Bao Bao is Washington DC National Zoo's seven-month-old panda cub, son of (the rather fertile) Mei Xiang, on loan from China. On Tuesday, he took his first steps in his mother's outdoor pen, and yes, there is video.
An episode of The Colbert Report last Wednesday used the words "ching-chong ding-dong" in an attempt to satirize / skewer Washington dunderhead Dan Synder. When the show's Twitter account tweeted the joke the next day without context -- “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever” -- a bit of hell broke loose on social media, resulting in Korean-American Twitter activist Suey Park starting the hashtag #CancelColbert. It reeked of so much faux outrage and willful ignorance
Ran E. of the the Chinese food appreciation blog FOODragon witnessed something interesting recently when he typed the Chinese character "eat" into Baidu: the autofill / auto-complete function -- which incidentally also likes to reinforce the stereotype that Americans love sluts -- suggested this as the top hit: "吃了精子会怎么样" - Eating sperm can lead to what?
Being from Hong Kong, storms no longer faze me. But hailstones the size of golf balls? That's a different story. An upscale mall in Kowloon Tong recently had its windows smashed by hail, and certain subway stations were flooded; planes were diverted, containers at our ports were blown sideways... what a way to end a weekend of Rugby Sevens! (Which New Zealand won, by the way.)
I didn't intend to publish this video via WhiteHouse.gov's "The First Lady's Trip to China" blog -- it's Michelle Obama and her family's last day in China, spent in Chengdu with pandas -- but near the minute-mark, I found myself inadvertently chuckling at the sight of a panda pawing, with oversized mitts, at a slice of apple dangling from a hole, and -- you know what? -- why the heck not, here's the First Lady and family feeding pandas.
People still remember where they were the day Exmetjan died. It was Thursday, June 13, 1991. He was only 22 years old.
As is common with the death of an icon, many people refused to believe he was gone. Instead, rumors spread that thugs from a rival disco had knifed him in a back alley or that he had faked his death and gone abroad to marry a princess.
When it comes to toadying up to authority, you can’t beat foreign business. While smog comes and goes like a dissident in the night, its legacy lives on -- for example, in the missive below from Savills, the London-based real estate agency, which wins our coveted Beijing Cream Corporate Whore of the Month Award with “Twelve tricks to protect you from haze.”
As the US and EU prepare to levy economic sanctions on Russia for its actions in Ukraine, Russia's leaders may be growing desperate to find support wherever they can. On Tuesday at 12:14 pm, the official Sina Weibo microblog of the Russian Embassy posted a message that, in no uncertain terms, sought Chinese empathy. There was one big problem: the post contained a remarkably tone deaf reference to the "Tiananmen Incident," i.e. the 1989 student protests in Beijing that resulted in a violent government crackdown, i.e. the one event that no one here is supposed to talk about.
