Monthly Archives July 2008

Self-indulgence

Princess and Mrs. Beijing Sounds sent text as soon as the wheels touched ground at PEK last night. By 10:30, they’d entered the Beijing Sounds studios in Shàngdì (上地 in northwest Beijing) and managed to include your editor (who they’d left holed up in Minnesota) in most of the evening rituals: the book-reading, the talk [...]

Olympic Endeavors

Olympic sloganeering & ingenuousness, Mandarin acquisition & n-closing, the Catch-22 of tones

If you’re a return reader to this blog of questionable taste, obscure subject matter and infrequent update, you probably have an appetite for a good cynical rant. Not that you’d be able to feed the habit on this url, mind you: as a recovering [...]