Found a funny post on Zhangjiang BBS tonight, purporting to be a leaked copy of the "2009 CCTV Spring Festival Gala Line-up" but with tongue firmly in cheek:

1.大型古装舞蹈《多难兴邦》，表演者:南方雪灾和文川**灾民
2.小合唱《因为爱所以爱肉体岂能拿来慷慨》表演者：绿帽组，主唱：谢霆锋
3.小品《有奶不一定是娘》表演者：三 （鹿）集团领导者
4.<谁说山西好风光>表演者:山西矿难家属
5.小品<老虎来了>表演者:周正龙
6.歌曲<你伤害了我却一拐而过> 表演者:刘翔
7.群口相声:钢铁是怎样也练不成的 中国足球队
8.豫剧:我比窦娥还冤 奶农
9.杂技:火车也疯狂，山东铁路局
11.单口相声：为什么受伤的总是我。孟学农
12.大型诗朗诵：冬天已经来了，春天还会遥远吗。部分股民
13.京剧《奥运油和米，北京欢迎你》 张艺谋
14.武术表演：《掌掴天下》 阎崇年
15.体育杂技：《三个俯卧撑》 表演者：翁安县公-安局

1. Classical Chinese Dance "Distress rejuvenates a nation", performed by survivors of the southern snowstorms and Wenchuan earthquake
2. Choir piece "Why you gotta go and do that love huh?", performed by the Green Hat Group, lead singer Nicholas Tse
3.Comedic skit "Are you my mother? (Got milk?)", performed by San (Lu) Group management
4."Who says Shanxi's got great views?", performed by the relatives of Shanxi miners
5. Comedic skit "The boy who cried tiger", performed by Zhou Zhenglong
6. Song "You hurt me and then limped me by", performed by Liu Xiang
7. Group xiangsheng: "Men of steel we'll never be" by the China national soccer team
8. Henan Yuju Opera: "More wronged than Dou'e" by the Milkmen
9. Chinese acrobatics: "Crazy trains", by the Shandong Railway Bureau
11. Solo xiangsheng: "Why's the one landslided gotta be me?" by Meng Xuenong
12. Grand poetry reading: "Winter is here, spring can't be far off" by a selection of stock traders
13. Beijing opera "Olympic oil & rice, Beijing welcomes you" by Zhang Yimou
14. Martial arts performance "Smacks all around" by Yan Chongnian
15. Athletic acrobatics: "Three push-ups", performed by Weng'an County Police Department

The list references a bunch of news stories from this year. Most of them were covered on Danwei, so if you've been keeping up there you should understand most of this.

Went out with the family today, this time just around Pudong. Here's some things I noticed:

• The new building with a Bakerzin on the first floor across from Babaiban and caty-corner from Times Square is calling itself "Erdos" (Chinese name 上海湾 or something like that). This calls to mind the Erdős number, but I'm pretty sure there's no connection.
• Our taxi driver coming home from Babaiban took advantage of several red lights to sneak peaks at a pigeon-raising magazine he stashed in the door pocket of his taxi. Apparently the eye color a pigeon tells you a lot because many pages had unnervingly large blow-ups of pigeon eyes next to pictures of the pigeons they represented.
• A girl on the subway was reading Neil Gaiman in translation in some magazine.

At the neighborhood grocery store this evening, I got this RMB 5 bill:

We've reached the point with Charlotte where we are going to have to start ordering a separate serving for her when we go out to eat. Today I shared my Taiwanese 卤肉饭 pork on rice with her and I was still hungry at the end of the meal because she ate so much.

Today was the first day where we really felt the pain of having two kids (well, actually it was the first time I paid a double-diaper/formula order bill, but now I'm talking about daily life). We spent most of the day out of the house, first at an early education center close to our house for a demo class, then at lunch at the Taiwanese grocer/cafe next door, and then going to the Dongchang Road area for some shopping. If we had taken Maryann alone, it would have been like when Charlotte was small and we still had only one baby: the occasional feeding or diaper change, some holding, a little playing, but mostly just sleeping in the stroller. Now, it's all that plus a perky, moody one-and-a-half year-old who weighs a ton, gets dragged along playing with the escalator handrail, wanders off to explore balconies and janitorial closets, runs into people and gets under their feet, and breaks dishes in restaurants by dropping them on the floor. We'd never regret having two kids, but we sure were exhausted when we got home tonight.

I hope this deal is still around when the SMIC Observatory gets popular enough to have an actual budget.

The Celestron Green Laser Pointer is 20-30 times brighter than a red laser, is is great for pointing out objects in the night sky, during lectures, and when giving presentations. Celestron's 10x50 UpClose binoculars have a water resistant body, a nice wide 7º field of view, and are tripod adaptable. Finally, the Celestron Green Laser Optics Kit includes a red LED flashlight. A red flashlight is necessary when reading star charts, etc. during star gazing, but red light is also nice during any activity that white light would be distracting, like the theater, concerts, or wildlife viewing.

Our Price: $59.00
List Price: $99.00
You Save: $40.00 (40%)

Via Universe Today.

I'm not done reading the article "Reaching an Autistic Teenager" (just previewing it before bookmarking it and working on real work) but this paragraph caught my eye:

What makes the Community School unusual is not its student body — plenty of schools around the country enroll teenagers with an autism spectrum disorder. But, like about only two dozen schools in the country, it employs a relatively new, creative and highly interactive teaching method known as D.I.R./Floortime, which is producing striking results among T.C.S.’s student body. (D.I.R. stands for developmental, individual differences, relationship-based approach.) The method is derived from the work of Stanley Greenspan, a child psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, behavioral science and pediatrics at George Washington University, and his colleague Dr. Serena Wieder. D.I.R./Floortime can be effective with all kinds of children, whether they have developmental challenges or not. As applied by T.C.S., it is an approach that encourages students to develop their strengths and interests by working closely with one another and with their teachers.

Hmm, sounds a lot like parenting + real life!

Jodi and I made a trip into Puxi today to see her grandparents off on their trip back home. From now on it's just us too (and a 9-4 ayi). The point of this post is to report on interesting things we saw on our trip:

• Hu'nan: on the drive from Puxi, we crossed an intersection involving 沪南路 and the pinyin read "Hu'nan Lu". It surprised me because I've never seen the pinyin for Hunan (沪南 or 湖南) spelled with an apostrophe before. Thinking about it, it makes sense because technically you could have a word like 昏暗 with the same pinyin but different syllables. Still, it struck me as strange.
• Anti-Maglev: nearing the South Railway Station on the Humin Elevated Road, we zoomed past a car with what I'm pretty sure was an anti-Maglev bumper sticker on the back bumper. It was small, square and white. It was the first time I've seen one of these.
• Subway spat: at the Southern Railway Station subway Line 3 station, between a couple of Shanghainese girls and a non-Shanghainese couple, over a seat on the subway car. The Shanghainese girl put down her bag on the seat to save it for her friend, and the other couple ignored it and sat down on the seat anyway. Of course the Shanghainese girls brought 外地人, "out-of-towner", into the conversation and started yelling in Shanghainese at the couple. They were both at fault, maybe the out-of-town couple a little more, but that isn't the point.
• Ikea redesign: Ikea redid their cafeteria to a more classy, updated design. The meatballs came with mashed potatoes instead of French Fries (boo) and the seats along the window with a great view of the Line 3 "rainbow bridge" have been turned into couches and low tables perfect for an afternoon snack or coffee (good).
• Polite people: seems to be a lot more people giving up their seats on the subway for older passengers and people carrying small kids.

Work tomorrow. Definitely too soon.

Jodi and some online friends were having a discussion about nutritional supplements for kids (fish oils, vitamins, etc). It started with one mother asking whether Charlotte takes them — she doesn't — and other participants noted that they felt like Chinese doctors always recommended them but that all the foreigners they knew didn't give their infants any of these supplements, only vitamins when they got older. During the course of the discussion, this story was told by a mother of another mixed baby:

有一次我妈带他出去玩，人家看到说，这个小孩挺白的，就是头发太黄，大概缺钙汗

One time, my mother took him (the mixed kid) out to play. Somebody came over and said, "Wow, your kid's skin is so white! But his hair is a bit yellow, he probably doesn't get enough calcium."

An idea that Jodi brought up just yesterday and that I think I've written about before is the different in the rates of lifestyle change in between China and the US. In the US, changes in our basic lifestyles have been very small, while in China people's environments and habits are changing by leaps and bounds. For example, Charlotte and her friends are playing with Fisher Price toys, some which are exactly the same as the Fisher Price toys that I played with when I was a kid in the early 1980s. But for Charlotte's friends here in Shanghai, Fisher Price represents a whole new way of thinking about children and play compared to what they had when they were kids.

The sea change in attitudes towards and possibilities available in raising children has many consequences. One that I've noticed in particular is the lack of guidance and experienced voices in the area of parenting. Actually, you see this in lots of places in China: there are many, many professions here where young people dominate and the lack of experience translates lack of attention to detail and failure to consider all facets of a problem before applying a solution. But in the parenting realm, you end up with things like a gigantic generational gap between new parents and their own parents, who are in unfamiliar territory when it comes to progressive parenting methods and raising kids in the new, open, modern China. You end up with things like one of Jodi's friends saying that their child would drink formula until she was three years old, and parent confused about whether or not to give their children what nutritional supplements.

(My guess, by the way, is that drug and supplement companies market heavily to naive or corrupt Chinese doctors, explaining why so many recommend fish oil and such to their patients. We don't give Charlotte anything because she eats healthy foods at home and outside. We're considering starting her on vitamins when she gets a bit older, maybe when she starts school. My family tried vitamins a few times but we could never get the habit to stick, and we turned out fine.)

Watching Obama and McCain deliver their speeches at the Alfred E Smith dinner, I've convinced myself that Obama should pull a Lincoln and appoint McCain to his Cabinet. McCain really is an articulate, well-spoken, clear-thinking guy when he's not being directed by the Republican attack-dog electioneering team. If he got elected I'm convinced the same thing would happen to him that happened to the younger Bush. But if he can break free by losing the election, I betcha he'd make a fine advisor to the Obama administration.

Just a thought.

This morning I was trying to find the address of the Shanghai Links in Chinese so that I could look up directions from my house for next week's K12 Online Conference session. A Google search for "shanghai links 路" turned up this BBS post on the Laweach.com BBS, a site for legal advice in Chinese.

我朋友（女）最近要去shanghai links工作，它是一个golf球场+别墅区，也就是说，里面汇集了很多有钱人、外国人。
但是有人(某知情人)告戒我朋友，叫她别和别人一起出去吃饭，因此，我想，里面是不是很乱，一不注意，很有可能就会威胁到朋友的安全（专指女性方面），而且，有钱人的生活，本来就糜烂，做事也比较为所欲为。因此，想问一下有了解shanghai links的人，里面的真实情况是怎么样的，会不会真的很有可能对朋友造成伤害。非常感谢！！

My friend (female) is going to start working in Shanghai Links, which is a golf course + private residential compound. This means that it's a neighborhood with a high concentration of rich people and foreigners.
Somebody (an acquaintance) warned my friend not to go out to eat with other people there. So I'm thinking, is it true that this place is a bad neighborhood, that my friends safety could be suddenly threatened if she's not careful (especially for females)? The debauched, devil-may-care way that rich people live... So I'm asking people familiar with Shanghai Links to let me know what the situation inside the compound, is it possible that my friend will possibly suffer from harm? Thanks in advance!

Uh-oh, I'd better be careful! Nah, just kidding. Actually, to me this says more about Chinese peoples' understanding of the class divide than it does about Shanghai Links specifically. Worth considering.

I'm getting ready to submit an order to WL.com (first time I've used them) for a few books. I'm hoping they really do have Chen's novel, which all other book sites are listing but not stocking. The order consists of:

• 陈丹燕的《慢船去中国(简妮)》 Chen Danyan's "Slow Boat to China—Jenny", the sequel to a first book about Shanghainese history and identity told through the story of the daughter of a fallen comprador family. I've been to see Chen speak a couple of times, and I like her focus on local history.
• 王朔的《顽主》，《千万别把我当人》 Wang Shuo's "Masters of Mischief" on recommendation of Brendan and "No Man's Land/Don't Dare Call Me Human" from the Chinese Forums, because I didn't like 黄金时代. Having seen Wang Shuo compared to Bukowski of late makes me wonder if I'll ever like him, though. Maybe for his cerebral prose, but probably not for his subject matter.
• 莫言的《什么气味最美好》、《天堂蒜薹之歌》 Mo Yan's "What's The Most Perfect Scent" and "The Garlic Ballads" because he just won the Newman Prize for Chinese Lit (awarded, entirely coincidentally, by the school I'll be getting my MEd through soon).

It's clear that I'm pretty much in the grip of the North-eastern literary circles' hegemony. Are there any good Southern authors to recommend? Maybe I need to dip back into wuxia novels...

Share: Queen - Dont Stop Me Now.

I'm seeing an interesting new feature in my Chinese language Google searches these days. Search results that come from BBSs have an added line below the link that sometimes gives the number of posts, the number of posters and the date of the last post for that thread. An example:

求70年代广播体操的音乐[已解决] 激动社区-大型视频化综合娱乐社区 ... - [ Translate this page ]
10 posts - Last post: Dec 2, 2007
求70年代广播体操的音乐. ... 树型| 收藏| 小 中 大 3. 回复：求70年代广播体操的音乐 . 哈哈哈,过瘾.偶好象只会做这一套广播体操. gototop ...
bbs.joy.cn/showtopic-1955872.htm - 75k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

I say it's interesting because I don't know what to make of it yet. My first reaction is to suspect that this would be impossible to keep up to date, but it looks like Google is doing some customization behind the scenes because some results omit parts of that line, presumably information they can't get from that page. For example, higher up on the page that yielded the result given above is another link with the line "7 posts - 7 authors" given, which hints that Google didn't find the date of last update on that page, whether by design or accident. This makes me think that they may have thought about the problem of freshness, as well as accounting for threads that span many pages.

The Chinese Bloggercon 2008 is coming up in mid-November, about a month away. This year it is being held in Guangzhou which means that 冯三七 is involved, and I betcha they'll take the rude lessons learned from the last two years and pull off a great conference reminiscent of the first year in Shanghai. Registration is open and your RMB 100 in advance or 150 at the door should get you a t-shirt, a sticker or two, whatever surprises the Guangzhou folks have in store for us, and a weekend with a unique and forward-thinking set of minds from a very special part of the Chinese blogosophere.

Speaking of the bloggercon, it's one of the items on my secret "selfish list". Lately I've been mapping out a budget for Jodi and me every month, and it's been hard to stay within the bounds. Doing so has meant that there's a buncha stuff I'd like to get but have been holding off on until we are in better financial shape. Traveling to Guangzhou would mean spending a bit of cash, so it's something I'll have to talk about with Jodi before I start making definite plans. Anyhow, here's the list:

• CNBloggercon 2008. Deep down, I'm a believer in the open source lifestyle and devotee of Isaac Mao, and this is a rare chance to meet like minds in the flesh. One-way by train RMB ∼200, by plane RMB ∼500, plus one or two days of hotels, meals; maybe a total of RMB 1000.
• A new cellphone. The old Siemens, my first phone and a very amateurish pick, is hanging on for dear life and refuses to die/wander off. At the top of the list of replacement candidates are the Nokia 6108, an old Nokia model with pen input and CN-EN-CN dictionary, and the Gionee V9, a domestic model with a built-in NES emulator. They both go for RMB 200-300 on Taobao.
• A couple new pairs of glasses. My current glasses are 5 years old and showing their age: scratches on the lenses, mold in the nose-pads, and an outdated prescription. I'm jealous of Ani for having two pairs of glasses, which is strange because I'm not sure I'd use two pairs. I hear glasses go for RMB 300-400 a pair, and some shops will cut deals if you buy more than one pair.

I'm no angel, as Dido would say, and there have been a couple things that fell off the selfish-list and onto my lap in the past year. One is the eeePC, which we bought when I was on paternity leave at the hospital and needed to send sub plans to school and upload pictures to Flickr. The other is a pair of Uniqlo jeans, which I gave in and bought in desperation after failing to find a plain, no-frills pair of jeans for less than a <insert nickname for the RMB 100 bill; is there one?>. And when I think about those things, I feel too guilty to dive into the rest of the list. Waiting for birthday/Christmas... (Every time I say that, Jodi jokes that we'll be buying a million things at Christmas.)

Weather Underground says:

浦东新区 地区天气预报

文字版	10月10日	10月11日	10月12日
最低 温度	20°C	18°C	16°C
最高 温度	24°C	21°C	22°C
上午
下午
晚上

Nice weather this weekend, but look at the temperature trend.

This morning between classes I outlined a first worksheet for a series of math topics that I want to add to my physics classes before the end of the semester. I think the first one is particularly clever and succint, so I'm publishing it to show it off. It's called Error in Measurement.

UPDATE: after Googling around for a while, I actually found a lot of related material on the web. I'll be expanding this into a week-long lesson at the beginning of next year, I think.

When Matthew was in town last week, he brought up the question of why People's Square is called "Square" when it's really made up of the city government, the planning museum, the theater, the Shanghai museum, Renmin Avenue, etc. I decided to look into the issue.

A search on Baidu Zhidao turns up that after the Liberation in 1949, the hippodrome that had occupied the area before was razed and the location split into People's Park in the north and People's Square in the south. The actual Square was majorly redone in the 1990s (before I got here), giving it its present look. I dug around with Google and found some photos of Shanghai in the 1980s that show the original People's Square:

Looking southeast. The tower is Great World entertainment complex. The part of the Square where the buses (and military vehicles?) are parked is pretty much exactly where the Shanghai Museum is today. The houses in the center-right across from Great World have been torn down and now is the location of the Shanghai Concert Hall. From this perspective, the Concert Hall would probably be blocked from view by the Yan'an Rd Elevated Highway.


At the bottom left of the previous photo is Renmin Avenue, from which this picture is taken. The old city hall is on the left, replaced now by a bigger city hall, and People's Park begins just behind it. To the left of the city hall is a set of grandstands for parades down Renmin Avenue. I'm not sure of the identity of the conspicuous multi-leveled building on the horizon.

Also, I'll link to a picture of a famous intersection in Shanghai. Recognize it? I'll post the answer in the comments. (Actually, I think I posted this picture before.)

Why is 鱼香肉丝 called "fish-fragrant pork"?

所谓"鱼香",其实不是真的鲜鱼香,是因为川味糖醋鱼里要用一种泡辣椒做作料,那种泡辣椒和糖醋酒作用的结果,产生了一种独特的甜酸味,由于这道菜太开胃了,以后的厨子把这样的作料和烹饪方法推广到别的菜,最著名便是"鱼香肉丝",于是乎,顺理成章便把川式糖醋鱼的鱼香转移到作料的香味,再转嫁到肉丝的烹调上,尽管肉丝里并没有鱼.

So-called "fish fragrance" (鱼香) is actually not from real live fish. In Sichuanese sweet-and-sour fish, one ingredient is a kind of preserved hot pepper (泡辣椒). That kind of pepper plus a sugar/vinegar sauce combine to give a very special sweet-and-sour flavor that spread to other dishes due to its popularity, the most famous inheritor being "fish-fragrant pork". So in order to communicate that the sauce from the sweet-and-sour fish recipe was being used to cook the pork in a similar fashion, the name was carried over even though there is no fish in the pork dish.

So there ya go. (See also: What is 盖浇饭?)

I just ran across this message posted recently on a Facebook group, and it's blowing my mind.

at 2:00am on August 13th, 2008
nihao. Wo tseu fagoren. Shenzhen hua hay ni ! mingbaile putankuoa. wo jiao zeugen. tsa meumay ?/duo shao xiang ? piayi yi dien ? xing boxing ? tsaijen ! :)

I can make out about 80% of what he's saying, but can anybody tell me what this is? Cantonese? A dialect of Mandarin? An obscure romanization system?

Just a link to a poem: Longwu Lu (龙吴路).

Today was a long day for Charlotte and me.

In the morning we got ready, then took the Zhangjiang Loop Line to Zhangjiang metro station, took the subway to Nanjing East Road (Jodi still calls is Henan Middle Road, cute), and then the 66 to Fuyou Road. Fuyou Road is one of the stops on the edge of... Cheng Huang Miao, the City God's Temple. I love this area because it has loads of antiques (real and fake), souvenir shops, wholesale malls, tourists, snacks... We browsed an old bookstall with antique blocks of wooden movable type for sale, ate Ningbo tangyuan (rice balls with black sesame amaretto paste inside, in soup) and Cheerios, watched the fish in the pond fight over bread crumbs, saw a strange heron-like bird under the Yu Garden crooked bridge, heard a mini-concert by a man playing the bamboo flute, watched a shadow play narrated by a guy dressed in period costume and featuring Zhu Ba Jie eating KFC, and flew through the throngs of tourists to catch a bus at Xin Bei Men.

The bus we caught was the 64, which took us to the Xinzha Road metro station. Originally I had wanted to stop at the Cyber Electronic Components Market to look at resistors and LEDs, but we didn't have time and as we rode past it looked like it was closed for National Day anyways. By that time, also, Charlotte had fallen asleep in my arms on the bus because it was about 12:30am, time for her afternoon nap.

She woke up when we were most of the way to John B's house, a good 15-minute walk from the Zhongshan Park metro station. Once there we got to play with little Willy (not so little anymore!) and chat with John B, Kexia, Adam and Megan, over three ginormous (Firefox spell-checker says that's a word‽) Papa John pizzas. After a few hours Charlotte started suffering the effect of her short and tortured lap-stroller nap, getting into trouble and throwing tantrums so we said goodbye and took Line 2 back to ol' Zhangjiang, shared a yogurt from the new Boli Nuchang at the metro station, and took the Loop Line home, where I ate dinner and fell so deeply asleep on the couch that Jodi didn't even wake me up to give Charlotte a bath.

It was a long but good day.

This afternoon I went out to lunch with a visitor from Tianjin. Since he was hoping to take in the Shanghai Art Museum afterwards, I took him to 佳家汤包 on Huanghe Road, just north of People's Square. It was actually the firs time I'd been there, which is surprising because it gets rave reviews for its 小笼包 soup dumplings. So what did I think of it?

The food was good. When we arrived, there was a line out the door because the place has about 10 small tables and more than enough customers. We ended up waiting about 15 minutes outside in the freakish autumn sunshine we've been getting this year, next to a parked Porsche Boxster. Once inside we ordered from a menu that was 80% sold out. Besides the famous 100% 蟹粉 crab meat dumplings, the only other kind they had was 蟹粉鲜肉汤包 crab and pork soup dumplings. So we had two steamers of crab-and-pork dumplings, two seaweed and egg soups, two side servings of finely chopped ginger floss, and a Sprite and Fanta. Like I said, the food was good: the dumplings filling was finely ground and well mixed but with distinct and fresh flavors in the soup and meat, the ginger floss had bite but was sliced thin enough to spare the tongue a drubbing, and the soup was nothing to write home about but that's not the point anyways, right? The vinegar was a big thin, but that's personal taste. So overall, good. I'd go back frequently if People's Square was a regular haunt and I could be spared the waiting in line.

One thing I wasn't happy about is that it was so easy to find. Hole-in-the-wall, name-brand places should be out of the way. I didn't realize after hearing about them for so long that 佳家汤包, 小杨生煎 and 老克勒 were all right next to each other on Huanghe Rd, 2 minutes from People's Square. Lame.

Speaking of 老克勒, a couple of waitresses were standing outside handing out take-out menus to passers-by so I picked one up and scanned it in. This place looks worth going back for. Full sizes are on Flickr.