Years ago I wrote about tiny Chinese food refrigerator magnets. Chinese food has returned, this time to grace our cell phones. My friend Kris spotted these in China a few weeks ago, and recently gave an update with a better picture:
For a detailed run-down of what the food is, check out Kris’s entry on it. He also comments:
They are basically rubber, but after inspecting a few I’m still not convinced the hongshao rou is not the
…
I haven’t had time to read many blogs these days, but fortunately John B forwarded me this gem from Imagethief, which discusses Beijing’s air quality:
How bad was the air the last two days? If it was a person it would have been a seedy, broad-shouldered thug, dressed in filthy leathers and reeking of grain alcohol, last-night’s whorehouse and cheap cigarettes, that hauled you into an alley by your collar and beat you senseless with a lead pipe wrapped
…
I enjoyed Shaolin Soccer, and I like Jay Chou (周杰伦), so I’m really looking forward to more mindless fun from Kung Fu Dunk (大灌篮):
A film by Stephen Chow (周星驰), of course. [Sina page]
UPDATE: The film is not by Stephen Chow at all. It’s by Zhu Yanping (朱延平). Sorry about that. Now it looks like a pretty shameless ripoff. (Thanks to commenter Ken for pointing out that …
I personally have nothing against Karen Mok, but I present you with Exhibit A:
That is one mournful-looking puppy. Case closed!…
“Christmas” in Chinese is, of course, 圣诞节, but in the spirit of my previous Character Creations, I’ve created two new single characters that mean “Christmas.”
Character Notes: some radicals in the creations above were chosen for semantic reasons, but many elements were chosen for purely visual purposes. In some cases I purposely shunned a more obvious option (such as 木 for “tree” or 星 for “star”) because they didn’t have the visual effect I wanted. In the case …
So I’m caught up these days with an experiment (I hate humans!), work, and now even Christmas. So I decided to just throw up a link.
I found this interesting-looking online book: How Taiwan Became Chinese.
Has anyone read it? Any good? The title smacks of propaganda, but I’m willing to eat a little propaganda every now and then in the name of good education……
Here’s a picture of a place near work where I occasionally eat:
I have nicknamed it “Filthy Delicious.” The name says it all.
What’s interesting to me, though, is the name of the cuisine boldly painted in red on the wall: 麻辣汤. This is interesting because once upon a time I was under the impression that this was the correct name, but enough chastisement from Chinese friends converted me to the “real name”: 麻辣烫. And yet there it …
The experiment continues. The human element complicates any experiment, but having to gather my data from human sources and then to also have human help (not me) gathering the data is rather… vexing. Fortunately my experimental design allowed for some flexibility, because I have gone from Plan A to Plan B to Plan C… and I think I’m on something like Plan G now.
I’m not sacrificing quality; it’s still going to be good, but I will be glad …
“Better,” i.e. less obscene.
Brendan recently wrote a post in which he discusses the possible origins of offensive translations of the word 干. He strongly suspects bad machine translation is the culprit.
Then just the other day Victor Mair wrote on the same subject on Language Log, in which he basically proved that newer versions of popular translation software 金山词霸 (AKA Kingsoft, AKA iciba) don’t make these same mistakes. The real kicker to the post was the …
Thanks to everyone that wrote to me when I asked for subjects. I ended up having to get students from ECNU after all. I spent the weekend finishing up the preliminary work, and this week the experiment begins in earnest. Whoo-hoo!
I was disappointed that actual experiments seem to be discouraged by the faculty at my school. (Come on! This is supposed to be science! How can you discourage experiments??) Well, I’m starting to realize how much extra work …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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