At my girflriend’s urging I recently purchased my very first Bollywood movie. I only spent 7rmb on it, but watching it was a three-hour time investment. It was with much trepidation that I started viewing Veer-Zaara.
I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Pakistan was not portrayed nearly as negatively by Indian producer-director Yash Chopra as I had expected, and there were fewer song/dance scenes than I imagined. The story, while not what one would call “realistic,” was …
Yay! Now there’s a Sinosplice page just for feeds! This serves two purposes:
You can check for new updates to any of the (semi-)frequently updated sections of this site in one place.
You can see all the Sinosplice feeds (RSS/Atom) you can subscribe to in one place.
I expect that this page may become more important in the future, if I’m able to do some of the other things I want to do….
Thanks to Roddy for hooking me …
大家都知道中国人和外国人往往有不同的美丽标准透视。虽然很多美国人认为Lucy Liu很好看，但中国人觉得她一点都不好看。这样的例子很多，其实我对这个话题已经没什么兴趣了。我想说的是屁股的美丽标准。
我觉得中国人评价美女时，最重要的是：人要瘦，脸要美。外国人可能更注意身材，也不喜欢太瘦的。太瘦的话我们说：“she looks anorexic”（看来她得了厌食症）。太瘦就是不健康。当然太胖也不好看。
屁股呢？很多外国人看中国女孩说“they’re pretty, but they have no asses!”（好看是好看，但没有屁股！）。很多外国人觉得屁股太小也不好看。
那么外国人对屁股有什么美丽标准呢？这很难说，但其实我也不用说因为前不久在网上出现了一个非常好的榜样。很多男的都说这是“the perfect ass”（完美的屁股）:
我真的很好奇。中国人对屁股有什么美丽标准？跟我们不一样吗？是不是越小越好？
（注意：“ass”是个不太好的词。“butt”没有“ass”俗，也是屁股的意思。）…
Just in case it has escaped some of you, Micah is my friend and co-worker here in Shanghai. (If you have a compulsive need to follow “all things John Pasden” (ha!) you should keep an eye on Micah’s blog because my name pops up there from time to time.)
Micah recently wrote a thought-provoking entry on raising children in China as an expat:
Having gone to Spanish public school for so many years has cocktail party utility, but I blame
…
I just found out a little while ago that my blog’s comment script is not working. (From my little sister, of all people!) I had no idea it wasn’t working. I’ve been too busy with work these past few days to notice that kind of thing, although I did notice the comments had died down quite a bit.
It looks like maybe my host disabled the script (Roddy says they tend to do that, without warning).
I e-mailed …
I spent Friday and Saturday in Suzhou with Carl and his parents. Carl took his parents for sightseeing, and since I’d never been, decided to tag along.
Suzhou has always been paired with Hangzhou in my mind, due to the famous Chinese saying:
上有天堂，下有苏杭。
Above there is Heaven,
Below, Suzhou and Hangzhou.
Living in Hangzhou, I had this verse cited to me countless times. Hangzhou was not quite Heaven, but it was a pretty nice city as Chinese cities go. …
“Paji looooi!” the vendors cried as I stepped from the train. Hazy memories from almost a year ago quickly came back into focus. I was in Dezhou again.
My company had sent me for the second time to the mid-sized Shandong city for a day of teacher training. It’s a 14 hour train ride to Dezhou, and the train leaves Shanghai at 8pm, which puts arrival at 10am. The only problem was the training was scheduled to begin …
Pretty much every Chinese person has a government-issued ID card (身份证). They serve the roles of American social security cards (and sometimes driver’s licenses, for non-driving-related ID purposes). These ID cards are necessary for all kinds of everyday procedures and thus indispensible in daily Chinese life, although in some cases the ID number on the card is all that is needed.
Recently I became interested in the structure of the ID numbers on these cards. I was trying …
China has the world’s highest annual road death toll. Traffic accidents killed nearly 107,000 people last year, the result of skyrocketing car demand, poor roads and bad driving.
Yikes. I don’t doubt it, but this was the first time I came across statistics of this sort. Of course, it would be helpful if the statistics were given more context. China ranks “highest” for a lot of things, given that it is the world’s most populous nation.
And …
Sinosplice has been offline for the past few days for reasons entirely unrelated to hosting or blocking.
The other night right before I went to bed a thought popped into my head: doesn’t my domain name expire sometime in April? I better check on that.
I did a WHOIS lookup on sinosplice.com. Sure enough, it expired the very next day. Furthermore, my registrar was still the much-loathed iPowerweb.com. I vowed to myself last year to transfer my domain name …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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