Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Bad news about Lee
This is JimK...Please read this. We’ve lost Lee.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
King Kong
Wow, it’s been a shitload of time since I wrote anything. It’s not that I’ve lost the passion for writing an online journal or anything, it’s just that everything I’ve been doing lately are things I’ve done in the past. I go to Russian clubs. I stay out until eight in the morning. I go to a doctor who will write me a prescription for anything I want. I get solicited by both hookers and Nigerian drug dealers in bars. Same old same old, life in Beijing.
I do have one important development, though. For a variety of reasons my company has decided not to renew my contract when it expires at the end of April. When I am no longer employed there I will go into more detail, but suffice it to say that the separation was more or less amicable, no real hard feelings on either side as far as I can tell. So this means the end of my time in China, unfortunately.
Or does it?
I’m headed to Hong Kong on Thursday night. The original reason I was going was to start a corporation. Let’s just say it’s for “tax reasons.” Being who I am I wanted an amusing name. Basically I wanted something that sounded legitimate but was actually really offensive. My friend Rob knocked it out of the fucking park on his first attempt: “Pacific Rim Job Consulting.” (If you’re such a sheltered wallflower that you don’t know what a rimjob is, click here.) We even had a logo picked out, simply a picture of an eye but in brown ink, and the slogan, “Take it to the rim!” It was going to be my finest masterwork, an actual corporation registered in Hong Kong with the word “rimjob” in it.
Then I got an email. I won’t go into detail yet, but I will say that an exciting job opportunity has popped up which may indeed keep me in China. I have to meet with the man in question on Friday while I am in Hong Kong. Details to follow as appropriate. It does, unfortunately, mean that since my consulting corporation might actually be used as a consulting corporation having the word “rimjob” in the title might not be conducive to future profits.
Other than that I have some friends going with me to Hong Kong, so we’re going to party our balls off on Friday and Saturday nights down in Wanchai. Wish me luck. With California $42 billion in debt and our current president spending like there’s no fucking tomorrow the LAST country on the planet I want to move to right now is the United States.
Great place to visit but I sure as fuck don’t want to live there, at least not right now.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Gerber
Uh-oh. There’s another poisoned baby food scandal.
A woman was arrested in a Sunrise supermarket while she was allegedly poisoning jars of baby food in the grocery aisle.
Shirley Ybarra, 50, is charged with Poisoning Food or Water, a felony, as well as violation of probation.
Detectives say Ybarra put rubber gloves on her hands Thursday before mixing and acrid, black substance into baby food and juice containers.
Publix surveillance cameras caught her wheeling her shopping cart down the aisle, where she worked on the jars and bottles for about 15 minutes - all while shoppers and employees walked by.
Here’s the weird thing. Click on the link above, they have a picture of the woman. She isn’t even Chinese!
Fun With Subtitles
Okay, this is fucking awesome. I’m sitting here watching old South Park episodes on DVD. I randomly stuck one in and it was one where Trey and Matt introduce their favorite episodes. They’re performing at an old folks’ home when the turn to the camera, and announce that we’re about to see their favorite episode, “Conjoined Fetus Lady.” The dialogue then goes something like this.
Matt: ‘It’s all about the boys and their trip to China to compete in a dodgeball tournament.”
Trey: “We got the idea when Matt and I visited Beijing, China. Here we are at the Great Wall.”
[Photo of them at the Great Wall.]
Matt: “And here we are at the Forbidden City.”
[Photo of them in an alley.]
Trey: “And here we are at Tiananmen Square, where students were massacred by the Chinese army.”
[Photo of them in front of the Forbidden City.]
Trey: “And here we are reenacting the Tiananmen Square massacre.”
[Photo of them in Chinese army clothes pointing their fingers at a Chinese guy’s head as if they were guns. Cut to another shot of them strangling the same guy.]
Matt: “After we got out of jail for reenacting the Tiananmen Square massacre we came home and thought, ‘Wow, China is really stupid. Let’s make fun of it.’ So we did.”
Trey: “And this episode has that old ‘Woman who has a conjoined twin attached to her head’ joke in it.”
I was really curious to see how the Chinese subtitles would translate this so I started the DVD over again with the subtitles on. When it gets to “We got the idea when Matt and I visited Beijing, China” there is an accurate translation. I recognized the characters for Beijing and China. The funny part comes through the rest—this exact same translation remains on the screen through everything I quoted above, until it gets to the last line, about the conjoined twin joke. For the entire section dealing with Tiananmen the translators conveniently forgot to put up subtitles.
High-larious family entertainment. Of course, the fact that I’ve just written the words “Tiananmen Square massacre” is probably going to get this site blocked by the government. Note to the government functionary who will be evaluating this: this is a personal blog designed for my family and friends, not a political or anti-government website. We’re lao wei, we all saw what happened live on TV. It’s on YouTube, for God’s sake. No Chinese are going to be reading this, so please, cut me some slack. I’m making fun of the DVD, nothing more.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Thot Plickens
Many years ago I worked for a time in Shanghai. One night I was at a popular expat bar and struck up a conversation with a guy who said he was the editor of one of the city’s English language dailies. I asked him about censorship in China, and inquired as to how much autonomy he had in deciding what to write. He said that if the building across the street burned down he couldn’t write about it without prior permission from the censors.
I was reminded of this anecdote today when reading in the New York Times that the people responsible for the inferno in the building next door to the CCTV tower was, in fact, CCTV itself.
China’s national television network on Tuesday blamed an illegal fireworks display by its employees for igniting a blaze that destroyed a futuristic luxury hotel and theater here.
In a statement posted on its Web site, the network, China Central Television, said the illegal pyrotechnics on Monday, the final night of the Lunar New Year celebrations, were staged too close to the unfinished Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which is part of the network’s headquarters complex. The network apologized for “the severe damage the fire caused to the country’s property.”
Xinhua, the official news agency, reported Tuesday that one firefighter had died from smoke inhalation and that six firefighters and a construction worker had been injured.
The apology was a rare gesture of contrition by the powerful state-owned network.
But wait, it gets better.
Beijing residents who wanted to see the smoking shell of the hotel had a harder time on Tuesday finding images of the fire on the Internet, on television or in the city’s newspapers.
There were no pictures on the front page of The Beijing News. On Tuesday morning, the home page of Xinhua featured a photo from another event: a stampede in South Korea that left four people dead. Throughout the day, CCTV’s brief bulletins about the blaze omitted images of the burning tower. By evening, the newscast skipped the story entirely.
Even before the flames had been put out early Tuesday, pictures of the burning hotel had been removed from most of the main Internet portals serving China. In the afternoon, the story had been largely buried, although by the evening, news of the fire was accessible on the Xinhua and CCTV Web sites.
The network’s unusual public apology and the media’s skittish approach to covering the fire suggested that the authorities were struggling with how to deal with a delicate event in the age of cellphone cameras and YouTube.
A directive sent out by propaganda officials, which found its way to the Internet after it was leaked, made it clear that the authorities were eager to reduce public attention to the blaze, a colossal embarrassment that many people believe augurs poorly for the new year. “No photos, no video clips, no in-depth reports,” read the memo, which instructed all media outlets to use only Xinhua dispatches. “The news should be put on news areas only, and the comments posting areas should be closed.”
So not only did CCTV censor itself over a fire next door, it censored itself over a fire started by ITS OWN EMPLOYEES. Indeed, here’s the website for CCTV 9, their English language station. See how long it takes you to find their apology. There are stories about a government official meeting with a Saudi official, a koala rescued from the fires in Australia, and the upcoming Valentine’s Day.
The fire across the street, which they started, resulting in the deaths of and injuries to firefighters, not to mention ¥4,000,000,000 (about $600,000,000) damage to a brand new luxury hotel? Buried in small text in the middle of the page. To put this in perspective, imagine if employees of the New York Times had started a fire which engulfed the skyscraper next door, then the Times refused to even publish a story about it while every other newspaper in the country ran with it. I mean, look at the aftermath.
This wasn’t a small blaze in a few rooms, they gutted a luxury hotel worth almost three quarters of a billion dollars, and this is their apology in its entirety.
A devastating fire took place in the adjacent building of the new CCTV complex in Beijing last night around 8.30 pm.
Beijing Fire Control Bureau says CCTV staff responsible for the construction of the new TV complex, hired staff to ignite large festive firecrackers outside the building, and caused the fire. The move did not receive approval from related authorities.
The fire has caused severe damage. CCTV sincerely apologizes for the damage that the fire caused, and the inconvenience it has brought to the public.
So far, related details of the fire are still under investigation. And CCTV will do everything it can to cooperate with related departments in the aftermath.
Basically, “Oops, our bad. Dude, that blows.”
It’s the “lack of permission from authorities” aspect which will all but guarantee a number of life imprisonments and a few death sentences for those involved. But, considering the damage caused and the deaths and injuries to the firefighters, I won’t lose any sleep over it.
Monday, February 09, 2009
So Where the Fuck Have I Been?
Honestly, I just needed a blogging break. Between the Christmas holidays, followed, by the Chinese New Year, I couldn’t have been fucked to blog about anything. I’ve been partying, relaxing, enjoying time off work, and just generally being a complete lazy fuckhead.
I’ve got some AMAZING video of the fireworks this year, which I’ll be posting any day now. Unlike last year I kept my goddamned mouth shut, so you don’t have to hear my idiotic commentary where I use the word “spectacular” every five seconds. I also got some great shots tonight from my office window (my home office, I mean) where you can see fireworks going off right outside my window.
See? That towering inferno below could have been my apartment. Ah, China. There are SO MANY ways to die here, it just makes every second count.
The Towering Inferno
See, this is why you don’t set off fireworks in the middle of a city. This is happening about two miles from my apartment. The odd-looking building in the foreground is the CCTV tower, which is China’s state-run television center.
There isn’t much news yet. Here’s a Google translation of a Chinese news site. It looks like the building on fire is a hotel. Now, even with fireworks going off everywhere there’s no excuse for an entire building to torch up like that. It’ll be interesting to see how this is spun tomorrow. I imagine a few people will be arrested, some imprisoned, one or two executed. Problem solved.
Update: Check out this translated page. Note the way they proudly stress that the first thing the government did was declare martial law for that area, with armed police quickly taking control of the situation. Much less was said about rescue efforts, firefighters, and the like. Order is paramount above all other considerations.
Monday, January 19, 2009
RTKBA
Those of you back home might be surprised how popular SUVs and Jeeps are here. Pickups haven’t taken off, but there are SUVs and Jeeps everywhere. This morning a Jeep pulled in front of my taxi. It had a lot of sport accessories on it, so it looks like the owner might take it offroading. (I don’t think he was a poseur, it actually looked like it had been offroad.)
Like all cars it had a license plate. This one, however, had an additional license plate frame, which had been attached to the rear gate of the Jeep off to the left. I swear I’m not making this up—It was a standard American sized license plate with the NRA logo in the center, with the words NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION clearly on it. It’s the type of plate that, in some states, you’re allowed to put on the front of your car.
I didn’t get a solid look at the guy because he pulled onto the freeway in front of us but I’m almost positive he was Chinese. He may have been an ABC—American Born Chinese—but whatever he was he was prominently displaying the NRA colors.
This country never ceases to fascinate me.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Killing Fido
And here we see just the latest in a long string of Chinese tainted food scandals.
A Shanghai dealer has issued an emergency recall of a batch of Optima dry dog food with a production date between August and September last year.
Some dogs eating “Optima Puppy Lamb and Rice Dry Dog Food” have been poisoned by aflatoxin - a naturally occurring toxic chemical that comes from a fungus found on corn and other grains.
It can cause severe liver damage.
“Three dogs have been confirmed dead, and they all ate the batch of Optima food,” said the Shanghai Naughty Family Pet Co, a pet clinic on Hongqiao Road. These dogs were fussy about their food, had diarrhea and vomited, all symptoms of aflatoxin exposure, staff said.
What the hell is it with these people and tainted food? I can only begin to imagine the bad publicity this is going to get in the western press. “Chinese, once again, poison the world.”
Yidi purchased the batch of Optima dog food from a Taiwan supplier, according to an agent who declined to be named.
An imported feedstuff registration list posted by China’s Ministry of Agriculture shows that the Optima dog food’s production enterprise is Australia-based Doane International Pet Products.
But Tan said her purchase order said the food was made in the United States. “American-made Optima is a very famous brand. That’s part of the reason I chose it,” Tan added.
Ah, so the food came from Taiwan, it’s from an Australian corporation, and was manufactured in the United States. Anyone want to get bets going on how much negative press this gets in western papers?
Keyboard Kops
The Chinese may be a lot of things, but stupid is definitely not one of them. They are apparently the first country in the world to officially qualify “internet addiction” as a disease. And, surprise surprise, they have a treatment.
Nanometre wave machines, military formation drills, gruelling exercise regimes and electric shocks are being used to cure China’s ballooning number of internet addicts.
Some 300 treatment centres across the country hope to tackle the growing social problem of web addiction that has accompanied rapid modernisation.
“[Internet addicts] can’t adjust to school and society, so they try to escape their difficulties and avoid problems,” psychologist Tao Ran, who runs a treatment centre on a military base outside of Beijing, said.
“They lack self-confidence and often don’t have the courage to continue their lives,” he is quoted by ABC News as saying.
See, in the West, we call these losers World of Warcraft fans. However, you need to read the subtext here. China clearly censors the internet, they admit that, so I’m not giving away any state secrets. And I’m sure that in China, just like in other countries, there are antisocial losers who have no lives outside their computers. All this is stipulated.
However, methinks there’s a little more than meets the eye here. Suppose there was someone who was writing something on the computer here wasn’t supposed to, something that agitated the people and stirred up discontent. Why, all it would take was a diagnosis from a doctor and he could be whisked off to one of these “rehabilitation camps” which sound oddly like Abu Ghraib. When the western media eventually find out about it the Chinese now have plausible deniability—“No, no no. He’s not being locked up for what he said, he’s been locked up for his terrible affliction in a facility where he can get the political reeducation, uh, I mean medical care that he needs.”
You gotta hand it to them sometimes, you really do. Now if you’ll excuse me I think I’ll go download a few gigs of porn.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Frosty Brew II
I just had my latest crate of beer delivered. They’re running late tonight. It’s almost midnight and they just showed up. I had the little security panel on my wall ring, and when I answered all I could see was the top of a woman’s head. I said nihau? (hello?) and she said pijiu (beer). This little woman, maybe 45 years old and under 5 feet tall, was humping up a crate of beer.
It’s so fucking cold outside that the beers in the crate were twice as cold as the ones I had in the fridge. It’s been cold as a witch’s tit lately, bitter biting cold wind blowing in off the Gobi Desert. It’s “turn your nuts into raisins” weather.
A Night at the Flicks
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. What time is that, you ask? Is is the crisp winter? The new year, with all the promises it holds? No, my friends. It’ a couple of months before the Oscars, and the studios are sending out screener DVDs to the academy members, which means that the Chinese DVD pirates end up with them, resulting in us poor lao wei being able to see good quality, recently-released films on DVD. In the last couple of days I watched Benjamin Button and Gran Torino, both of which I loved. (Eastwood is fucking brilliant, and the visual effects in Buttons more than make up for Brad Pitt’s atrocious New Orleans accent.) I’ve got Milk and Slumdog Millionaire and a whole bunch of other films to watch in the coming days. On top of that I recently watched the most recent season of House (in a one-day marathon of viewing) and the final season of Boston Legal, which was an even bigger vehicle for David E. Kelley’s left wing agitprop than any that preceded it, though the characters and stories were still great. Next up is season two of Californication, a show I love in part because it takes place exactly where I used to live and work when I lived in Los Angeles, and I recognize half the locations in it. (In the opening credits there’s a brief flash of David Duchovny outside a building with an abominable massive piece of art comprised of a ballerina with a hobo’s head—I used to work a block from there, we called it the “clown building” and I used to park in there all the time. (Useless trivia—you remember the exploding bus in the film Speed? That’s the same corner where the filmed the explosion. More useless trivia—in Californication all the names of Hank Moody’s novels, such as “Seasons in the Abyss” and “God Hates Us All” are the names of albums by the band Slayer. I fucking love Slayer.)
I still think, overall, Tropic Thunder has been my favorite movie so far this year. I thought I was going to crap myself laughing at the “You never go full retard” scene, which I think has some of the best comedy dialogue I’ve heard in years (not to mention the most accurate) and the Tom Cruise scenes are awesome.
Remember, folks, these movies cost about a buck each.
Update: In the first few minutes of the first episode of season two Hank’s daughter is playing Guitar Hero. The song she’s playing? “Raining Blood” by Slayer.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Er Ling Ling Jiu
I just realized that today is the last day of 2008. It’s New Year’s Eve. With that in mind I’ll try to write something deep and meaningful, and since I’m in China I’ll give it a little Chinese flavor. The most commonly held beliefs in China, other than political ones, are Taoism and Buddhism. The OED defines Taoism as
[t]he central concept and goal is the Tao, and its most important text is the Tao-te-Ching. Taoism has both a philosophical and a religious aspect. Philosophical Taoism emphasizes inner contemplation and mystical union with nature; wisdom, learning, and purposive action should be abandoned in favor of simplicity and wu-wei (nonaction, or letting things take their natural course). The religious aspect of Taoism developed later, c. 3rd century ad, incorporating certain Buddhist features and developing a monastic system.
Deep stuff, huh? I’m not religious at all but this type of thing fascinates me. “The world does what the world does, and you should just let it happen.” (They’re actually somewhat similar to the Stoics in that regard.) Now, compare that with the OED on Buddhism.
Buddhism has no creator god and gives a central role to the doctrine of karma. The ‘four noble truths’ of Buddhism state that all existence is suffering, that the cause of suffering is desire, that freedom from suffering is nirvana, and that this is attained through the ‘eightfold’ path of ethical conduct, wisdom, and mental discipline (including meditation).
Look at this in a list.
1. All existence is suffering.
2. The reason we suffer is because we desire things.
3. We can be free of suffering.
4. Thinking is the means by which we free ourselves.
Thus, in a nutshell, the less we desire things the less we will suffer, and the more we contemplate our lives the more we can achieve happiness or “enlightenment.” That’s some pretty weighty shit. Then there’s karma.
[T]he sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future.
In 2009, think about your actions. This year for me is going to bring a number of opportunities where I have to make serious, life-changing decisions, not the least of which is whether I stay in China, come back to the US, or move to some as-yet-undetermined location. If we go by what the Chinese believe, I’ll end up with exactly the future I deserve.
So that is what I wish for all of you. From the Chinese perspective the type of person you are, and the way you act, will determine your future. May 2009 bring you exactly the future you deserve.
Bad Boys
I thought this was interesting.
Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was beaten by medieval prince Alexander Nevsky in a poll held by a TV station to find the greatest Russian.
Stalin came third, despite being responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviets in labour camps and purges.
Alexander Nevsky fought off European invaders in the 13th century to preserve a united Russia.
In second place was reformist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was assassinated in 1911.
More than 50 million people voted by phone, the internet or via text messages in the poll held by Rossiya, one of Russia’s biggest television stations.
Stalin usually comes out on top of these things, and it appears he was in the lead at one point.
Stalin - born an ethnic Georgian - was riding high for many months and was in the number one slot at one point until the show’s producer appealed to viewers to vote for someone else, says the BBC’s Richard Galpin in Moscow.
Stalin sent millions of people to their deaths in the work camps of the Gulag. Millions more perished in political purges or during the forced collectivisation of farms during his rule from the 1920s to his death in 1953.
Many in Russia do still revere Stalin for his role during World War II when the Soviet Union defeated the forces of Nazi Germany.
This is similar in dynamic to why Mao is still revered in China.
But now there is a much broader campaign to rehabilitate Stalin and it seems to be coming from the highest levels of government, says our correspondent.
“We now have to think very seriously, why the nation chooses to put [Joseph] Stalin in third place,” said actor and film director Nikita Mikhalkov, one of the contest’s judges, after the results were released.
I don’t think it’s that complicated, really. Stalin made the USSR into the fucking world-feared USSR superpower. There has been a great emasculation since then as Russia has fallen to a second-tier player, which explains fully why Putin and his tactics are so popular, with something like an 80% approval rating—he’ll make Russia great again.
Living in this part of the world, and speaking to people who hold this mindset, has been one of the most significant intellectual awakenings of my life.
Monday, December 29, 2008
The Harder They Fall
First read this post and my commentary to it, then read this.
In recent years, the international political structure has transformed gradually from “one superpower coexisting with several other powers,” formed after the Cold War, to multi-polarization.
The transformation picked up speed this year, with significant changes in the balance of international forces.
The United States has been acting as the world’s only superpower in 2008, but the financial turmoil, which broke out in Wall Street in September, showed its vulnerability.
In addition, the country is still deep in trouble with its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has undermined its international image.
Some analysts attributed the waning U.S. strength to its policy of unilateralism and expansionism on international issues, and its practice of a laissez-faire free market economy at home. It remains to be seen what consequences of these policies will have on U.S. national strength.
When we’re all old men and women the world is going to be a vastly different place. Simply sitting back and assuming that we’re going to always be the top dog is going to end up our downfall.