Cup of Cha
This is China

Oh Beijing, why do you torture me so? Isn’t our love pure, and true? And yet you find the need to pretend your are someone else, as soon as we have guests. You are ashamed of your smoke-filled restaurants, buses and even taxis, so you ban smoking in public places during the Olympics. Do you [...]

Continue reading “Beijing, You Beautiful Bitch” »

I open the floor to my loyal readers to get in your predictions for vice presidential choices of the two parties. Please pick one for McCain, and then you can decide how you want to handle the Dems. You can pick someone for each candidate or go out on a limb and make a double [...]

Continue reading “Veep Picks” »

My lease is up in a few weeks, and while I’m happy with the current apartment, I’m willing to test the waters. I’ve been looking at some places recently and have come to an unmistakable conclusion: Beijingers have lost their effing minds. They seem to think that owning a Beijing apartment in 2008 is as [...]

Continue reading “August 8th Changes Everything (to Some)” »

Tired of the Olympics, snow, and the election? Here’s some good old fashioned fun.
This is a series of videos, the first of which I’ll post and the rest of which I’ll link to. I never knew that Jimmy Kimmel was funny, but if these are any indication, he’s absolutely hilarious.

Continue reading “Funny YouTube Links” »

Just in case you were somewhere without power this week (like south China) and missed it, Steven Spielberg has not only backed out from his role in the Beijing Olympics, but rubbed it in China’s face. He has announced that his conscience will not allow him to support a country that continues to play a [...]

Continue reading “Shame on you Mr. Spielberg!” »

My favorite Chinese sitcom “家有儿女” (actually the only one I watch) switched actresses on me. In a proud tradition that started on the “Jeffersons,” continued on “The Fresh Prince,” and most recently appeared on “Roseanne,” the show canned the original actor and pretended like nothing was odd. In the latter case they replaced the daughter, [...]

Continue reading “Swapping Sitcom Actors” »

China announced that it removed 200 million ‘harmful’ pieces of information last year from websites. The article is really short (the harmful bits were removed before publication) so here it is in its entirety:
China removed more than 200 million items of harmful online information last year, according to the National Office for Cleaning Up Pornography [...]

Continue reading “Removing ‘Harmful’ Material” »

For Americans living in China, the announcement that two people were just arrested for passing business and military secrets along to the Chinese government is reason to be slightly tense. One of the two primary targets was American born, while two others were naturalized (born in China and Taiwan), and while the fourth appeared to [...]

Continue reading “Prepare for Spying Blow Back?” »

If you’ve ever studied Chinese and then tried to understand someone from Sichuan, or Xinjiang, or pretty much any city, you know that for most people there is not a single language called “Chinese.” Standard Chinese, known as Mandarin in English, or Putonghua (普通话）in, uh, Mandarin, became the official national language of China in 1912 [...]

Continue reading “Are China’s Dialects Dying?” »

Premier Wen Jiabao raced around the country to do his man-of-the-people routine in response to the blizzards that preceeded Spring Festival. He announced that the great tragedy of the blizzard was “some mandarins (oranges) died and trees were toppled.” This according to China Daily.
It’s really sad that some trees died, but what about the [...]

Continue reading “Wen Jiabao: Blizzard Sad for Botanists” »