The latest t-shirt design:
The graphic should be familiar to those that know their American history. The Chinese says 食蛇补身, which means something like “eating snake nourishes the body” (i.e. “snake is nutritious”). I’ll let you figure out what it means when you put the two together.
As always, you are welcome to purchase this shirt or browse the others in the Sinosplice Store. Thanks for the support!
The China Blog List recently got a design update. It looks like this now:
For a while now, the CBL has been suffering from massive spam attacks. John B, the original architect of the current version, had already helped me implement simple filters and batch delete functions, but I was still just getting bombarded by automated spam blog submissions. Recent additions of a captcha on the submission page and a “check range” greasemonkey script (which allows me to check hundreds of spam submissions for deletion at once) have enabled me to get the problem under control.
Being back in control inspired me to do the long-overdue layout update. Now that I am back in control, I also have a lot of blog submission approving to do. If you’re one of those people that submitted a while ago and you feel like you’ve been waiting forever, this is the explanation. And I will get to your submission.
I still have a bit of work to do on the layout. It breaks in IE. I’m not overly concerned though. (Do real web designers still care about IE??)
Oh, and while I’m on the subject of web updates, be sure to check out Dave Lancashire’s latest contribution to ChinesePod: the ChinesePod Dictionary. Very cool!
I just found these on YouTube. Hilarious. Just watch.
The amazing thing is that there are apparently over 30 of them! The camera work and pedagogy don’t get any better over time.
The full description of the first one led me to believe that the whole thing is just mocking a well-meaning old Chinese man, but then why would it go on for over 30 lessons? Plus more and more effort is clearly going into the on-screen presentation with the later clips.
I don’t get it.
I found this brief review of China pretty amusing:
> Pros
Lots to see, Beautiful historical buildings
> Cons
Run-down areas, Communism
> The Bottom Line
Definitely worth the trip!
No mention of the people… perhaps because the pros and cons of the people cancel each other out?
OK, so you know a thing or two about China. You may even speak great Chinese. You’ve been called an “Old China Hand” on more than one occasion. The real question now is… are you arrogant enough? Well, this t-shirt should help you along on that path. If someone’s 普通话 (Mandarin Chinese) is not 标准 (standard), then they need to know!
Your Chinese Is Not Standard
Possible uses for this shirt include (but are not limited to):
– Humiliating your fellow students of Chinese that are below you. They probably don’t realize that their bad tones and poor palatals hurt your ears. This will tell them.
– Humiliating the nice, hard-working peasants from the countryside. You can understand your Chinese teacher just fine, but you can’t understand these folk when they speak “Mandarin.” They need a wakeup call!
– Humiliating everyone in the south. Because you could walk through any city south of the Yangtze, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone this shirt’s message doesn’t apply to!
– Humiliating yourself. Wouldn’t it be great to wear a shirt that tells people their Chinese sucks (in Chinese), but you don’t even speak the language yourself? I think you should do that.
Anyone who wears this shirt in China is plenty to end up with a story or two. Be sure to share them with me.
[The opinions expressed here may or may not be real, but this is a real shirt. Please support Sinosplice by buying it or something else in the Sinosplice Shop. Thanks!]Just in the past few months I’ve had blueberry juice (in Beijing) and bayberry juice (in Shanghai):
This got me thinking about some of the other interesting juices in China. Although not so exotic, I never saw watermelon juice and cucumber juice on the menus back home (no, I have never hung out in health spas). But they’re regular features on the menu in Shanghai.
Then of course there’s kiwi juice and strawberry juice.
What interesting fruit or vegetable juices have you had in China?
AB报 (ABBao.cn): See the front pages of a slew of Chinese print newspapers. Pretty cool! Definitely worth exploring more.
饭否 (Fanfou.cn): the Chinese Twitter clone. Buboo.tw: the Taiwanese Twitter clone. [Twitter]
Sun Tzu’s Art of War: the whole thing in English, plus commentary, plus the ability to link to or comment any individual passage. Now if only it was in Chinese as well….
On my way home from work yesterday I saw this ad on the subway:
At first I was really confused by the composition of the ad, but in fact someone had slipped their own (quite professional-looking) ad behind the plastic ad display cover. (They chose an oral contraceptive ad.)
The content of the ad:
> 寻人启事
吕金花：女，24岁，身高1.60米
左右，河南周口人，于2007年5月
12日晚19时许走后至今未归，家人
非常担心，着急。如有知道下落着，
请于高家保联系13764498186，当面
酬谢！！！如金花本人看到此广告，
请速回电！！！
And in English:
> Missing Person Notice
Lu Jinhua: Female, 24 years old, 1.60 meters tall,
from Zhoukou, Henan. On May 12th, 2007
at about 7:00 pm she left home and has not returned since. Her family
is extremely worried and concerned. If anyone knows her whereabouts,
please contact Gao Jiabao at 13764498186. A reward will be given
on the spot!!! If Jinhua herself sees this advertisement,
please get in touch right away!!!
I was impressed by the sly way they got hundreds of people to view the ad on the subway (although the ad probably won’t last until tomorrow morning). And they got their ad on the internet, through me.
This whole thing has me curious, because the ad seems so professionally done. And maybe Jinhua doesn’t want to be found. Seems like there’s a story there.
If you have ever taught English in China, you have mostly likely heard the saying, “happy every day” (天天快乐) from your students. This ridiculously cheerful saying was my inspiration for this simple t-shirt design:
Is it being sarcastic? Ironic? Wear it and find out what everybody else thinks.
“Happy every day” is available in the Sinosplice Store for less than past t-shirts sold for. (Extensive research has revealed a shocking truth: people like cheap stuff!) Thank you for the support.
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 on the firm principles of purple backgrounds and bondage.
Thank you to the ChinesePod fans that visited China, took this, and then shared it with us.
The most annoying form of advertising, by far, is the guys that pass out little business card ads around the city. They do it on the subway, and they like to hang out around subways, particularly at the top of escalators, where they can push their unwanted ad-cards on you.
Then there’s the most annoying form of transportation, the motorcycle guys. They carry around an extra helmet and park outside subway stations so that when you come out they can yell “hello!” at you (translation: “want a ride?”).
Well, it seems that the motorcycle guys have taken a lesson from the ad-card kids, and starting just recently they now get right up in the faces of commuters coming off the escalator outside the Zhongshan Park Station to badger them (see picture at left). Ah, what a perfect union of unpleasantries.
I’m a wuss, so I took this picture from a distance. They noticed me photographing them, though, and it did kind of freak them out and make them unhappy. (Take that, pushy motorcycle dudes!)
I passed by a tattoo shop near my home the other day and snapped a picture of it. I briefly mused that with more and more Chinese tattoo shops opening, maybe foreigners can come to China to get their tattoos and finally get the Chinese characters right! (Of course then most people would have a language barrier to deal with, but that seems more surmountable to me than depending on a random tattoo artist to really know Chinese characters.)
Anyway, after looking at the picture of the shop at home, I decided to check out its website, yueyutattoo.com. Here’s what greeted me:
I hadn’t paid any attention to the Chinese name of the store until I saw its website. The tattoo shop is capitalizing on the success in China of the TV show Prison Break to sell its tattoos. The Chinese name for “Prison Break” is 越狱 (Yuèyù). I understand the main character has a big tattoo vital to the storyline.
This dog is a flashcard!
Sure, you may enjoy your dog’s company, and maybe he can lift your spirits when you’re down in the dumps. But what does your dog really do for you? Precious few dogs even fetch their masters’ slippers these days (not to mention the morning paper). It’s a disgrace.
So it’s time to put your dog to work! Make your dog into a flashcard. Buy this shirt and put it on your dog, and then instead of merely prancing around in empty-headed glee, he’ll actually be educating you, continually exposing you to the character 狗 (in the perfect context) and how to pronounce it: “gǒu.”
If you’d like to take it a step further, your dog could even educate you on the characters for dog meat: 狗肉. Your Chinese houseguests are sure to love that. (Just be sure they realize it’s a joke.)
Note: After creating the “dog meat” t-shirt I did a check, and indeed, I am not the first person to make such a shirt. Gou-rou.com had already thought of it (shocker!). Their shirt promotes their website, and mine promotes education, though.
Both the 狗 Flashcard Dog Shirt and the 狗肉 Flashcard Dog Shirt are available in the Sinosplice Store. Thank you for your support!
ChinesePod has a reputation for creating extremely useful lessons. We’ve done one on buying feminine products, and one on specifying that you want your beer cold, to name just two. I thought our recent lesson entitled The Drug Dealer was pretty interesting, but maybe not quite as practical as some of the others. But then we got this testimonial in the comments:
> interesting lesson… i have a chinese friend who was telling me about a friend who likes to do drugs. I asked “what kind of drugs” and my friend replied “i don’t know how to say in english, but their head will shake” i assumed it must be something like ecstacy, but now i’m sure – thanks chinesepod
Well, you’re weclome, KennyK. (摇头丸, literally, “shake head pill,” is the Chinese name for ecstasy.)
A friend of mine is supposed to interview Yao Ming next weekend here in Shanghai. The Yao Ming.
He’s a famous guy, so I can understand if she feels a little nervous about interviewing him. Since I have a lot of experience in China and being tall, I thought I’d help her out a bit. These are the questions tall people love to be asked that she can ask Yao Ming:
1. How tall are you?
2. Do you play basketball?
3. What size shoe do you wear?
4. How’s the weather up there?
(Well, 3 out of 4 is not bad.)
I know what you’re thinking: those are the exact same questions we’d ask a non-Chinese tall guy! Amazing, isn’t it? Some facets of human nature know no cultural bounds.
…or your indifference, or your befuddlement, or your joy of pushing people’s buttons. Wear one of these shirts:
The simple design in the t-shirts above is based on one I did in 2002 and called “Sinoamerica.” I like it largely because its meaning is so ambiguous. It’s unity, it’s harmony, it’s neutrality, it’s loss of identity. The colors stay blithely out of nationalism’s grasp.
For a long time I’ve liked the idea of designing t-shirts. Last year I did a tiny experiment in the form of a “Please speak Mandarin” t-shirt. I wanted to know if anyone would buy a t-shirt I put up. I figured if anyone went for something that simple, then it might be worth putting a little more effort into it. Well, some people did buy that design, and now that the weather is warm again, this is my second baby step in the t-shirt direction.
Anyway, I appreciate the support. I’ll be putting out a new t-shirt every Sunday this summer. Here are the links to buy this design: purple, green, brown, gray, the Sinosplice Store. Thanks!
Actually, the movies above were not pirated. They were purchased in Carrefour, a reputable grocery store, for about 20 RMB each. My point is… how can you tell?
A lawyer friend of mine recently visited China. He wouldn’t buy any pirated DVDs because he had heard horror stories of a friend of a friend trying to bring back fifty DVDs and getting busted by U.S. Customs, and fined something like $1,000 per DVD. Scary.
But if I bought fifty of these legit DVDs at Carrefour and tried to take them back home, how would customs know they’re not fake? You can buy pirated DVD-9 DVDs that look just like these. The way I see it, you’d have to show your Carrefour receipt. Your faded, blurry scrap of paper written all in Chinese. Would that really work?
And if it did work, does that mean that all you need to get your DVDs through customs is a receipt? Those would not be hard to produce. Something doesn’t fit.
Does anyone really get busted for bringing pirated DVDs back into the States? If so, can one also get through with legitimate Chinese DVDs? I really wonder this.
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.
Check out this picture:
These were the thoughts running through my head leading up to the shot:
> Wow, look at the size of that load. I should take a picture. Hey, this is totally one of the most cliché China photos ever: the “big load on a tricycle” photo. And this load isn’t even that big. In all my time in China, I’ve never taken that picture, though. I’m gonna take it.
So the above is one of the great China photography clichés. We’ve all seen these things. Many of them are about contrasts, such as the high-power businessman talking on his cell phone next to the peasant carrying produce. Or the old home getting torn down with the huge skyscraper in the background.
I’m curious, though… what is the most cliché China photo to you? Link to the photo in your comments!
