McDonald’s China has fairly recently launched 24-hour delivery service in Beijing, to most parts of the city. That’s good news for those of us who need a dose of heart disease at 2:00 AM.
Here’s a portion of the flyer they’ve been stuffing under people’s apartment doors to advertise the service:
My question is: what, exactly, is going on this image?
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After reading Trent Reznor’s expletive-filled mini-rant about Apple’s App Store approval process, which I basically agreed with, it got me to thinking: why does Apple want to be the decency police in the first place?
Apparently, when you submit your app to the App Store, they have people using it and looking for naughty words interspersed in the language, or looking for bare breasts (oh no…the horror), or they are judging the overall functionality of the App based some loose and unknown standards. You can probably guess that my personal opinion is that any and all apps should be allowed, unless they are violating specific laws, but I am not conceited enough to think that my standards should be applied to everyone else, so I agree that there needs to be a solution.
Personally, I think what Apple does well is write great software and build great products. I also think they suck at determining what is offensive and what isn’t, and quite frankly, I think everyone sucks at that. More to the point: putting themselves in this position only brings them bad publicity. Either they will piss off conservatives who think they are allowing too much horrible stuff that scars the children, or else they will piss off free speech advocates who believe that responsibility for judging decency falls on the individual and are paranoid about a 1984-esque future. In short, from the corporate perspective, there’s no way to win.
Rumors are that version 3.0 of the iPhone software addresses this issue to some degree. But, in the meantime, here’s how I think this problem should be solved.
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So, just like everyone else, I failed. I did not stick with my resolution to post a new Mandarin word every day or two. However, I have been making a slightly more concerted effort to improve my speaking, and hey, it’s still 2009, so I can come back to it.
I’ve been enjoying www.google.cn/music, which is the first officially sanctioned (by the idiotic music labels) free music download service I am aware of. Note to those outside China: you’ll need a Chinese IP address to download stuff. But, for the most part, it’s pretty well done, and it’s been a great way to discover Chinese music, in particular, though I’ve also used the service to download a bunch of western stuff, too.
The only headache, on the Mac, at least, is that the MP3 files’ ID3 tags appear to not be Unicode-encoded, which mangles all the Chinese, so there’s some work to be done to properly tag the Chinese music that comes down.
All this made me realize that I did not know the word for “album” (in the music sense), so it’s a good opportunity to do some further study.
The previous narrative has been abandoned (I’m sure you’re sad not to know what happens with the 震动棒), which kills part of my plan to reinforce the learning by using the words twice, but maybe a new one can start.
专辑
zhuān jí
(record, music) album
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I’ll continue the “5 great” list with these 12″ gems from the 1980s. They may not necessarily be my favorite 12″ tracks of the 1980s, but these are instances where the remix of the song improves markedly on the original version. And this also means it excludes tracks that were issued on 12″ first, or 12″ only (like Pump Up The Volume, for example).
What makes a great remix? Well, that depends on what type of remix it is. In this case, the criteria is remixes that don’t stray so far from the original as to be essentially a completely different song, but which alter the original enough that it really adds depth, or goes in a new direction
When I was in high school in the 1980s, remixing was what I really dreamed of doing, although I never pursued that path. Consider this my homage to some good engineers.
I’m endeavoring to attempt something never before achieved in the history of mankind: make a New Year’s resolution, and stick to it. Given my desire, it’s apropos that I write this on the first day of the lunar new year, since the resolution for 2009 was: learn Chinese, like for real.
“For real” means expanding beyond the lazy, expat-level of everyday, common Chinese I’ve been stuck at, for a while now, being one of a plethora of lazy Americans living in Beijing or Shanghai. It means actually having a damned vocabulary, for one, and it means taking more than a token a swipe at learning some lingo, and some words that don’t appear in the everyday Chinese dictionary.
In order to learn something, to really learn something, it takes commitment, it takes repetition, and it takes curiosity. The intellectual curiosity is not the problem for me; it’s the commitment and repetition I’ve had trouble with. Also, you absolutely have to make it fun. Well, technically, you don’t. You can sit there and force - no, torture - yourself by having your head buried in books, but you’ll have two undesired end results: (1) you’ll be bored; and (2) it’ll be less efficient. So, I’ve decided to make it fun. When things are fun, the learning just comes.
So, I’ve started out by learning a word a day and putting it on Twitter, with a twist: I’m going to create a narrative out of it by re-using the previous words en route to learning new ones. Along the way, I’ve found that Twitter is not enough, because of its paltry character limit, and that I need to introduce some new words and sentence structures at the same time. It’s a fun challenge, and of course, this being me, the sentences will be absurd. (But therein lies the “fun” for me. If I have to learn how to say “Where is the pharmacy” one more time I’ll shoot myself.) This whole artificial construct should create enough repetition for me to actually learn the concepts I set out to learn.
And, given that it’s so public, maybe it’ll give my friends some entertainment, so they can laugh at my pathetic progress as time goes along. Laughing at people is always fun, after all…
My last post got me thinking about posting some top 10 lists on my blog, just for fun.
But then I thought, “10″? Do I really have that much to say about that many songs? I suppose I could endlessly fill the space with tired music critic clichés, but we should all be spared that much bullshit.
And then I thought, “Top”? It’s impossible. I haven’t heard every song in existence, and even if that were somehow possible, I haven’t heard all of them them enough to develop strong feelings for them.
So that’s how this “5 Great” list came about. I’ll post one every now and then, and I’ll link to either iTunes or free downloads to the tracks, if possible, so you can get them yourself. I tried to use iTunes’ iMix thing to just link to the whole list, but the way the iMix feature works is stupid: have a song from a compilation that iTunes has on a different album? Then it doesn’t recognize it, or even make suggestions so you can map it properly.
Anyway, onto the fucking list already…consider it my tribute to the most versatile word in the English language. No, these are not (necessarily) great songs to listen to while fucking. Nor are these great Songs About Fucking (well, not exclusively anyway). Rather, they are great songs that have everyone’s favorite word somewhere in the title.
I am a closet music historian, and a not-so-closeted music geek. Anyone who bothers to get to know me finds this out sooner or later. On that “Rock & Roll Jeopardy!” show that VH1 used to run, they used to ask a lot of questions about ’80s pop, and I found out watching that show that, basically, I would never have lost.
It’s not really anything to be proud of though, and I’ll tell you why. When you have this affliction, you do things like spend hours of time hunting down obscure artwork of 12″ singles from crappy “blue-eyed soul” bands so that the extended remix of some obscure 80s song you got on a compilation has the proper cover art when it pops up on your TV screen via Apple TV. You make sure the song has the right name (was that Loving or Lovin’?). You make sure it’s classified in the right year, which can involve quite a bit of reasearch for, say, old soul music that was only released on 7″ singles.
All in all, I’m not sure this is really the best way to spend your time.
iTunes (and tools like it, though I use iTunes) have been a godsend for music-loving OCD-types like me. If you properly tag your music, you can do something like listen to music of a particular genre from 1973, or you can easily make a playlist of every song you have with “fuck” in the title (57 songs long at the moment if you care). Yes, the possibilities are fucking endless.
Well, almost endless.
OK, not literally. But I thought I’d write a few words about Obama after the election, and then I ended up so busy that it sort of never happened. I could wait until the inauguration to write about this, in that most apropos of moments, but now is just as well, while the President-elect goes about the business of choosing cabinet members and managing “the transition”, as the robotic American news anchors keep regurgitating from the teleprompter.
It’s funny, I am extremely politically active, in that I engage in political debate and discourse with my friends almost constantly, although I would never work on someone’s campaign. I’m sitting in half a world away from my home country, but thanks to VoIP, talking to my friends back home costs very little, and we were burning through minutes and hours talking about McCain’s head-scratching tactics, about the Barbie doll vice presidential candidate, about the brawl between Hillary and Barack in the primary, etc. and so on.
Though those close friends who sat through my endless wind-baggery know full well my seemingly contradictory political beliefs (which are really only contradictory when viewed through the idiotic prism of American political theater), more casual acquaintances or business associates really don’t have a feel for my politics, because I usually play those cards close to my vest, so to speak. Therefore, it may surprise some that I am not a progressive.
You know, for all our pontification and theorizing and building, the fact remains, we’re all just a bunch of gunk stuck onto a skeletal foundation. All of us from kings to the unemployed, from skinny super models to obese computer technicians to beefy bodybuilders…we’re all just skin and bones.
Some of us, though, are more skin and bones than others. I don’t mean this in the normal sense of the term: not in a skinny way; rather, it’s more like a quality of construction way. Most of us, our bones, our skin, our fat and muscle; it all synthesizes into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. We look at them and we see a person, not mere skin and bone.
But then there are others that when you look at them, if you look closely, you can really see the skin hanging off the bone. You can see the shape of the skull, the face clinging on like a person clinging for dear life on the edge of a cliff. You can immediately see through them, dissecting without the need of a knife, neatly separating them into their component parts, in your mind.
To you non Web developers, there’s a special tag we use when we want to make text pop up as your mouse hovers over something. It’s called a tool tip, and if I’m not mistaken, the practice originated in Microsoft software years ago.
Now, to you Web developers, if you’re using a single header graphic spanning the entire page, here’s a tip: be careful what tool tip you use, or else you might create results like the one I inadvertantly found when my mouse traveled to the top of the contact page for United States Senator for Maine Olympia Snowe:
Now that’s one handsome woman!