2007/02/16

Never play with,scare and catch birds,crickets fish and cicada(unless business items)


This is the best sign I saw in China, at a Shanghai park.

2007/02/14

A Western holiday in Japan just wouldn't be complete without intensifying the gender inequality

from wikipedia:
Thanks to a concentrated marketing effort, Valentine's Day has emerged in Japan and Korea as a day on which women, and less commonly men, give candy, chocolate or flowers to people they like. This has become an obligation for many women. Those who work in offices end up giving chocolates to all their male co-workers, sometimes at significant personal expense. This chocolate is known as giri-choko (義理チョコ), in Japan, from the words giri ("obligation") and choko, a common short version of chokorēto (チョコレート), meaning "chocolate". This contrasts with honmei-choko, which is given to a person someone loves or has a strong relationship with. Friends, especially girls, exchange chocolate that is referred to as tomo-choko (友チョコ); tomo means "friend" in Japanese.

By a further marketing effort, a reciprocal day called White Day has emerged. On March 14, men are expected to return the favour to those who gave them chocolates on Valentine's Day. Many men, however, give only to their girlfriends. Originally, the return gift was supposed to be white chocolate or marshmallows; hence "White Day". However, men have interpreted the name differently and lingerie has become a common gift.

2007/02/04

左宗棠鸡的奇怪来源

General Tso's chicken (also General Gau's, Tao's, Tsao's, Zhou's, Gao's, Chou's, Tzo's, To's, So's, Joe's, or Toso's) is named after 左宗棠/Zuo Zongtang, a famous Chinese general who crushed uprisings in 新疆/Xinjiang in the 1870s. (The difference in spelling is because "Tso" comes from the unacceptable Wade-Giles transliteration system.) General Tso's chicken is the most famous 湖南/Hunan dish outside China - except that it doesn't exist in Hunan. Here is the bizarre story of how General Tso's chicken was invented in 1950s 台北/Taibei and 1970s New York, how Henry Kissinger disseminated it to the world, and how latter-day Hunanese chefs are now adopting it as a "traditional" dish.

Wesley Crusher is on our side


The actor who played the intolerable Wesley Crusher character from Star Trek TNG - Wil Wheaton in real life - these days blogs about geek stuff. Lately he's been pretty upset about two things: global warming deniers and - far more heatedly - the reaction of politicians and the media in Boston's Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerrilla marketing debacle.