a shameful waste of madhouse time

Hua died on August 20, and as you can expect w/ someone of his particular stature and role in history, obituaries are going to be terse at best:
On Baidu news, the Olympics coverage dominated most of the top of the web page, and you had to scroll down slightly to get to a few sparse [...]

[Read more →]

曹磊泪撒新闻发布会 “把金牌献给去世的母亲”_网易奥运 via kwout

Her family refused requests by reporters and media for interviews and kept everything on the DL to ensure that the news wouldn’t upset Cao Lei and ruin her chances for getting Gold.
曹磊的父亲瞒女儿两个月，这期间曹磊家人谢绝了所有媒体的采访，就是不想让任何一个人去了解到这件事情，从而破坏曹磊备战的心情。今天的比赛中，曹磊爸爸也关掉了手机，就是希望此刻的他能够安安静静的等着女儿举出一块金牌。
I have to say, I can understand it in a way, but on the other hand, it’s extremely fucked up.

[...]

[Read more →]

I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.
Of course, [...]

[Read more →]

In Shaanxi province: a woman named Li Chenghui was living with six disabled people. The article title in Chinese might be misleading because it implies that they are all mentally disabled. However, it seems that Li’s parents are both mutes (her father was severely injured in an accident, but not necessarily mentally disabled), and her [...]

[Read more →]

These three people�a female surnamed Wang, a man called Chen Guangquan and a man called Liu Yanchao�were there when Liu Shufen, the girl that died, was supposedly trying to jump off a bridge. If you’ve been following the news you know that the family of the deceased girl believed that she had been raped and [...]

[Read more →]

Saw this on vip.bokee.com–it says that unmarried women in Guangdong are not allowed to receive artificial insemination because the right to be a mother is tied to wedlock. Another factoid worth noting: in the ten years that they’ve been doing reproductive planning Guangdong province has “saved itself” an estimated 40 million people. That’s pretty darn [...]

[Read more →]

The Juyuan Middle School was one of the “worst” tragedies of the Wenchuan earthquake: the entirely school collapsed and took the lives of the hundreds of people that were inside it. Recent media attention in China has been focused on why certain buildings managed to stay upright while others completely collapsed. Shoddy construction, lack of [...]

[Read more →]

Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed � persistently inquisitive � about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on [...]

[Read more →]