The FJP

Loving the Future in Chinese - how, sometimes, absurdism online is the best way to make sense

(Inspired by the Guardian’s Battles for the Internet series)

We all know that China has the world’s largest online population, and its government is among the most intrusive when it comes to censorship.

But what we may not is that on China’s domestic sites, posts about sensitive issues — Tibet, ousted officials, and occasional village rebellions — are often deleted quickly, and searches for similar terms are usually blocked. So how do people get around them?

With humor. via Offbeat China:

The most interesting of all is the case of “Teletubbies vs. Master Kong”. This is not a new cartoon and surely not meant for kids, either. That is the argot for what might be happening or have happened in a rumored “coup” in Beijing.

Almost overnight, everybody on Sina Weibo becomes part of a “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” reality show – they look for traces of truth in every rumor, and in their hands lies a secret code book.

“According to unreliable resource, the 18^th tug war has a winner. The winner is the team of dragon led by carrot and his team mates Teletubby, Subor study machine and wood son Li. The team led by Master Kong beef instant noodle was defeated because they lost tomato and it was a great loss.”

Total nonsense? Not if you know the ciphers.

Carrot: 胡萝卜(hu luo bo), a vegetable = 胡锦涛 (hu jin tao), President of China

Teletubby: 天线宝宝 (tian xian bao bao), popular cartoon character = 温家宝 (wen jia bao), Prime Minister of China

Subor study machine: 小霸王学习机 (xiao ba wang xue xi ji), famous brand of children electronics = 习近平 (xi jin ping), one of China’s 9-member Politburo and who has been speculated as China’s next President

Wood son Li: 木子李 (mu zi li) = 李克强 (li ke qiang), one of China’s 9-member Politburo and who has been rumored to be China’s next Prime Minister

Master Kong: 康师傅 (kang shi fu), famous instant noodle brand = 周永康 (zhou yong kang), one of China’s 9-member Politburo and who has been rumored to be a supporter of Bo Xilai

Tomato: 西红柿 (xi hong shi), a vegetable = 薄熙来 (bo xi lai), fallen political star that has been the center of recent political dramas in China

Outrageous? Yes. Inventive? Yes. Necessary? Yes.

This one is a bit less silly: Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous artist and government dissident, who was jailed for several months last year and remains under close watch at his house in Beijing, has long been a human rights icon for Chinese people. But he’s scarcely mentioned online due to censors and rules, and so netizens have slightly altered the three Chinese characters in his name to give the sounds new meaning.

via the Atlantic:

Term: Love the Future.

Definition: “‘Love the future’ is a coded reference to Chinese artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei (艾未未) that began to be used after Ai’s disappearance in early 2011. Ai’s surname sounds the same as the word ‘love’ in Chinese, and his given name ‘Weiwei’ can be converted into the word “future” by adding two small strokes to the second character.”

For more on this weird but not inaccessible phenomenon, see the China Digital Times’ lexicon of Chinese terms used online.

Photo: The Atlantic

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In Memoriam: Facts, 360 BCE - 2012 CE

We are saddened to learn about the passing of Facts:

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists.

Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.

“It’s very depressing,” said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of “A History of the Modern Fact.” “I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We’ll never agree on anything.”

Facts was born in ancient Greece, the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle. Poovey said that in its youth, Facts was viewed as “universal principles that everybody agrees on” or “shared assumptions.”

Rex W. Huppke, Chicago Tribune. After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.

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Is it a Condom or is it an Android?

Des Traynor creates this chart and and offers some free brand and marketing 101, “If your product isn’t a condom then don’t name it like one.”

H/T: Business Insider.

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Can I Make Stuff Up?

Fabrication, fiction, falsehood: see what you can do and when you can do it at Slate.

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Better than the “staycation” is the Internet holiday. Why even put forth the effort of explaining that you’re not going somewhere? This morning we’re enjoying these travel posters for extremely lazy people.

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Why I won’t win the award for Best Oscar Coverage

Oscar Several years ago, I applied for press credentials to cover Hollywood’s annual celebration of self-love known as the Academy Awards. To my surprise (and eventual chagrin) I received a reply indicating that my coverage was welcomed. That is, if I wanted to cover the assembly of the bleachers they set up on the sidewalk so the Hoi polloi can gawk and stalk the celebs outside the Kodak Theatre.

The Academy actually has a media staffer assigned to handle the press for this “event” and, sadly, some journos actually show up. Apparently, that’s where they go to euthanize their dignity. Fortunately, I double-checked the itinerary before renting a tux, boarding an economy flight to Burbank and catching the subway to the Hollywood and Highland Station, which happens to be the cleanest subway on earth because no one knows it exists.

Needless to say, I didn’t bother claiming my coveted credential to the bleacher assembly, though I’m sure it was followed by a lovely party replete with gift bags and heaps of schadenfreude served atop crostini. Hollywood seizes any excuse to have a party and the media likewise seem to enjoy standing outside looking in. Since I write for a comparatively small publication 400 miles from the action, the “upside” is that I’m seldom invited “inside” or “outside,” which I realize sounds like the backing vocal on a Beach Boys tune, if not merely sour grapes.

Since declining to write what surely would have been a Pulitzer-worthy pre-Oscar piece (“Bleachers on the Boulevard: The Masses, Their Asses and Thirteen-and-a-Half-Inches of Gold”), I’ve barely kept up with the annual love fest. But I do continue to receive Oscar spam, which is presently cranked to a fever pitch with several missives a day landing in my inbox.

Recent updates include the attendee lists of pre-award luncheons and occasionally their menus. I for one don’t need to know what our stars are digesting, but for some outlets, the phrase “Too Much Information” doesn’t exist. Without TMI, TMZ couldn’t exist, for example, and thanks to TMJ someone, somewhere isn’t getting a part.

Literally, while writing this, I received this Academy news flash: “‘Oz’ Ruby Slippers Find Their Way Home, Major Acquisition for Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.” Sigh. So what does this mean, someone finally opened Dorothy’s gym bag? Besides press releases from Oscar central, there is a veritable dog-pile of publicists trying to news-jack Oscar-awareness for their clients. Consider the Beverly Hills’ Avalon Hotel, which has mixed up a drink menu in honor of the Best Picture noms. I stomached the ingredients list for “The Help,” dubbed the “Southern Comfort Hurricane,” which was only mildly offensive, but stopped reading once I got to the “Sidecar” prepped for the “Midnight in Paris,” that, given its director’s romantic proclivities, should have been a Shirley Temple.

I’ve got Oscar-fatigue and I don’t even own one (yet). Bert Salzman, one of Sonoma’s Academy Award Winners (yes, we have several), once let me hold his Oscar, though the honor came with the proviso, “Don’t be an a—hole.”

I didn’t know what he meant until I off-handed, “It’s heavier than I thought,” to which he replied, “That’s what every a—hole says.”

I won’t hazard a guess as to when I might have another chance to be an a—hole whilst wielding a statuette of a little man, though I’ll assume it’ll either be when I’m accepting my own Oscar or conducting an exorcism.

Since either event somehow seems possible (when I’ve been drinking), I’ve prepared speeches for either inevitability. For the latter, it reads something like, “Exorcizamus te impuri spiritus sed relinque vinum,” which is Latin for “We exorcise you impure spirit but leave the wine.”

My Oscar acceptance speech, however, isn’t as tidy, which is ironic since I’ve been rehearsing since I was 11. The problem is that I keep changing who I’m going to thank in the 15 seconds they allot to sum up an entire career. To wit, I’ll keep it brief, “I’d like to thank the editors of this space, without whom I wouldn’t have a place to bitch about the Oscars – or send my invoice.”

Daedalus Howell is a columnist at the Sonoma Index-Tribune and author of I Heart Sonoma: How to Live & Drink in Wine Country.

daedalushowell.com

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And I want to be able to argue on my show that Obama’s stimulus created zero jobs.

Doonesbury continues exploring information silos with its “myFacts” series.

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What Privacy Policies (Really) Want to Say

With user frustration over endlessly changing end user licensing agreements and privacy policies from the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple among others, Skipity, a startup search/discovery engine, spells everything out quite clearly.

Among their 10-point privacy policy:

1. We are the company that cares about your privacy. Specifically, while most other companies are concerned with protecting your privacy, we care about profiteering and violating it when expedient or useful.

2. You may think of using any of our programs or services as the privacy equivalent of living in a webcam fitted glass house under the unblinking eye of Big Brother: you have no privacy with us. If we can use any of your details to legally make a profit, we probably will.

5. If the opportunity arises to sell or otherwise use this or any information, data or meta data about you or your world, we will jump at that opportunity like a pitbull on a fresh steak.

9. Cookies: We like chocolate chip cookies. You agree to furnish any employee or associate of our company with fresh chocolate chip cookies upon request. That’s the price of using our programs and or services (in addition to any other price we come up with).

Always good to know where you stand before using an application or service, no?

H/T: Forbes.

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We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change. However, our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede. We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble … well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.

Matt Doig, Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Excerpt from a job post sent to a listserv earlier this year.

We laughed then, we laugh now. AdAge reminded us of this gem in their rundown of Best Media Writing of the Year.

Mother Jones has Doig’s complete post.

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These sorts of gyrations and five-sense choreographies, with variations on Ed’s main themes, played out episodically between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m., when Diane said, “Let’s shower.”

In the shower, Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap. After a while he shut his eyes, and Diane, wielding her fingernails now and staring at his face, helped him out with two practiced hands, one squeezing the family jewels, the other vigorous with the soap-and-warm-water treatment. It didn’t take long for the beautiful and perfect Ed King to ejaculate for the fifth time in twelve hours, while looking like Roman public-bath statuary. Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present you with the winning prose in Literary Review’s 2011 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Or, as the journal also calls it, Britain’s Most Dreaded Literary Prize.

This years winner is David Guterson for the above passage in Ed King, a reimagining of the Oedipus myth in the latter half of the 20th century.

As Jonathan Beckman, a senior editor at Literary Review and bad sex judge, writes in the Financial Times:

Prudishness lies at the heart of poor sex writing. You can sense the urge to shy away from sex, to displace it with simile or hide it all together. It’s striking how frequently the view becomes cloudy or obscured. In previous years Carlos Fuentes got “lost in a leafiness like that of a forest of fleshy ferns”; Amos Oz was “like some piece of sonar equipment … anticipating and consciously avoiding every sandbank, steering clear of each underwater reef”; John Banville has “a passionate dalliance … on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out of them”.

For what it’s worth, when Guterson isn’t winning bad sex writing awards, he’s winning things like the PEN/Faulkner award for his 1995 Snow Falling on Cedars.

Somewhere there’s something hopeful in that.

H/T: Salon.