As the Beijinger notes, “They don’t come much more revered in the Middle Kingdom than Cui Jian,” the 51-year-old “father of Chinese rock.” He’s playing at the MasterCard Center (formerly Wukesong) tomorrow night as part of his “The Blue Bones” China tour, and tickets are still available. The above is from a 2006 unplugged performance in Beijing... Read more »
A Chinese national trying to buy iPhones in Nashua, New Hampshire was tasered outside an Apple Store last Friday. A cell phone video shows 44-year-old Li Xiaojie being held to the ground before police knocked her unconscious with tasers. Her 12-year-old daughter was with her. Li was at Pheasant Lane Mall to buy her third and fourth iPhones,... Read more »
Liu Qiyuan, 45, isn’t letting the end of the world take him alive. He’s built seven spherical survival pods, each costing about $50,000, that are water-proof, ice-proof, and fire-proof. “Only my daughter supports me,” Liu says. “Practically everyone else thinks I’m crazy.” “If there is really some kind of apocalypse, then if you use my product,... Read more »
That last video we just put up of a man streaking outside the Nobel Banquet Hall in Stockholm wasn’t just some prankster after a laugh, or a drunk man who’d lost his wits. It was part of a coordinated protest featuring none other than Liao Yiwu, author of The Corpse Walker and the recipient of... Read more »
This paragraph is simply THE WORST. It comes from Global Times, of course, in a story headlined, “Foreign-run VPNs illegal in China: govt” (emphasis mine): Residents in China have found logging into their Facebook and Twitter accounts increasingly difficult in recent days, after several popular VPN (virtual private network) companies have alleged that China’s Great Firewall (GFW)... Read more »
A woman in Handan, Hebei province has been getting lots of press recently for her ability to write with both hands at the same time in English and Chinese. Ambidextrous squared, then. (Can we call her a tesseract?)
In Stockholm on Monday, on the night of the Nobel banquet, a man dashed butt-naked through the cold and snow, his ebullient battle cry resonating across the dark Swedish night. Wherefore?
According to SVT News (via Notes on the Mosquito, a website about the poetry of Xi Chuan), the streaker was protesting Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. (We don't know Swedish, but we see very clearly after putting the article through Google Translate that Mo Yan is involved.) He was also very drunk, which most people have to be to denude in subfreezing temperatures.
The abusive teacher in Guangzhou who threw four-year-old Yao Yao on her head earlier this year won’t be teaching anymore any time soon, or doing much else. “We’re not sure what the penalty is for toddler assault. Whatever it is, it’ll probably be too civilized,” I wrote back then. The penalty is now in: the teacher,... Read more »
Changes are afoot at Beijing Cream. Specifically, we’ve outgrown our current site design, a relatively minimalist theme called Chunk, and very soon we’ll be rolling out our new look with its nifty features. I’ll save the details for later, but suffice to say it’ll enable us to do much more with the space here. To... Read more »
