Hong Kong is a city unlike any other, its buildings rising up out of the hills like ridged obelisks, its waters rippling with cargo ships, ferries, and buoys, its mountainside painted the shade of roiling green, its alleys stacked upon one another with overpasses and skywalks crisscrossing as in an M.C. Escher illustration.
I'm in Hong Kong at the moment, and to try to capture a bit of the wonder of this place, I made the above video. Hope you enjoy.
We love that term, wish we would’ve thought of it ourselves. Zombie commuters. Commuters because they’re trying to get somewhere. Zombies because you’d have to be brain-dead to drive into traffic in Beijing. As SCMP puts it: “It’s like a scene out of American television show The Walking Dead, said a microblogger on Sina Weibo, after photos... Read more »
David Beckham arrived in Beijing yesterday, kicking off his second tour of China as soccer ambassador. (His first trip, in March, saw him hilariously whiff on a free kick.) The positive publicity couldn't have come soon enough, considering the Chinese national team's humiliating 5-1 thrashing at the hands and feet of Thailand's youth team on Saturday. What was one of the first things Becks did?
Join Sina Weibo, of course. Check out his first post:
Dick Cheney, former vice president, bad quail hunter, to Fox News:
"I'm suspicious because he went to China. That's not a place where you would ordinarily want to go if you are interested in freedom, liberty, and so forth.... It raises questions whether or not he had that kind of connection before he did this."
Regarding Chen Guangcheng's exit from NYU, we acknowledge that there's a chance he and his camp know something the rest of us don't. Yet if there is evidence of coercion from Beijing, neither Chen nor anyone else has been able to present any. "Chen did not respond to repeated requests for evidence of his claims," reports SCMP. In the same article, NYU professor Jerome Cohen gave perhaps the most withering sound bite yet about this situation:
Look at these douchenozzles.
A dolphin was found stranded in a swimming zone of Dadong Sea in Sanya, Hainan province on June 16, and while waiting for animal rescues to arrive, a few swimmers decided to lug the poor creature out of the water for photos.
"But wait," writes Angry Asian Man. "Look a little closer, and you'll see a coded message inspired by the lyrical stylings of none other than the Notorious B.I.G."
Oh?
Via Angry Asian Man: “Over the weekend in Los Angeles, the one and only Bruce Lee was honored with the unveiling of a new statue of the martial arts legend in Chinatown — the first and only statue of its kind in the United States: Historic Dedication Made In Honor Of Bruce Lee During LA Chinatown’s... Read more »
Way back when, a young and overeager Jackie Chan found himself in a fight scene with the legendary Bruce Lee in the movie Enter the Dragon. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. Bet he didn't think he'd almost get knocked out by his idol.
Watch the above for the full story, as Chan tells it as part of George Stroumboulopoulos's Best Story Ever series.
It's difficult -- it really is -- to say Chinese soccer has reached a "new" low, considering its history of match-fixing and utter, abysmal, unmitigated failure on the international stage (its only World Cup appearance coming in the year when two other Asian countries had automatic bids into the tourney). But after losing 5-1 to a mostly junior Thailand team on home turf on Saturday, more than a few fans are saying this is the bottom. "Disband the national team" has become something of a commonplace chant, as meaningless as "black whistle" when refs screw up, but the rallying cry attained something of a feverish tone of urgency on Saturday. Can it get worse? If so, it's only because we're talking about Chinese football here.
