow. I am trying to be accommodating, trying to be nice.

The liaison at the school doesn't contact me until Wednesday evening - by text message. We get into a protracted exchange of messages, by the end of which I have blown off the engagement.

"Will it be OK to meet at the East Gate at about 7.45pm? Or would the South Gate be more convenient?" I ask.

"I will meet you at the East Gate at 8.05," she replies.

Huge warning klaxons go off inside my head.

I know this campus well, and none of the classroom blocks or lecture halls we are likely to be using are less than several minutes' walk from the East Gate, possibly 10 or more. And it is always politic to be at the venue a few minutes before the scheduled start time, to make sure that the computer and projection equipment are working OK (a consideration that is all the more important when we are on such a tight time schedule - with really not a second to waste).

I remind my contact that I am supposed to be starting speaking at 8pm, so would really like to be in the room no later than 7.55pm.

She tells me that I am the second speaker.

I remind her - politely, but firmly - that I have been booked to speak from 8pm to 8.30pm, and that if there are other speakers, they will have to go on before me or after me.

After further frantic text message exchanges, I discover: a) they want me to run a quiz with the students at the end, to give away some book prizes (there are only two prizes, but even so, this will eat up a few more valuable minutes that we should be using for the already dangerously attenuated - almost unviable - presentation); b) one of her colleagues wants to give an introductory speech of about 10 minutes (and I know, from bitter experience, that it will probably run longer; it will certainly seem to run longer); and c) we can't start any earlier because..... someone else is using the room until 8pm! So, even if that previous group gets out of the way right on time, we can count on it taking at least 5 or 10 minutes to set up the room for our use and to get all of our audience inside and sitting down. Thus, we are looking at having probably around 10 minutes available for the main body of my presentation, at best; possibly less than 5 minutes. Utterly, utterly ridiculous!

No, I am not prepared to give up a big chunk of my evening (after an already exhausting day at work), to travel to the 'wrong side of town', to hang around for 40 or 50 minutes..... just to speak for 10 minutes or less.

It's not really about the money for me; I need to feel that I am doing something worthwhile - and there really is nothing useful that I could tell these students in less than 10 minutes.

And no, I really don't want to have anything to do with people who can be so infuriatingly naive and disorganized. (Even though not actually a part of the university, I fear that this school is tainted by the typical university mentality: they probably thought they had bought me body & soul for the entire evening, and that it really wouldn't matter at all if they started a quarter of an hour or a half an hour late and kept me there until well past 9pm. No, sorry, people: 8.00-8.30 means 8.00-8.30, and not a minute more.)

Alas, I find myself ultimately more frustrated with the English company that was supposedly setting this up. They should have told this client that 30 minutes was not long enough for this presentation. They should have told them that it couldn't possibly be any less than 30 minutes. They should have told them that it is vital to work out exact timings for all parts of the event. They should have told them that it is unwise/unacceptable/pointless to try to organize events of this kind at just a few days' notice. They should have told them all this before they even asked me to do this gig on Tuesday. Should have, but didn't.

Then, when I told them about all the problems with the administration and the timing, they should have told the client that it was impossible to proceed, and they would do better to postpone the event (if they staged it over the weekend, during the hours of daylight, they'd get a much better audience anyway!). But NO: instead, they came back to me and suggested that I could stay there longer, in order to deliver a full 30 or 40-minute presentation, no matter what time we actually managed to get started. (And this, despite the fact that I had already explained in a phone call that I had other plans for the rest of the evening and absolutely could not stay beyond the 8.30 finish time I'd orginally been given.) My contact seemed surprised, uncomprehending, aggrieved. She then said sniffily that she would see if she could find someone else to do the presentation. I could not restrain myself from pointing out to her that she had already told me the day before that she was unable to find anyone else for this engagement; and also, that it was downright RUDE to be asking people to take on jobs like this at less than 24 hours' notice, and that I thought it was very unlikely anyone would agree to it even if they were free.

I have, thus, probably just torpedoed one of my longest-standing and most lucrative business relationships here. But sometimes, you know, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Impassable

I have commented before on the frequency (and protractedness) of sidewalk renovations in this city - but just lately, things have been getting ridiculous.

The sidewalks on both sides of Jiugulou Dajie, the main southbound street near my apartment (which I walk along nearly every day), have been completely impassable for a couple of months: although much wider than in most parts of town, these would-be pedestrian thoroughfares are riddled with holes and trenches, piles of sand and stacks of paving slabs every few yards. It's particularly difficult to traverse these obstacles at night, since street lights are few and far between, of rather low brightness (the government no doubt claim this as a sign of their Green consciousness, but it's probably more to do with the shortfall in generating capacity), and largely obscured by the ubiquitous bloody trees anyway. Lately, I have fallen into the habit of cutting through the hutong back-alleys when I go out at night - because it really is just too darned hazardous to try to negotiate these sidewalks in this half-dug up condition (and there are no warning signs or tape cordons, of course!).

And it was not just this street. Almost all the major streets in the centre of the city seem to have been reduced to this condition. The shots above were in fact taken a couple of weeks ago on Zhang Zizhonglu - one of the city's main east-west thoroughfares!

We always get big seasonal splurges of this kind of repair work, but this year it seems to have been more thoroughgoing, more widespread than ever before. And it started in September, within days of the Paralympics concluding. I wonder if perhaps the deterioration of the sidewalks (another trees problem - the shallow root systems often chew up the paving within the space of 6 months or so, requiring continual re-levelling) has been more chronic this year because the spring/early summer repairs were done earlier than usual (and perhaps in a more rushed, slipshod manner - if such a thing is possible!) because of the panic about prettying the city up in time for the Olympics. It seems quite likely.

The most alarming thing about this phenomenon is not the inconvenience and health & safety risk it constitutes, nor its startling ubiquity - but the fact that it has gone on such a long time. The work was begun in late September or early October, but proceeded very slowly - and then seemed to be abandoned altogether for several weeks. I began to worry that it might be another indication of the impact of the 'global meltdown': if the Chinese government is running out of money to complete routine public works...... then we are all in big trouble.

PS Just in the last couple of weeks, the sidewalk re-laying finally seems to have been completed. The workforce was diverted elsewhere for a month or two, I suppose. Perhaps the 'global meltdown' effect here is that China is channelling its spend-it's-way-out-of-recession efforts into more conspicuous public projects like new roads and bridges and subways, and mundane pothole-filling is occasionally getting sidelined.

Fantasy football

I happened to catch an international football roundup on the domestic sports channel, CCTV5, this evening. For some unfathomable reason* they were showing a Real Madrid v. Barcelona match from 4 years ago. I wasn't complaining, though. It was awe-inspiring stuff. There have been many "all-star" teams in recent years, particularly at Real, but the lineup they had that year was really something else again: Raul, Ronaldo and Michael Owen playing up front at the same time; Zidane, Beckham and Roberto Carlos in their pomp; and Luis Figo itching to get on from the bench! Ridiculous! Perhaps a somewhat excessively attacking formation to field against a team as good as Barca, but it seemed to pay off, sort of: it was 4-2 (to Real) after 27-and-a-half minutes!

Of course, this being CCTV5 - and in a bar, without even the "benefit" of a Chinese commentary - it was pretty much impossible to follow what was going on. The original score and match-clock was obscured by the superimposed channel ident; huge tracts of play (anything without goals, injuries, or sendings off, I presume) were omitted completely; the date of the match (well, not the actual date, only the season in which it took place) was displayed only very briefly at the beginning of each passage of highlights; and these rather choppy excerpts from the stupendous 2004/2005 game merged without a break into highlights of two (or more?) further games between the two Spanish giants - from later seasons whose dates I didn't quite catch. The sports coverage in this country is just so far below dismal.......

* OK, I take it back. Real are playing at the Camp Nou this Saturday - a reasonable enough excuse to recap some of the best moments from the last few encounters between the two teams. I just wish the chaps down at CCTV could have done it in a slightly more coherent way.

Ice, ice, baby

When staggering home through Arctic conditions last Thursday night (well, OK, the wee smalls of Friday morn), I was alarmed and perplexed to note that - although temperatures had been continuously below freezing for over 24 hours at that point, and had been getting down towards -15°Centigrade for the past several hours - there was not a trace of ice on the old city moat which lies alongside the North 2nd Ringroad, just a few hundred yards from my apartment. I have remarked on this rather perplexing - downright scary - phenomenon before. One wonders if they're still dumping superheated sewage into it (they supposedly stopped unloading raw sewage into the city's open waterways for the Olympics, but they've probably resumed the practice now; all of that modern city/"Green" Olympics bullshit was the most temporary of window-dressing).

It is therefore with considerable relief that I note today that - despite the temperature having been much milder for the past few days, and well above freezing during the middle of the day today - the moat is at last well and truly frozen.

I imagine, then, that the nearby Houhai lakes are too, although I haven't had the chance to go and take a look yet. The ice is probably still a little too delicate to bear much weight, but give it a few more days. The two-month 'Frost Fair' down on the lakes is one of the highlights of the Beijing winter: a Bruegelian (the Elder, that is - not the mad visions of Hell one) pageant of skating, sledging, hot chestnuts and candied fruit.

The weekly bon mot

"The only good thing about cats is that when you take one into your house, you are no longer the laziest and most selfish resident."

Tony B, blogger extraordinaire - on cats

Weekend silliness

I have lately been mocking my old friend The British Cowboy for his enthusiasm for the Star Wars series of films. I am at the opposite pole in my feelings for them: I so dislike the idea of them that I have made a point of never watching any of them. I don't think that debars me from criticising and deriding them, since I am well aware of their place in our popular culture (and, indeed, I have a pretty good idea what happens in them).

In digging out this Star Wars-themed cartoon, I was suddenly reminded of The Adam & Joe Show, one of the better late-night offerings on the UK's Channel 4 back in the late '90s. It followed the Wayne's World premise of two goofy friends (the comedians Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish), stuck in a perpetually teenaged mindset, hosting a homemade TV show from their bedroom. However, where the appeal of Wayne & Garth, such as it was, was mostly about the wackiness of their characters, Adam & Joe actually created a worthwhile show - apparently on a shoestring budget - full of endearingly daft content, including some very sharp parodies of films and TV programmes. One regular feature was a pastiche of a recent cinema blockbuster acted out with stuffed toys: I remember their Trainspotting and Saving Private Ryan (Saving Private Lion!) with particular fondness. Another weekly highlight (this is why they came to mind now) was a spoof of a popular TV show using Star Wars action figures: my favourites were Jedi Springer and Channel 4 game show The Crystal Maze (Yoda as Richard O'Brien - brilliant!). [Embedding disabled, unfortunately.]

Enjoy.

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Elspeth Huxley

Well, the too-wonderful-for-words Moonrat is a hard act to follow; and, since she is the only one of my 'Fantasy Girlfriends' with whom I am actually on corresponding terms, I wouldn't want to risk making her jealous - so I suppose I'd better install her as Permanent Honorary Fantasy Girlfriend-in-Chief.

However, the series must go on. And I figure Moonie will be less likely to get in a huff with me if I follow her with a literary idol.

Elspeth Huxley was a marvellous British writer of the last century. She spent most of her childhood - and much of her subsequent long life (she lived to be nearly 90) - in Africa. She wrote some charming fiction about the continent (like the amusing title above; I don't think I've ever seen a photograph of her, and can't find any online now), as well as a number of non-fiction books about wildlife conservation there and biographies of a trio of great British heroes, Capt. Scott, Livingstone, and Florence Nightingale. However, she is perhaps best known for The Flame Trees of Thika, a lovely memoir about her first experience of living in Kenya as a young girl. This was made into a rather good TV series in the UK back in the late '70s or early '80s (for once, an ITV rather than a BBC production), with a gorgeous theme tune - but, alas, I can't find that online either. She was splendidly played by a very promising young actress called Holly Aird, and impressed - even at the age of 10 - as a quite exceptionally intelligent, idealistic, and spirited person.

One of the things that most attracted me to her - apart from her writing, which is really very, very good; and apart from the many other worthy things she achieved in her life - was an anecdote I heard on a BBC Radio tribute to her back in the '80s (it might possibly have been Desert Island Discs): I think she was telling the story herself - she continued to be a wonderfully fluent raconteuse, even at quite an advanced age - about how she had once been expelled from school... for running a book on the Derby! I hope I am not mistaken about this. It is a very long time ago that I heard this story; and I had thought that it had been an English boarding school that she was thrown out of (one of the big names like Roedean), but online biographies seem to suggest that all of her schooling was in Nairobi. As I so often say, print the legend. Show me a girl who likes horse-racing, can understand mathematics, and doesn't give a damn about silly old rules, and, well, I'm hers for life! And if she can write too.....

Yet more irritation with Chinese employers

Chinese universities all suck. All of them. I'd really be much happier if I never had to work with one, in one, or for one ever again, but.... in the current troubled economic conditions, I can't afford to be too dogmatic in my working policies. Alas.

So, I'm doing a promotional event for a Beijing university today. Saturday. The weekend. That's already annoying enough (particularly when I had two parties to go to last night!). How could they make it more annoying for me? You really want to know? Well, maybe not, but I'll tell you anyway.

1) Late on Wednesday afternoon, they send me an e-mail demanding a summary of my intended lecture that they can put on their website. Well, what they actually asked for was my complete PowerPoint presentation, but I told them - politely but firmly - NO; what they got was a brief outline, a list of topics, no more. Damn, these people always want FREE content.

2) On Thursday afternoon, I get a text message "confirming" the details of the timing. Actually, I find they are trimming the duration from 90 minutes to 60. I'm none too pleased, but I tell them I can compress my planned material into the shorter time, but will still expect to be paid the originally agreed fee. Taken aback, they decide to reinstate the 90-minute schedule. "Oh, and by the way, we did tell you we've moved it to the morning, didn't we? That doesn't matter, does it?" Well, NO, you hadn't told me that. And - given the 'two parties' thing alluded to above - a morning start is considerably less than ideal. But what the hey - I need the money. And I am trying to be nice here.....

3) Late on Friday afternoon, they send me an e-mail asking if they can video my presentation. They claim they only want to use a short clip from it (again, for advertising purposes on their website). However, they are also intending to press a DVD of the entire performance. At least they are asking me in advance this time! And they are very kindly offering me a free copy of the DVD as my recompense!! That's right: no actual fee, just a DVD. As I've said before, if you want to exploit my skills by mass reproduction of my work for your own benefit, well, I might be willing to discuss the possibility of that - but you've really got to be talking about a fee 50 or 100 times larger than I get for just doing a stand-alone lecture. I said NO once again - politely, but very, very FIRMLY.

4) This morning, when I arrive at the venue, my contact is NOT waiting for me at the gate as she had promised. I call her to tell her I've arrived, and she promises to come and pick me up "in 3 minutes". More than 10 minutes later, there's still no sign of her and I'm freezing my nadgers off. I call her again. She claims she didn't realise I'd actually arrived. (I figure she's lying, because we had discussed in detail exactly where I was standing and, you know, she had said she would meet me there in 3 minutes. I am just about ready to jump in a taxi in a righteous huff and go back home to bed again.) "Oh, and do you mind if we start 10 or 15 minutes later, because our director wants to give a long, waffly introductory talk in Chinese?" Yes, I DO mind. In the real world - and I don't mean "outside of China", I basically just mean "outside of Chinese universities" - people do not think they can change a fixed itinerary on the day of the event..... at barely 5 minutes' notice!! (That taxi home is now mighty tempting!) I have timed my material very carefully to fit the scheduled 90-minute slot, but.... oh, what the heck, the director can prattle on as long as he wants to; but understand this - you are only paying for 90 minutes of my time, and at 10.30am precisely I am out of here. So, maybe the director can give his speech at the end??

Deep breaths. Calm, calm, calm. Picture a restful place. Let the anger go. Calm, calm, calm. (And if it's still bugging you, blog about it when you get home.)

Be careful what you write about....

Rebecca Mackinnon is a giant figure in the China blogging scene. A former media professional (she headed up CNN's office in Beijing for a while) and one of the founders of Global Voices Online (fantastic website, if you don't know it: it collates and translates newsworthy blog-posts from all around the world; the China page is an essential weekly read for me), she now holds an academic post at the University of Hong Kong where she conducts research on the Chinese Internet.

She and her students recently carried out a fascinating experiment on online censorship within China. Guess what? Her blog post on that - and, indeed, her entire blog - are now BLOCKED in China. So comprehensively blocked, in fact, that I can't even reach it using my regular proxies! Nanny is miffed, evidently. Well, maybe she's been blocked for a while, I don't know. I don't follow her regularly. But I've never previously had any difficulty accessing her blog through my usual proxy. (I worry that I might get myself blocked simply for mentioning this....)

However, you can - for now - still view this slideshow summary of the study. Interesting stuff.

Come on, Nanny - do your worst! I'll fight you with one hand tied behind my back!

Because you can make 'Art' out of anything....

Just when you thought the Internet couldn't get any weirder......

Well, OK, I gave up being foolish enough to think that quite a few years ago, but..... even I found myself unprepared for this.

Haiku for the week

Alarm clock silenced;
Working world a distant dream.
Lie-in: luxury!

Yes, today is the first completely free day I have enjoyed in about 5 or 6 weeks. Not that I've been working especially long hours for the most part, but even a fairly short gig requires preparation and travelling and hanging around beforehand and hanging around afterwards and more travelling; even an engagement of only an hour or so can eat a big chunk out of the day. And having such engagements over the weekend just stops the weekend being properly restful, somehow. I am feeling run into the ground. The savagely cold weather of the past few days has been tiring me out as well. This morning - with nothing to do - I lounged in bed until 10am. Bliss.

Winter is here?

The nighttime temperature has been dropping well below freezing for the past several days, but the daytime highs - though tailing off somewhat from the fairly mild spell we enjoyed in recent weeks - had still been getting well above zero Celsius again. Well, until the last couple of days: I think the daytime peak crawled above zero only just barely, if at all, today; and there has been a penetrating north wind that is making things feel much colder.

Things are predicted to get even worse over the next few days, with daytime temperatures staying below zero, and overnight lows plunging well below -10.

I just walked back from a music bar down at the bottom of nearby Jiugulou street. Barely a mile - but I really didn't think I was going to make it. The mean air temperature was about -15°, and the windchill was probably taking another 10°or 15°off that.

I used to make mock of people who complained of such conditions, but I fear my resilience is weakening with advancing years. I used to maintain that the two sets of long thermal underwear I bought in my first year here would only be used on trips to the mountains or the frozen wastes of the far North-East, but that resolve has been overwhelmed a few times in recent years. Tonight, I think those longjohns may have saved my life. That is about the coldest I have ever been in Beijing. I have been pretty bloody cold here before on a number of occasions, but this was just a whole new level of pain.....

I am starting to seriously consider my friend DD's suggestion to wear both pairs together.....

Today, in the recording studio

Today we received the rare instruction to record the script exactly as it stood - not making any attempt to repair the numerous omissions, illogicalities, mis-spellings, and Chinglishisms in it.

I suppose I should be thankful. Even though my regular partners and I have now become adept at spotting and amending such howlers almost at sight, in a bad script I'd guess that it can slow us up by at least 10% - and we only get paid for the amount of usable tape we lay down, not the amount of time we spend in the recording booth, so that's all "lost income". It's writing up these corrections that really takes the time, something that we do purely out of a sense moral uprightness, not because we think anyone is ever going to pay them the slightest bit of attention (much less actually incorporate our improvements into subsequent versions of the tapescripts). Such a proof-reading/re-writing process really ought to be quite generously reimbursed; but in practice we are doing it for free.

So, I ought to have been grateful for the greater efficiency, the saving of time and unrewarded effort that the 'NO corrections' policy brings us. But, really - it's just painful reading some of this stuff. My partner DD finds it great fun, but something in me recoils in disgust from this unnecessary butchering of the mother tongue (however hilarious it might sometimes be).

A lot of the time I find myself 'auto-correcting' without even realising it. For instance, it was only with difficulty that, when playing a tour guide warning his party against getting too close to the local fauna, I was able to force myself to say that this was because the animals might lose some of their natural "fearlessness" through too much human contact, even though it was fairly obvious that "fearfulness" was the right word. However, I refused to warn them against "reproaching" the animals when it was clear that "approached" was meant (one wonders if this passage on eco-tourism hadn't been ineptly mashed up with an article on Chinese parenting; the loss of "fearlessness" through too much "reproaching" might have fitted there). And it was only on a subsequent re-reading (idling away a couple of minutes while DD read a long solo passage) that I realised I had unconsciously amended "wide life" to "wildlife".

Ah yes, and this tour was taking place on the Golab Gist islands (essence of Indian dessert-making??). It took a minute or so for the penny to drop: Galapagos!

The plague of inappropriate naming of characters seemed even more rife than usual too. Can Nancy ever be a surname? Even in French? (The character was a male university lecturer - Professor Nancy!) A little while later I had to put up with being addressed as Brine. The highlight of the day in this particular genre, though, was when I found myself playing an elderly American gentleman being delighted to receive a phone call from his married daughter - "Why, it's so nice to hear from you, Crusty." I am a seasoned professional at this work now, quite the trouper - but I just could not keep a straight face through this, and it did require 3 or 4 'takes'.

Three holes in the ground....

It transpires that the pile-driver operating at a distance of barely 5 yards from my balcony (only for about 12 hours a day, at least; not overnight) is there for the purpose of digging a well. (I badgered my landlord to contact the building company, to try and find out what the f*** is going on, and how long it's likely to take. Apparently the well-digging should be over soon, but the whole project - still shrouded in obscurity! - is scheduled to take another 6 or 7 months. Oh my gawd!)

I don't quite understand why they need their own well, rather than simply connecting to the mains supply, or pumping water out of the adjacent canal. The way Beijing's water-table has been going in recent years (retreating at a rate of knots towards the centre of the earth!), I fear they are going to have to dig very deep.

And they are at least two other major pieces of excavation going on in 'my' (formerly quiet) little park: one small hole close to the well-bore, and one much larger one at the far end of the park's mystery building (a lake, possibly?).

Looks like I'm in for a long haul of sleeping in the living room......

Last words

I think the thing that ultimately always saves me from my own occasional suicidal urges is the writer's block it always induces in me.

Here's another example of how we might make that last note even more difficult for ourselves....

PS Fret not, gentle readers, I am not assailed by any such glumness at the moment. It's just that I spent the entire morning wrestling with bloody PowerPoint to create a presentation for a lecture I'm doing this weekend (5 hours of effort to create 1.5 hours of slides? Something wrong there! No, in fact, about 1 hour of creative effort, and 3 or 4 hours of re-doing the 'Auto-font-sizing'! [Is there any way to turn this OFF?!]), so I have been reminded how much I HATE all things Microsoft.

Chinese people LOVE me! (22)

"My landlord loves me because..... I always pay the rent, on time and in full."

Even in these troubled economic times.

I think that must make me a freakish rarity - at least amongst the less well-off strata of expat society here, and quite probably amongst Chinese tenants too.

Just about everyone I know tells stories of regularly facing an unseemly last-minute scramble to get their monthly or quarterly (or, in some cases, half-yearly) rent together, and is often asking their landlord for a few days'/weeks' grace to make the payment. One translator I know changes apartments pretty much every year because her landlords are always getting fed up of her being behind on her rent.

Me, I usually aim to have enough cash in hand to cover the next 6 months' rent - just in case of a disastrous downturn in work (or a reckless urge to go travelling for a while).

And I'm a quiet and peaceable chap. I don't annoy the neighbours. I don't break stuff. I rarely trouble him to try to get repairs done. I only have a party once a year (at most: I missed to have one at all this year, somehow!). I am pretty much the model tenant.

I don't think my landlord appreciates me as much as he should. But he does always wear an ecstatic grin on his face when he leaves here with a great wedge of money.

(I was planning to take a picture of The Grin this time, but it completely slipped my mind. Drat!)

Traffic Report - the blog stats for November

Thanks to my one-off 'Picture Week' (28 pictorial posts, with scarcely a word on them) on Froogville a little while back, last month's wordcount on the blog was well down on recent totals - although still pretty much up to the typical rate of output over the rest of the month.

There were thus a staggering 66 posts on Froogville last month, but only a comparatively modest 10,500 words.

Barstool Blues once again hits its steady average of 40 posts and 11,500 words.

I hadn't previously been paying any attention to the 'Monthly Summary' feature available on my Statcounter traffic-monitoring, but I've just discovered it, and, well,........ it seems that Froogville is pretty regularly drawing 1,200 or more unique visitors per month. Nothing that exciting, but at least twice as many as are getting recorded by my Sitemeter counter. The Barstool is consistently 100 or 200 behind on the 'unique visitor' count, yet, strangely, seems to draw almost twice as many return visitors. I'm at a loss as to why that might be. (I'm rather more concerned - alarmed/disheartened! - that, after a huge spike at the start of the year [when the Barstool was briefly drawing significantly more readers than Froogville!], its numbers have tailed off dramatically since then. Why? Why?)

Nothing very interesting happening lately on the 'visitor map', alas - except for a sudden surge in visits to the Barstool from Canada and the United Arab Emirates! (Once again, I am at a loss...)

Once again, I thank you for reading (if you have been; at all regularly, that is). And if you have been (reading, fairly regularly), I would ask you to contribute to my recently initiated 'review page' - all comments welcome, whether good or bad, on either blog or both.