I first started hearing about Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944) years ago from Brendan O’Kane and Dave Lancashire. A “self-made sinologist,” he was apparently fluent in Chinese and quite well connected, but was also later exposed as a magnificent fraud. A prolific diarist, he also dwelled quite a bit on the sexy details of the Qing Dynasty.
Anyway, it may at times be difficult to separate the fact from the fiction in Edmund Backhouse’s story, but it’s quite a story. …
Recently I was browsing Flickr photos and came across one that looked familiar:
To my surprise, I was given credit for the original idea in the photo caption.
I looked at some of МОЛОКО’s other photos and discovered some “gay character creations”:
Some of these innocent-looking characters are pretty explicit if you go to the photos’ Flickr pages (click on the images) and mouse over the characters.
In case you’re not familiar, the “funny-looking symbols” next to the Chinese characters …
Chinese New Year (CNY) is this week, and it’s bound to cause confusion. This is because we’ve basically got three systems for numbering days overlapping, and quite close together:
The days of the week are referred to by numbers, starting with Monday (AKA “One-day”), then Tuesday (AKA “Two-day”), etc. In Chinese they’re 星期一、星期二、星期三、星期四、星期五、星期六、星期天.
For most of the year, dates are also referred to using the Western system.
Most Americans are familiar with the “base system” baseball metaphor for physical intimacy. If you’re not familiar with it, you might check out this XKCD comic for the complicated version, or this excerpt from baseball metaphors for sex from Wikipedia:
…
- First base is commonly understood to be any form of mouth to mouth kissing, especially open lip (“French”) kissing.
- Second base refers to tactile stimulation of the genitals over clothes, or of the female breasts.
- Third base refers to groping
I’m not sure if the people in this picture are Chinese, but I found it through Baidu Images:
This reminded me of a similar funny photo I’d seen before. Turns out there are quite a few, if you look. Here’s one gallery, and another with more photos, and of a more international nature (but also more NSFW).…
Word on the street is that the unedited version of Lust, Caution has already circulated pretty widely. My wife picked up a good copy a while back. I’m planning to watch it soon, partly to see what the fuss is about, and partly because of the ridiculous claim that I keep hearing from the Chinese: “foreigners can’t understand it.” (I actually probably won’t understand it–this isn’t the kind of film I’m into–but it’s still a ridiculous claim.)
Anyway, this is …
In early 2007 English First (an English training school) was running this ad in Shanghai:
What kind of message is that sending?
Apparently they later decided that they needed to make sure that the foreign teacher in the ad was more mature (and perhaps had better eyesight), and that the teachers they pimped provided equal bondage opportunities for both sexes. These are the ads they’re running now:
Conclusion: English First is a company with a progressive attitude towards advertising, based …
ChinesePod just did a lesson on condoms. It was an amusing dialogue. (You can listen to just the dialogue on the online player by clicking on “DIAL” and then the play button.)
Then in the comments someone posted a link to the largest collection of sexual vocabulary and slang in Chinese (and English and Swedish) that I’ve ever seen. Impressive. It’s called 牛X语言, and yes, you might find it obscene, so click at your own risk.…
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 …
China finally came up on my one of my favorite blogs, Sentient Developments:
When stripped of all its historical and social baggage, however, ‘eugenics‘ can be used to describe two general philosophical tendencies: 1) the notion that human hereditary stock can and should be improved, and 2) that such changes should be enforced by the state (or other influential social groups such as cults or religions).
These two concepts are not married to one another. Transhumanists tend
…
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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