Timely Snow

I’ve now posted some pictures of the pailou outside the PassBy Bar in Beijing, a very pleasant courtyard bar, restaurant, internet bar, and lending library. It appears that it really, though, is a front for a child clinical psychology operation. Here’s the picture:

The sign on the left says:
“Chinese Academy of Sciences Psychology Research [...]

One of the interesting things about living in China is the ready access to recorded music and video. Certainly some of it is pirated, although it’s a bit difficult to figure out. I think the US recording industry is really making a mistake in pricing its products as high as they do—I think people in [...]

UPDATE —Last night I found a great billboard to go with the comments at the end of this, so it’s now enclosed below:

 
With every passing day, life in Beijing is slowly getting back to normal. Yesterday, my wife and I biked downtown and came back along the second ring road, in the midst of the [...]

For reasons perhaps best left unexplained, I found the page below to be completely hilarious. The pictures were taken from the “ready.gov” anti-terrorism preparation site in the U.S., and adapted to local conditions by John Pasden, an American teaching English at Zhejiang University in beautiful Hangzhou.
http://www.sinosplice.com/china/pictguide.html
Given the way the pictures were chosen, I found the [...]

Some thoughts on what the SARS in Beijing might mean for the rest of the world, with a focus on the United States.

Information can’t be controlled. During the period before the amazing press conference on April 20 (somewhat sanitized transcript at: http://www.chinaembassy.se/eng/47200.html), rumors abounded, some of which were even more extreme than the reality (which [...]

If you are in Beijing this Spring, and not quarantined, it’s actually a great time to be a tourist. Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I took advantage of the beautiful weather to tour the Forbidden City. I can never remember a time when it was so empty. The picture belows gives some sense of how [...]