Apparently Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, was his usual self in China this past week, and as a result he pissed off the Chinese establishment. Not only did he walk with his hands in his pockets for parts of the closing ceremony, he wore an unbuttoned jacket and held the Olympic flag with one hand (madness!). Boris hilariously entertained his Chinese hosts later at a dinner by stating that the British had invented or codified every international sport, including China’s favorite, ping-pong. Then he said: “Ping-Pong is coming home. Athletics is coming home. Sports is coming home.”
Forget London 2012. We need Boris 2012.
Now that the opening ceremony is over, China Daily is asking its online readers to vote for “the shiniest star of the opening ceremony entrance.” Kitsch-Posh was the first unbiased news outlet in the world to see the poll, and the result as of 12:17 PM ET (12:17 AM Beijing Time) speaks for itself:
Unfortunately, some biased sources voted minutes later and altered the results of the other polls.
It’s obvious that China is continuing to block the Olympics media’s access to Facebook. By sometime mid-February they’ve exhaustively reported on everything worth mentioning (and nearly everything not worth mentioning) about the Olympics, so now they’re so bored out of their minds that they’ve resorted to talking about the weather. The IOC might as well have sold exclusive broadcasting rights to the Weather Channel.
And no matter what color the Beijing sky is—whether it be blue, cerulean, cornflower, periwinkle, or shamrock, The Weather Channel, AP, AFP, Reuters, BBC, CNN, NBC, Fox, NYT, WP, and the McLean Sun Gazette are on the scene and reporting LIVE, to give YOU the latest weather updates in your area China. Oh boy here comes the rising sun—better tie ourselves to the palm tree NOW!
Over just the past week there have been hundreds of pieces scattered over our media exclusively dedicated to talking about some given day’s weather. Here’s Reuters’ offering so far in August (dates approximate because we don’t care to sort out timezones and updates to the same story and all that):
And don’t forget the daily one-picture update on the Drudge Report, which usually links to these stories with headlines such as “BLUE SKIES BEIJING!” and “Smog returned to Olympic skies on Monday…” Tomorrow’s headline: “NO MORE SMOG BEIJING!” Thursday’s headline: “Chinese Government to Export People as Pollution Darkens Capital.”
Actually, nevermind. These guys are not at all like The Weather Channel. TWC loves to provide up-to-the-hour data on temperature, humidity, pressure and precipitation, as well as satellite imagery, dopplar radar maps, and computer-modeled 36-hour and 10-day forecasts. By comparison, what these reporters in Beijing do is they look out the window, copy-paste yesterday’s story into Word, and replace the headline and lede with some comments on what they thought the sky looked like today (you know, pretty easy, just start with something basic like “Huge Phallus-and-Gonads Cloud Hovers Over Olympic Stadium” and go from there). Perhaps plug in some bogus numbers where they are supposed to go, and take a nap. Then wake up in the evening to hook up with a transsexual prostitute and buy some X from the son of Grenada’s ambassador.
P.S. Some loser sports columnist whines. [WP]
The green sea algae that had threatened the Olympic sailing venue off the coast of Qingdao have been removed from the immediate area, but continue to spread elsewhere in the region. It looks like the Olympics will go on untroubled, but was there ever any serious doubt that it will? Was the algae bloom caused by human activities such as agricultural runoffs dumping excess nutrients into the water, or was it just a totally random and natural accident, an act of God? Either way sounds perfect.
On the other hand, various sorts of of algae have long been talked about as a promising source of second-generation biofuel, thanks to the possibilities for inducing characteristics such as fast growing rates and fatty composition. Many laboratories and companies out there have been trying to make it work, and soaring petroleum prices have given them more attention—just search “algae+energy” on Google—and, presumably, more investment.
Thank God for high oil prices. It’s saving Civilization.
The (PRC) Chinese are more humble than I thought:
“Yao Ming will face Kobe Bryant in the opening match of the Olympic basketball competition on August 10. By what margin (number of points) will the new US ‘Dream Team’ win its opening game against China?”
That’s the poll question being asked to online readers of China Daily, a widely circulated English-language newspaper in China. Needless to say, it doesn’t appear that the newspaper editors have faith in their basketball players. Who knows? This could be China’s “Miracle on Ice” moment, political and national symbolism included. China Daily commenter “people” believes his countrymen can pull the upset:
“you will wrong !we believe china ,chinese men !come on !”
Chinese men !come on ! indeed.
-L.
Last year I went to China (PRC), and by far the funniest part of the trip was reading all the poorly-translated English. In slang terminology, this “practice” results in Chinglish, or the direct translation of Chinese into English without applying any common sense. Most of the time I found Chinglish in more affordable establishments, such as the fake jewelry shops in the Pearl District or markets in the alleyways of Beijing, though certain stores in prominent commercial venues were not spared (read: Wangfujing). I can imagine why this happens: the Chinese shop owner, eager to sell his products to dollar Euro-carrying foreigners, feels compelled to accommodate them with the lingua franca so that the tourists can at least understand where they are and what they are buying. The shop owner just doesn’t know that what he actually wrote in English can be different from Mandarin. Thus, these efforts do not always come out as intended, especially in restaurants. Now the Chinese government is doing something about it:
“Local dishes like ‘Husband and wife’s lung slice’ or ‘Chicken without sexual life’ conjure lots of furrowed eyebrows on famished foreigners. So, with the Olympics a few short weeks away, China is giving its cuisine a linguistic makeover. It is proposing that restaurants change the names of exotic, but bizarrely named, delicacies to make them more delectable for the estimated 50,000 visitors arriving in August for the Summer Games. [. . .] The government has put down more than 2,000 proposed names in a 170-page book that it has offered to Beijing hotels, according to state media.”
So Beijing continues to change, presumably for the better, due to the Olympics. No fair. Westerners and other people who speak English should be able to chuckle when ordering the “chicken without sexual life,” or, in my case, the “sacrifice beef with red pepper” and “deep-fried chicken Muslim”:
In all seriousness, this cosmetic fix, though long overdue, takes away some of the adventure for tourists. Yes, the Chinglish is humorous, but oftentimes it is the navigation and interaction that comes from trying to understand what you are buying that makes Chinglish worth keeping around. I still remember the various instances when I had to use my Chinese-speaking skills (basically saying ni hao and glancing at my Lonely Planet guidebook every five seconds) to know what I was ordering. The waitresses and I developed a quirky bond due to my lack of understanding and her inability to explain right away the contents in the menu. I spoke to the waitresses longer than I would have done otherwise; it was a type of cultural exchange between two people from different societies. Isn’t that the ultimate goal of these Olympics? If you don’t like that reason, then isn’t just plain fun to say you ate a “chicken Muslim” for dinner? At least one Chinese journalist thinks so:
“The process of standardizing a menu translation is a double-edged sword. It removes the ambiguity and unintended humor, for sure. But then it takes away the fun and the rich connotation too. It turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavor.”
Nevertheless, though Beijing will try to erase the Chinglish…
…some of it will remain in place for the world to see.
-L.
International media report that the coastal seawater where they’re supposed to have the sailing events for the Olympics are filled with green algae. [IHT, AP/Google]
Maybe it was in Historical Study A-13 where we learned that every Chinese dynasty needs a color. How about the current one? We’d probably have said ‘Red,’ except that the Olympics are getting Beijing to pay a lot more attention to being Green. Then the color Red became very angry and green with envy, so it sent a big, scary Red Tide. Except all the green paint they were spraying on the Beijing sidewalks and mountainsides ran off onto the nearest coastline and the red tide turned green. Back in Korea, every summer we used to hear about red tides happening in the Yellow Sea or the South Sea East China Sea Fuck you, so the problem isn’t entirely new in those parts. The remedy that Koreans typically apply for red tide is to pour loess (break up the soil first!) into the water from boats. China is overflowing with loess, why don’t they just try that instead of trying to manually haul the algae out of the sea (photo 2)?
