On Thursday I noticed three kinds of Trojan condom ads in the subway car I was riding*, and I’d never seen Trojan ads on the subway before. Trojan is getting into the market a bit late; the dominant foreign company is Durex.
What interested me was the content of the ads. One of them was a long horizontal ad which read 不只是神话…… (“it’s not just a myth”). Another was a rectangular ad which briefly recounted in both Chinese and …
Recently Flickr images were being blocked, but not the site. I posted a link to a workaround.
Now the whole site is full-on blocked.
From Jonathan:
I’m told that this is a layer 7 (application layer) block, which is apparently serious.
Layer 7? I don’t know what that means, but this is quite inconvenient.
Update: As of 11:36am, Flickr seems to be back, unblocked.…
ChinesePod has recently been developing its “Extra” content. That refers to content that is not in a daily podcast lesson. One of the Extra features is one called Movie Madness, conceived by Dave Lancashire. The concept is this:
Here are the first five that we’ve recorded …
The whole Shanghai vs. Beijing debate is somewhat tired, I know, so I’m not interested in rehashing it. I’m not going to bash or gush over either city. Rather, I’ve had sort of a change of heart about Beijing, and I’d like to tell why. To be honest, the more time I spend in Beijing, the more I like it. But I doubt I’d ever voluntarily relocate to Beijing.
Still, if I found myself in any of the following scenarios, …
My family has a ball with misheard English (“dancing plaid” being a favorite), but a whole new world of hilarious confusion opens up when you switch to a different language. These two were heard the other day:
香橙 (“fragrant orange”) mistaken for 香肠 (“sausage”) as an ice cream flavor
谢谢光临 (“thank you for coming”) mistaken for 西瓜 (“watermelon”) as a farewell greeting
Given China’s myriad of dialects/topolects/languages and the resulting substandard varieties of Mandarin, one can expect this kind of …
Today I had to officially submit my masters thesis proposal to a panel of professors at East China Normal University. In Chinese, the verb for going through this process is 开题. When you propose your thesis topic, you have to give each professor on the panel a copy of your proposal, or 开题报告. Then you summarize what you’d like to do in your thesis, and ask the professors any questions, if you’d like. The professors ask you questions …
Just got back from Beijing. I have more thoughts on that city, for those that can stand them, but I’ll be posting them in a few days. In the meantime, you can read Brendan’s account of my little meetup with him.…
Now that I’m a “Shanghai snob,” I had to laugh at Hangzhou’s East Train Station waiting room VIP seating:
…
I love stylized Chinese characters.
It says 西湖一號 (West Lake No. 1). This is a good example of mainland Chinese designers using traditional Chinese characters for artistic effect (號 rather than 号).
Taken next to West Lake in Hangzhou.…
There’s a new addon for Firefox that gets around the recent Flickr block. Apparently all it affects is Flickr photos. Get it here:
I’m using it and it works great. The only downside of using this is that I won’t know when Flickr becomes unblocked…
[Source]…
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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