No dancing Filipina flight attendants on this one but it’s still pretty cute and catchy, a safety video from Air New Zealand with hobbits, elves, orcs, dwarves and even Gandalf, though unfortunately no ents.
I’ve been living in the US for over a year now and what better time to give a description of my impressions than shortly after the election? I have to admit I expected the campaigning to be much more intense than it actually was here in my neighborhood, but this was also part of a [...]
Mo Yan (莫言) has won the Nobel Prize of Literature in 2012. On a personal level, and perhaps it is a bit silly to put it like this, I’m happy that this year’s prize, like last year’s (Tomas Tranströmer), has been awarded to an author I’ve actually read. Chinese prizes are often controversial, one way [...]
Before my post on Mo Yan, I’ll share this video that has been on my mind for a while. I’m very fascinated with languages and like movies with language realism (like Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”) and so I’ve been wondering why there aren’t any Chinese movies in the language as it was [...]
Jimmy Lai’s Next Media is at it again, this time updating their American avatars to look more… ah, realistic? *Big thanks to James Fallows for bringing this to our attention.
Nothing to add, just watch and enjoy!
Just as I was skeptical towards a previously reviewed book about North Korea, “The Aquariums in Pyongyang,” in B.R. Myers “The Cleanest Race” I instead thought that I had found the Rosetta Stone to understand the basic driving forces behind the leadership of the Kim family. Confounding Chinese, American and Japanese experts alike, the Democratic [...]
You’ve probably noticed we’ve been mostly absent over the last few months. Both Wukailong and I had been pretty busy with work and personal matters but we should be far more productive in the coming days. You might also have noticed that this blog has rarely if ever commented about breaking news in China. Two [...]
I was reading an opinion piece in the New York Times about the perils of positive thinking, or even the power of negative thinking, when I stumbled upon this part: Buddhist meditation, too, is arguably all about learning to resist the urge to think positively — to let emotions and sensations arise and pass, regardless [...]
I’ve recently run across a certain type of performer in Japan, the mime/hip hop dance artist. The first individual I saw who practiced this was Takahiro Ueno, and at first I just thought he was a hip hop dancer with a derivative style but as the act progressed, he brought new elements that made the [...]
One complaint I’ve heard a lot lately is that modern cars all look the same. While I don’t really have an opinion about that matter, perhaps it’s true about cities around the world now that a large part of the world is developing fast. I decided to have a look at various cities along the [...]
… drying your hair tomorrow. It’s a tad disturbing to know that this hair salon’s hygiene system involves hanging its freshly washed towels on some power grid’s dusty fence in a parking lot. As a former journalist for daily newspapers, I’ve learned that all you can hope for is that your story is an accurate reflection [...]
…better than a white dress and a Christian church, apparently. As a former journalist for daily newspapers, I’ve learned that all you can hope for is that your story is an accurate reflection of what happens on a given day. It’s a snapshot, that’s all. By tomorrow, everything may have changed completely. I live in [...]
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few months since this isn’t a new announcement, but I still feel it deserves to be heard. South Korea decided last summer to invest the equivalent of US $2.4 billion dollars in Samsung Galaxy Tabs for the classroom, switching from textbooks to tablets by the end [...]
… maybe a little soy sauce and oyster sauce, and stir fry. As a former journalist for daily newspapers, I’ve learned that all you can hope for is that your story is an accurate reflection of what happens on a given day. It’s a snapshot, that’s all. By tomorrow, everything may have changed completely. I live [...]
