GV is a website that Elizabeth discovered some time ago, but I want to make sure that anyone interested can find it easily so I’m going to post it here too.

The site mission statement describes itself aptly: ” Global Voices aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.”

This means that blogs from all over the world are translated, linked, abridged, and mad available to readers anywhere! You can sort by region, country, or topic and find first person accounts of the news everywhere. Learn what’s happening on the ground in Iraq from both supporters and haters of the new government, get accounts of Chinese life before the censors pull them off the web or arrest the blogger. This is a step toward the conversation the web promised us would begin, and it pleases me so much to be able to access it free.

So, one of my closer friends has left China now (much against his better judgment) and I have begun the arduous process of job searching. It’s difficult mainly because I ultimately don’t want a job. I don’t like them.

It’s further complicated by the fact that the US job market is wildly competitive or at least job ads are written in the most reaching language imaginable to discourage people from applying. (Please don’t take this as a cue to begin sending me jobs you think I might like)

Just wanted to share an example of a US job that sounded interesting to me working with an organization researching rule of law initiatives in China and show the frustration.

The ideal candidate will have the following qualifications:

• Advanced / Master’ degree in social science and/or related discipline (Preferably PhD candidate) plus a minimum of 2 years work related experience to local governance, public administration, and civil society in China.
• Proficient in written and spoken Chinese (Mandarin)
• Excellent analytical research, writing and communications skills in English
• Good knowledge of governance issues in China
• Good knowledge of SPSS.

Pretty steep requirements. My JD probably gets me over the degree hurdle, but the 2 years of experience in Chinese civil governance is quite a lot to ask. I’ve lived in both Mainland China and Taiwan. I also edited a thesis by a Chinese JSD scholar concerning democratization of a changing China…. maybe that can be good enough. I think I qualify as proficient plus in Mandarin at this point. Law school and law review should get me past 3. 4 is bluffable to the extent that I’m lacking knowledge of Chinese reform. SPSS I used ages ago, but feel confident that with a little training I can get back up to speed.

Roughly 4 out 5 (with flex) of the requirements met… way higher than I usually feel I need to land a job because everyone assures me that they ask for more than they need. This one is starting to look good and it’s in DC!

So what’s the job actually about? :
InterMedia, a global research, evaluation and consulting firm specializing in the field of media and communications, is seeking a Research Assistant-Intern to take part in the governance/civil society/rule of law evaluation work on China. The successful candidate would be responsible for reviewing and assessing/evaluating key materials and reports, and transcribing in-depth interviews and entering quantitative data.

Yes, those requirements are for an INTERN despite the job being listed as full time assumedly permanent employment, but titles aren’t everything, eh? I mean they require at least a master’s degree or PhD , fluency in Mandarin and multiple years experience in Chinese governance, they must be willing to respect you, right?

Salary: $12.00 p/hr
Ok, titles seem to be everything.

For the record, my salary as an English teacher in Kunming, China according to today’s exchange rate is $13.90. This in a country where my rent for a 2 bedroom is a little less that $150 a month fully furnished with appliances. Average rent in DC for a 1 bedroom unfurnished is $1100 according to www.rent.com

This isn’t an exception, this is how job descriptions read.
I hate job hunting.

The British government is asking that all athletes to attend the Beijing Olympic games “go native” and embrace the Chinese local tradition of censorship. All athletes are being asked to sign contracts including a clause expressly stating that they will not criticize the government or make politically sensitive statements while in China. This decision, as reported by the Daily Mail evokes for many the Summer 1938 Berlin Olympics where athletes were similarly requested to immerse themselves in the local color and offered a Nazi stiff armed salute to onlookers! I can only hope this new display of cultural tolerance will be looked upon with similar pride in years to come.

ABOVE: The British National Team expresses support for a popular regime in 1938

We are now back from our tripto JianShui and YuanYang! It was by and large good times and we weren’t sick at all until last night when we returned to Kunming. You may enjoy photos here:

Elizabeth also enjoyed this YuXi temple frog which I find to resemble Jabba the hut:

This logo for the department of civil affairs here in China appears all over the place. Strangely I just noticed it for the first time last week, but after you’ve seen it once you can’t stop finding it everywhere. The department is in charge of most social programs including disaster relief, charities, marriage registration, adoption, funerals, etc.
I’ve thought up a few non-pornographic interpretations of this logo, but don’t want to color your own view. What do you see?

I was in SongPan, Sichuan in 2000 when Beijing was awarded the Beijing 2008 Olympics. The town erupted into a frenzy as the farmers and tourguides who had been eagerly watching the tv and listening to radios heard the news. The surrounding mountains occaisionally sparkled as electricity- less villages and campgrounds set off fireworks. I could hardly have anticipated that the frenzy would lead to 8 years of maintained excitement.
Now that 2008 is here, every newspaper, everyday has some form of story on the subject. The new years eve was covered mainly as the arrival of the olympic year. Here is one newspaper ad, I found amusing.

The ad advocates “olympic pregnancies” telling mothers that they can have their own olympic treasures by having a child this year, and that countless olympic years later there child might be the one! The ad is for prenatal care and delivery, and seems to really be fighting for it’s olympic connection… there is a nice pun with the second character of pregnancy having the same sound as the first character for sports, etc.

Chinese friends often tell me that the Olympics is vital to proving that China is a modern country and that it is the most important event in modern Chinese history. They can rarely remember where the last one was. One friend finally explained to me, that it isn’t about China proving itself to the world, but about China proving itself to its own people.

For the second year running New Orleans has shown that despite criticism it is recovering to pre-Katrina levels of murder and violent crime, by once again seizing the title of most-violent American city! This year the murder rate reached an impressive 71 murders for every 100,000 citizens up from a mere 63.5 last year. That’s a 209 murders for 2007.
LINK
The housing boom also continues as scheduled following recent unanimous decision to destroying public housing facilities. (image from Humid City)

Far from the apparently hard hitting question about food quality and marketability in Asia, “Can You Enjoy us?” is actually a recruitment slogan on a poster here in Kunming. What with the Chinese fever around learning flawless American style English, it’s nice to see Yum! doing their part to bewilder and confuse. Yum! is the corporate parent of KFC, A&W, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver’s. In addition to the excellent slogan the rest of the ad is also full of typos:

One of the current soft news viruses on the web is about a girl who tried to get a tattoo of her boyfriend’s nickname “roo” written in Chinese on her belly. Unfortunately her total ignorance of chinese made her think that this would be three characters an R. O and O. Why she wasn’t confused about the multiple choices for O I can’t quite get, but chinese is of course not a phonetic alphabet and each character is a sylable and unit of meaning. The story reports that workers at a local Chinese takeout revealed to her that the tattoo accidentally ended up “spelling” supermarket on her stomach.

Now, nonsensical Chinese on shirts, stores, and yes stomachs, is nothing new in the US, but what’s strange here is that this one doesn’t seem to say much of anything, nonetheless Supermarket. (Read bottom up it could be very generously translated at professional alliance）

The only thing sillier than getting a tattoo of something you can’t read is reporting it as a news story without even a minute of fact checking. Sadly, the story has even been picked up by the bbc.

Most of you stateside probably saw this story already, but I found it fantastic that the US is now following the Chinese press model. Fema held a press conference to discuss disaster relief of the wildfires in California, but didn’t invite the press until 15 minutes before it started. What happens when you hold a press conference and nobody comes? Fake it! Employees of FEMA went ahead and posed as reported asking softball questions and letting the talking head ramble on and on about the success of the situation.

Here’s the video….

This is another monster bug I bumped into while strolling and listening to language tapes one night.
3 images of the same guy first with flash, then without, and finally by the light of my I-pod and computer brightness added so you can see where the glow goes. The glow is really really intense and I can see it from up to a hundred feet away, making him sort of easy to find.
FLASH

NO FLASH; GLOWING EYES The rest

When I was in Taiwan we used to see a motorcycle gang go by riding bikes splattered with swastika medals and pins. I remember one Chinese friend trying to convince me they were the Bhuddist backwards version, but she was never able to explain away the nazi eagle and the WW2 era helmets they wore. Anyway, today I saw the Kunming version of this phenomenon: an electric bike with stickers of hitler.

:

Speaking of racist, sheriff Harry“If there are some young blacks driving a car late at night in a predominantly white area, they will be stopped.” Lee of Jeff. Parish fame has died back home in New Orleans. Known at home and nationally for his inflammatory actions, the sheriff reigned for better than 20 years.

This bug whose body is roughly around 3″ or 7.5 cm (not including the tail/ovipositor thing) flew and crashed down next to me the other day. It splashed ungracefully into a pond near me, swam to the shore and then crawled up the pond wall to sun itself. Sorry it’s not the greatest picture, but I didn’t want to get too close. Anybody ever seen this guy before and or have a name for him?

Based on Elizabeth’s comments we add this information:

the Dread WATER SCORPION! (or maybe a toe biter— he’s not quite the same guy, but clearly a relative.
It seems that these guys use their legs to grab prey, can fly, and also use that tail thing to breath underwater… it’s a friggin snorkel!

ALSO: many more images

Some time back I posted concerning Mattel’s multiple toy recalls, and how they had been timed them to make it appear that all the recalls were resulting from a single cause: namely the use of lead based paint by a Chinese subcontractor. Perhaps because of the recent Chinese pet food scandals, the recall story really caught on and a huge bashing of the Chinese manufacturing industry began. The articles rarely pointed out that the vast majority of the recalled toys were recalled due to a US created design flaw involving small magnets powerful enough to twist or tear a child’s intestines should they be swallowed and then attracted to something outside the child’s body.

One of the most confusing aspects of these stories was the fast and loose number crunching in many articles. It was difficult if ever to get separate figures for paint versus magnet recalls. Also, the numbers for US and worldwide recalls were used interchangeably. The actual numbers were 2.2 million toys recalled for paint, 17.4 million recalled for magnet flaws. So the threat to the world’s babies from Mattel toys was just about 8 times more likely to have originated stateside than in China.

Today, Mattel apologized in China for it’s actions essentially saying as much (and providing those numbers). The have already clarified that there apology is not to the derelict manufacturers but to the Chinese people who have had there character smeared.
But of course this can’s be the end of it….

Coverage of the apology focuses on the aspect of Mattel being forced to apologize to China, because of its horrifying market supremacy. No doubt this is in part true, but the apology is deserved. The press coverage generally continues to be deeply flawed:

Time Magazine reports in it’s article “Why mattel Apologized to China”: Mattel needs China just as much as China needs Mattel, and it cannot afford to jeopardize its relationship with the country that produces 65% of its toys….So Mattel found a face-saving way of taking back the blame that it had previously placed so squarely on its Chinese partners, the source of all the toys it recalled this year. The “vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel’s design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China’s manufacturers,”…….Technically, Mattel’s analysis is correct. Of the 19.6 million toys that it has recalled this year globally, 2.2 million were due to lead paint; the remaining 17.4 million (11.7 million in the U.S.) were toys recalled not because of lead paint but because they were made with super-strong magnets.”

Yes, time, techinically, the analysis is correct, if one say reads the numbers.
There’s no need to make it sound like Time’s apology is equivalent to say a hunting accident victim apologizing to his shooter/ vicepresident, or as quoted in the NY times:

“It’s like a bank robber apologizing to his accomplice instead of to the person who was robbed,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said in an interview. “They’re playing politics in China rather than doing what matters.”

Pot, Kettle, Black.

We recently had to idea to blow up some of our photos and use them as wall art. A variant of this image is the first experiment and it was enlarged to 20″x24″ for US $6. A little expensive and a little too glossy, but how nice to turn snapshots into art, and add an extra window to the house.

Speaking of silly news stories, a link off CNN news led me to this sad YouTube video. Normally I wouldn’t post this, but I had the pleasant surprise of seeing Enfield, NH in the news and couldn’t resist. I didn’t make it to our family ritual retreat at Goose Pond this year, but the waving Enfield Police sign makes me smile.

I will forever remember desperately clinging to the first full time news station during GulfWar I way back when. However, under pressure from fox or whatever, I watched as the channel slowly decayed into a miserable mockery of itself and the population it serves. Elizabeth and I play a game every morning where we log into the web site and count how many of the stories could legitimately be counted as NEWS vs soft stories about say dog fighting or drunken Hotel Heiresses.. we usually get about 40% news.

Today however takes the cake… the picture window story is about an FBI most wanted fugitive “Polygamist Prophet”, while Putin dissolving his government is put in 12 point font off on the right in the list of other stories…. here’s the complete list… how many do you consider Newsy? more important that the Polygamist prophet?

Polygamist prophet now criminal defendant
* 8.2 strong quake hits off Indonesia 5 min
* Putin dissolves Russian government
* Japan’s prime minister stepping down
* Impact Your World: Youssif arrives in U.S. 7 min
* Survival experts doubt Fossett is alive
* Russia tests ‘dad of all bombs’
* Ticker: Giuliani behind in key states, polls show
* Dashcam catches cop’s tirade Video
* CNN Heroes: Teen helping free slaves Video
* Taser hits defendant, officer in court scuffle Video
* KTVU: 15 shot in S.F. Bay area wave of violence
* Restaurant crushes garlic with dirty shoes Video
* WESH: Man, woman, animals found dead at farm
* SI: Texas fan nearly castrated in bar fight
* Officers wrestle gator, get in trouble Video

Wondering if anyone has seen this book in any language except Chinese? The title roughly is THE COMPLETE WISDOM OF THE JEWS, and the Author has been given a foreign name 韦恩*玛格尔 (Wayne Mahger?)* though only transliterated into Chinese characters. I have only just begun to dive through it, but it already seems full of backhand compliments towards the jews that seem unlikely to be printed in the US at least. For example, the cover reads ” Three Jews sitting at a table can determine the course of the world.” (Just can’t decide where to go for dinner) and also “The money of the world goes into America’s pocket, the money of America goes into the Jew’s pocket.”
The Chinese I’ve met have a knee jerk reaction to my telling them I am jewish. They without exception tell me that Jews are the smartest ethnicity and are exceptional businessmen. Additional comments are generally along the lines of “But I thought you were American.” In three separate conversations I have also been asked why the Jews chose Bush for a second term, and get confused stares when I say that I voted against him. Apparently at least two history professors in Kunming teach that the American Jews rigged the 2004 election in favor of Bush so as to protect Israel.
All this of course I take in stride. Growing up in America I became not only more sensitive to multiculturalism (read political correctness if you must) than the largely homogeneous Chinese society, but also than most Western foreigners that I’ve met. It is also important to remember that I am in Yunnan province, which is not widely recognized for it’s high level of education.
Anyways, just curious as to whether the views I am reading in this fine book about the “mysterious money making skill of the Jews” reflects the opinions of a foreigner or the Chinese.

Anyone who has ever lived near a Ginkgo knows that once a year or so they begin to stink, and stink very badly. You can Imagine the effect then at Yunnan University in Kunming when campus streets lined with Ginkgo all go ripe. Let’s just say that as I sat outside reading yesterday, I routinely checked my sneakers for evidence of an accident.

What you may not know is that the horrifyingly smelly fruits are also, it seems, edible. For weeks now I have seen little old ladies gathering up the occasional dropped fruit, or in one case a family hurling a basketball up into the trees and frantically gathering the torrent of nuts that followed it down. Apparently the acorn sized orange fruits taste quite good if you go for the little nut inside, and ignore the fleshy orange exterior! Chinese people also feel the fruit can be rendered palatable. Here’s some recipes and data.

Anyway, just as I was about to driven out by the smell, a crew came along to gather up all the nuts– Chinese style. They laid some tarps on the ground and had a few guys climb the trees wielding giant bamboo staffs which they used to knock all the branches. The loosely attached fruit poured off the tree and onto the street or tarp by the thousands with the roar of a hailstorm.
The best part though, is the the 20 odd workers were followed by, and outnumbered by, a gaggle of little old ladies, who would snatch as many of the nuts away from the worker as they could.

The overall effect reminded me of mardi gras, the nuts fall from above, and every one scurries and jostles to get them off the ground before someone else notices. The resemblance was even stronger after they put up a cloth barrier to keep the old ladies out, and the old ladies would seize every second that the workers turned around, to sneak under the barricade and snatch the nuts. For those of you who never did mardi gras, picture an easter egg hunt but, you know, with the eggs being hurled down from 20 feet above.

The fruit smell kept me at bay, but I had a great time watching the hysteria.