Occasional Tales

Now I don't. For quite some time now, I've been able to get onto blogspot via a very effective proxy. It seems, however, that that may have come to an end or a strong block (whatever one of those might be) has been placed on blogspot since the events in Τιβέτ. It's quite possible that the latter is responsible, because sites that might've been available via proxy before were also blocked. But it's also possible that a recent update to Firefox has messed things up. As usual, Nanny has been incapable of being consistent during recent events in the imperium sericum . The main page of the Guardian Unlimited got blocked (though it's now available once again), but everything else was still accessible via RSS feeds. The BBC is now back in a way that it hasn't been in my 5½ years in China. As I type this in the early evening of a grey day in Chengdu, I'm listening to R4. The Beeb seems to have become fully functional mere days after the protests in Тибэт were ef...

Or, Little to show for it. Since MSN is out to lunch at the moment, I may as well post an entry here. Since it was rather cold today, accompanied by very light snow, I spent my time watching The League of Gentlemen and listening to sound files of examples of Piedmontese. I found this site (English version) just recently which has a detailed amateur description of the language. Because I found the rather eclectic Phonetical Symbology [sic!][1] to be annoying, I thought I'd see whether I could make head or tail of the symbols being used. The vocalic inventory includes shwa /ə/ (U+0259), /y/ and /ø/, as well as the usual Romance distinction between high mid and low mid vowels. Vowels are lengthened under stress, but this doesn't appear to be genuinely phonemic. The /a/ of quàder "painting" sounds longer than its unstressed counterpart, a feature which is probably only noticeable because of the use of accents marking stressed syllables in certain instances. In other wo...

Now what's going on? Yesterday and, it now seems, today, the mobile network was in a parlous state. My phone spent most of the day bleeping, which means that it was losing the signal and then getting it back again. I'm surfing around Cyberia, but finding several websites off the menu. No Map-Center or its successor, or Q3W forums ; the whole of MSN is down (last minute pre-Yuletide tinkering?); can't get onto The Independent (even via IE 7; I had a problem accessing the site with Firefox the other day, but no problem with IE); the formatting on The Guardian site in IE is complete shite (but all right with Firefox), as if the style sheet isn't getting rendered (which it probably isn't knowing MS's lax adherence to Web standards); no Danwei or ESWN or lost laowai . Japundit didn't even waste time dawdling and delaying before it proved inaccessible, which suggests that Japan-based sites may be blocked in general at the moment (although I'm not implyin...

geocities is on; Sicilian is off. For the past few years I've assumed that geocities sites have been blocked without exception and without the on-again-off-again nonsense that has affected blogspot. But I discovered a couple of days ago, quite by chance, that geocities sites are accessible again. I don't know when they became agreeable to the mad old bat or why. On the other hand, I thought I'd drop by Ninu Russu's Sicilian language site . Could I? I've been able to in the past otherwise I couldn't have bookmarked it. But no, it's now blocked. I thought I'd double check via anonymouse in case the site had gone. No, it's still there, and definitely blocked. It seems the site was moved to a new host in October. And there's my answer. It's now hosted by Lycos. This is another instance where the wholesale blocking of a host results in websites which are of no concern to Nanny being unavailable for no good reason. If the deranged old cretin wants...

Don't mention the Declaration. I'm pretty certain that when I first came to the inGlorious Motherland, it was possible to get onto the Omniglot site. It's devoted to languages and writing systems. Why should such a site be so offensive to Nanny? Since I was curious, I took a trip there via anonymouse . The most likely reason seems to be the sample text that's used to illustrate each language. Here are the "offending" sentences in Catalan and Occitan (Languedoc variety). Tots els éssers humans neixen lliures i iguals en dignitat i en drets. Són dotats de raó i de consciència, i han de comportar-se fraternalment els uns amb es altres. Totas las personas nàisson liuras e parièras en dignitat e en dreches. Son cargadas de rason e de consciéncia e mai lor se cal comportar entre elas amb un eime de frairetat. For those of us who know neither language, what do these sentences say? They are translations of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bu...

It's blogspot. Chris discovered that blogspot might be back on the menu again. Let's see whether I can say Tibet. I can. That suggests that Chris ran into one of those holes in the GFW you occasionally find. If blogspot really was back on the menu, then I'd run into some error message if I tried to publish a post with words like Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen, democracy etc.

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.