Occasional Tales

But for how long? I discovered, although somewhat later than everyone else it seems, that YouTube has been unblocked. Obviously, Nanny thought it was safe to let the hordes back again because all those video clips of the Old Man from Tibet getting knighted by Ayatollah Dubya will now be blocked as an individual group. Besides, the boys in Zhongnanhai were probably missing videos of girls doing the nearest thing to X-rated material that YouTube will allow to be posted. Huh. That was odd. Posting glitch. The offending culprit seemed to be Далай Лама in English letters. Perhaps there were just technical problems unless blogspot has also been unblocked.

Oh thou contrary old bat. The news from Danwei this morning is that blogspot is out to lunch again now that the Party Congress is over. But that's not why I'm posting. I just want to say, "Tibet". And indeed I can without all the fuss and bother that I had a couple of days ago. I bet I can say stuff about Taiwan, too.

Redirect this! I seem to be a little behind on the news from Cyberia. I've just found out that Nanny was redirecting Google, Yahoo! and live.com searches to Baidu a few days ago. This seem to have been the petulant response to a certain sovereign nation awarding a medal to some old homeless guy from a place in Asia. Did Nanny think that the Chinese Cyberians were all dashing off to one of the foreign search engines to find out more about this event? Or was Nanny merely trying to annoy the expats again since they're more likely to be affected by such puerile doings than the Chinese themselves. Anyway, I've just checked Google blog search and have found that it's back to normal. If you search for "green bamboo", guess which two blogs are top of the list. ^_^ Appendix A Did the redirecting actually only affecting the .cn versions of the search engines or did it affect them across the board? Appendix B Hmmm. That was interesting. When I first tried to post this, I...

MSN must be fiddling with the settings again. Spaces has been out of action today. They've been making some changes recently so I assume they're doing some more tweaking. Hotmail was all right, though. The good news is that I've been reimbursed for all the expenses I incurred over the summer. There was a question about excess baggage, but that was unavoidable. It was possible to box up a lot of stuff, but not everything, although there was more stuff left over than I was expecting. I'd tried to pare things down as much as possible, but I didn't want to arrive in Chengdu and then have to rebuy a bunch of stuff that I already have. We're off to see some irrigation scheme tomorrow. There's even meant to be a hill with a cable car. We're going with a group of American school kids who are over here for a month. One or perhaps both of the teachers with them want to do some teaching, which means that there's a couple of classes each of us won't have to ...

Public words; private truths. I've just had the weekly meeting with Linda and 蛇夫人. "Ye shall be at school for half a day every day." Why? I wondered. To hang around just in case some kid who's skiving from class might want to use us as a convenient bolt hole? I don't generally need to be at school any longer than I'm already there. Apart from classes, there's not a lot for me to do there. The planning is all done here at home because everything I need is on my computer. The alternative would be to sit around in the office being bored and probably being a nuisance to the others. Time well spent, methinks. [ So that's sarcasm . –ed.] Later. Turns out that the catalyst for the comments at the meeting this morning was the ever reliable SEF who, it'd appear, has quite possibly had everything handed to him on a plate. I really need to sit in on one of his classes because no one's sure whether he's even doing what he ought to be doing.

For the moment. The news is that blogspot has been unblocked again. However, I note that the RSS feed from petite anglaise has been dead this morning, thus joining the inert feeds for Japundit and Tokyo Times . I suppose it's nice to have blogspot back if you haven't been using the effective Firefox work round, but it'd also be nice to have LJ and various others back as well. This on-again-off-again thing seems and is so arbitrary. Just because blogspot has been blocked, it doesn't mean that posts critical of the Chinese government or references to Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen Square will've gone away or will've stopped coming. On this occasion, my guess is that the block has been removed during the Party Congress so that the delegates can blog without the nuisance of going through a proxy.

But I'm sure it's in the public interest. While Spaces is playing silly buggers, I may as well post an entry or two here. I was just doing a search via Baidu for Zhang Zeduan's picture 清明上河, but as is typical with any search via any search engine, you often get some odd results, one of which was a picture of a hot girl lying on a bed. I clicked on the link and found myself on this page on xinhua.net, which seems to be informing us that the cutie in question has had a little surgery recently. I can't read enough of the Chinese to understand what it says, but I'd say from the pictures that 陈瑀涵 ( Chén Yǔhán ; I guess that's her name) didn't really need any enhancement in the first place and is now sporting a somewhat unattractive cleavage. How this picture ends up being returned as a search result for Zhang Zeduan, I don't know.