JISHOU, HUNAN — I just came from the English Club Christmas party, where we danced a version of the “Bunny Hop” to a catchy tune I haven’t heard anywhere else but in China.
So, in keeping with my recent tradition of scouring the Internet for perfectly useless trivia, I went googling, yahoo-ing and baidu-ing to learn something about it. Since it seems to be something akin to an oral tradition, getting anything definite about it was a real challenge.
In China, the song is called “Rabbit Dance 兔子舞,” since the basic steps are just like the American “Bunny Hop” dance. [Ray Anthony's band did a 45 of this in the mid-1950s; the B side was the "Hokey Pokey." So now you know.]
But if you pay attention to the lyrics to “Rabbit Dance,” the song we hear in China says nothing about rabbits or bunnies. The animal in question is … penguins. Here’s the lyrics. If I’m violating copyright, please excuse me. Tracking down the performers was hard enough.
left left right right go turn around go go go
left right
left left right right left left right right go go go
left left right right go turn around go go go
Jumping grooving dancing everybody
Rolling moving singing night to day
Let’s fun fun together
Let’s play the penguin’s games
Smacking beating clapping all together
Rocking bumping screaming all night long
Let’s go everybody And play again this song
JISHOU, HUNAN — OK, so here’s another one of my musical treasure hunts. Tonight, I heard the students of my friend in the music college perform. Among the songs were two from Western operas. Both I recognized right away, and I could even sing along (not very loud, of course), but I could only remember the name of one of the operas.
The first was from Bizet’s Carmen — the “Habanera”. Even if you’re not an opera buff, you have to know this aria, because of the distinctive chromatic glide down the scale as the cello plays “ba ba ba bum ba ba ba dum.”
And for those who can’t read music, here’s an Old School video of Maria Callas singing it in 1962.
That one wasn’t so hard, but the second, a duet, was a mystery. I knew the tune well enough to sing the man’s part (not the lyrics, though), but why did I know the tune? And who wrote it?
This is the kind of thing that can keep me up at night.
The program was not all that helpful, since it only provided the title in Chinese and the names of the performers. The Chinese title is “让我们携手同行 rang women xie shou tong hang” or “Let’s walk hand in hand,” which was my loose translation into English.
If you are a real opera buff, you probably have already guessed the correct title and the source, but my spotty musical education left me perplexed. So, off to the Internet I went after I came home.
JISHOU, HUNAN — I have to confess, finding a travel article in a Hong Kong newspaper about Kentucky was a little weird. Most foreign visitors to the US hit the coasts, not the Great Midwest, much as tourists to China visit Tibet, Shanghai and Beijing, and skip everything in between.
For some reason, I always seem to end up living in the in-between parts, no matter where I live.
Anyway, the gist of the article in the South China Morning Post is that Kentucky is worth visiting to see the “real” America, whatever that means. The writer visited Bardstown, Lexington, Louisville, Mammoth Cave and parts in-between in a driving tour of the Bluegrass State.
Aside from using the dreaded pejorative, “hillbillies,” writer Tim Bryan pretty much nailed why Kentucky is such a good place to visit, or live, for that matter. He even mentions Ale-8-One. Damn. Now I miss the stuff.
Give it a read, especially if you’re from Kentuckiana. It’s refreshing to see how strangers view the Commonwealth.
JISHOU, HUNAN — I’m trying to make my blog more mobile-phone friendly, so I’m trying out the WPTap Mobile Detector plugin for WordPress. It’s supposed to detect a mobile-phone browser and automatically switch to a mobile-friendly theme (Carrington Mobile, in my case).
I’ve tested it with Opera Mini on my Nokia e63, and it does just what I want. But I’ve had less success with the built-in Nokia browser, which insists on using the site’s default theme for computer-based browsers.
What I need is folks with iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, Palms, Windows smartphones and Android smartphones to visit my site and tell me what you see. You should see something like this.
Please leave a comment using your phone by clicking on this post’s headline, and scrolling to the bottom of the page. Or, if that doesn’t work, visit the site with your computer and comment, or comment in Facebook Notes.
JISHOU, HUNAN — You can help keep this site going by clicking on the “Support This Site” PayPal donation button, or buying something from Amazon.com or TigerDirect.com, on the top right side of the main page.
My costs are quite minimal, and my profits are none, so a few pennies here or there would be a great help. Or a nice Christmas present. Or something. At one time, I tried cluttering my posts with links to books, CDs and DVDs at Amazon, but the process was more trouble than it was worth. So I gave it up.
If you buy stuff at Amazon, I get a teeny tiny commission. The same with TigerDirect. Or if you prefer the brute force method, just donate with PayPal.
As yet, I have no cute little gifties to offer, like stylish coffee mugs for pledges of $25 or clever canvas tote bags for $50 pledges, but I’ll be really grateful.
JISHOU, HUNAN — This site went down not once, but twice because of some kind of Linux hack.
Thanks to my ever-reliable webhosts, Planet Earth Hosting, and my own backups, the downtime was just a few hours total, but it was still a pain in the ass.
The first incident was on the 6th, when someone named GhOST61 replaced all the index.xxxx pages in my public_html directory (and perhaps in everyone else’s on that server) with his own 40-byte taunt. My quick googlifying turned up a reference to a vulnerability in the Linux kernel that said GhOST61 has managed to exploit all over the place.
The crew at PE Hosting had to take down the webserver, reinstall Linux, then restore the files from their backups. Some of my more recent posts were missing, but I was able to recover them from the feeds I send to my Facebook notes. The site was back to normal up several hours later.
Ella Koon 官恩娜- see below for details
The following day I tried to post something here and got nowhere. The URL didn’t work; all I got was a Firefox message saying the server was not found.
Turns out another hacker torpedoed the same webserver while the PE Hosting crew was trying to harden the server against further attacks. So, they had to take the server down again, reinstall Linux a second time, and restore the files from their backups. My most recent posts were once again missing, but this time I had my own database backup. Instead of cutting and pasting from Facebook, I could use phpadmin to insert the missing posts back into my WordPress database at PE Hosting.
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