UPDATE 28/7/2010 11:25 am: And now everything is back to “normal.” But Firefox went south on me, Winamp got trapped in a loop somehow, and even taskmgr couldn’t kill it. After I shut down the computer, and restarted, the “blocked” sites listed below were accessible again. So I laid blame on the Great Firewall, but maybe it was my laptop or Vista Home edition.

JISHOU, HUNAN — Yesterday, I could access a whole slew of my favorite websites. Today, I can’t. I blame the Great Firewall of China.

In fact, my own website (this one) is now blocked. I am using the Ultrasurf proxy to climb the Great Firewall just to post this.

And to aggravate me even more, Wikipedia seems also to be blocked, just as I was beginning the last phase of a long term project to edit Wiki entries about locations in Hunan, using my students’ research papers as the sources. I managed to edit the Jishou entry two days ago. Now, I’ll have to use the proxy to continue.

Here’s a partial list of what I could access yesterday, but cannot today.

• www.nytimes.com
• my.yahoo.com
• www.liitlegreenfootballs.com
• wheatdogg.computernewbie.info — MINE! and thereby cpanel access
• en.wikipedia.org
• www.sadlyno.com
• questionablecontent.net — a webcomic I kinda enjoy
• www.rightwingwatch.org

And here’s what seems so far to be unaffected.

• www.cnn.com
• scienceblogs.com
• www.washingtonpost.com
• www.bbc.co.uk – but some media blocked
• www.gmail.com
• dailykos.com

July 27th, 2010 | Tags: censorship, China, Great Firewall, Internet, proxy | Category: China, Civil liberties, General stuff, Media | Leave a comment

LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — James Cameron admits he based the mountains in his new blockbuster, Avalon, on the landscapes seen in many places in China. The tourism authority in Zhangjiajie 张家界 has made the connection explicit — it has just renamed a peak “Hallelujah Mountain” after a key locale in the movie.

The karst spire was once known as “South Pillar of the Heaven” (南天一柱), or “Pillar between Heaven and Earth” (乾坤柱). It lies within the National Forest Park, a world heritage site visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists — mostly Chinese, Korean and Japanese so far — each year.

And yes, when I saw the movie I said to myself, “Damn. It looks like Zhangjiajie!” You can see my photos on Picasaweb to see what I mean.

So, Avatar fans here’s the lowdown on the National Forest Park in Zhangjiajie. The quickest way to get there is by air from Beijing — one-way airfares are about 900 RMB (about $130) but sometimes you can get cheaper fares. Entry to the park itself is 248 RMB ($36) for a two-day pass. You will need both days, because the park is both big and worth a leisurely visit. Bring water to drink and food to snack on, but DO NOT carry it in a white plastic grocery bag. The local monkeys will literally try to steal the food from the bags. Use a backpack instead. The monkeys aren’t good with zippers … yet.

January 26th, 2010 | Tags: Avatar, China, Hallelujah Mountain, tourism, zhangjiajie | Category: China, Media | Leave a comment

CHANGSHA, CHINA — Unlike my last trip to the vicinity of Changsha, this one was not fraught with peril. The disasters were limited to the movies I watched.

Our bus screened two mega-disaster movies, the American 2012 and the Thai copycat version 2022: The Great Tsunami. (It goes without saying both were pirated copies.) And, before I fell asleep in my hotel Saturday night, I watched that classic star-studded extravaganza, The Towering Inferno, with dialogue dubbed into Chinese, of course.

Disaster movies are just really stupid, you know? It makes no difference when or where they are made. They’re just mindless entertainment.

Let’s start with Roland Emmerich’s 2012. As soon as heard the Important Scientist announce ominously that a massive solar flare had sent a storm of neutrinos toward Earth, and these neutrinos for the first time ever (Now with new cleaning power!) were interacting with matter, I knew the rest of the movie would be, scientifically, a stinker.

I was not disappointed.

Physics mini-lesson: Yes, the Sun produces neutrinos. Lots of neutrinos. They are a product of nuclear fusion, the gift that keeps on giving us heat and light from that yellow ball in the sky. The sun has been pumping out these little fellows for the last five billion years, and like all other subatomic particles, solar neutrinos don’t suddenly take the notion to change their ways. Neutrinos normally sail right through the Earth (and us, by the way) like nothing is there. They only very rarely interact with atoms, detectable by little flashes of light in huge underground tanks of pure water.

December 15th, 2009 | Tags: 2012, 2022, apocalypse, disaster, movies, The Towering Inferno | Category: China, Commentary, Media, Science | Comments Off

JISHOU, HUNAN — I read tonight that Editor & Publisher, which has been the unofficial watchdog of the U.S. newspaper industry for 108 years, is going bye-bye.

E&P was indispensable reading for us (former and present) newspaper types, even if we were only reading the classified for jobs or getting our jollies from the headline bloopers on the last page of the magazine.

The trade journal is a casualty of corporate media conglomerates, who value profit over service. E&P’s owner, The Neilson Group, is selling off some of its publications to new owners, but axing E&P completely. Journalists are protesting the move, but who knows if protests will succeed in saving Editor & Publisher.

Like the Columbia Journalism Review, E&P critiqued the newspaper trade, and especially noted the media’s servile role during the Bush administration, where it seemed most newspapers were just doing PR for the White House instead of questioning it.

Some allege that E&P’s tendency to criticize the Bush administration and point out corporate media’s dearth of fact-checking may have led to its demise.

This is as depressing as Rupert Murdoch buying The Wall Street Journal.

December 11th, 2009 | Tags: editor & publisher, journalism, Media | Category: Commentary, Media | Leave a comment

[UPDATE 20/11/09: I ended up in my own Google news alert on Rifqa Bary. Not sure what to think ...]

JISHOU, HUNAN — I find the whole Rifqa Bary thing fascinating, if only because it highlights the paranoia and/or religious nuttery of some segments of the American populace. I have a Google news alert set up for “rifqa bary,” so I get a daily digest of wingnuttiness. (Frankly, I prefer Nutella, though Nussa is pretty damn good, too.)

Well, it turns out that one of the speakers at the Rally for Rifqa in Columbus (capital of the Islamic Republic of Ohio) was another Muslim-turned-Christian, Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian-born author of anti-Muslim, pro-Israel books and founder of Former Muslims United. Darwish popped up in my Google news alert because of that brief association with Rally for Rifqa.

The link was to a conservative blog called, “Ruthfully Yours: The Right News, Front and Center.” Darwish was scheduled to speak at both Columbia and Princeton Universities, but both invitations were canceled at the last moment.

Apparently, the students who had invited Darwish got wind of her anti-Muslim rhetoric a little late in the game, and changed their minds.

The blogger, Ruth King — who by the way organized the Rally for Rifqa — sees a hidden agenda in the cancellations.

For those of us chronicling the advancing islamisation of America, things have gotten decidedly worse since Obama took over. We have entered a dark age.

November 19th, 2009 | Tags: Columbia, hate, Islam, Nonie Darwish, Pamela Geller, princeton, Rifqa Bary | Category: Commentary, Media, religion | Comments (1)

JISHOU, HUNAN — The Rifqa Bary saga just gets weirder and weirder. Now that the 17-year-old is back in her home state, her “benefactors” and “supporters” plan to hold a rally during the hearing that will decide whether she will return to her parents’ home.

In the reality-based world, a runaway child returning home would be a good thing, if the parents are decent, upstanding members of society, which the Barys appear to be.

In the apocalyptic world of the far-far-rightwing, however, Rifqa’s Muslim parents are sure to kill their Christian convert daughter, because, you know, all Muslims do that sort of thing, every day. Pamela Geller and her fellow Muslim-haters have themselves worked up into a froth, accusing the Bary family of every crime known to humanity, merely because the Barys are Muslim …

… and because Rifqa, whose own grip on reality seems kind of tenuous, has people convinced that her family will either kill her or arrange for her sudden demise once she returns to that lawless hotbed of Islamic terrorism, Columbus, Ohio.

Law enforcement officers and child welfare officials say the likelihood of Rifqa being killed is nil. Her parents are pretty normal sounding, middle-class Americans who have the “misfortune” of being dark-skinned Muslim immigrants with exotic names.

The parallels to the “birther” crusade are obvious. A lot of folks also cannot accept that a dark-skinned son of a foreign-born Muslim with an exotic name became president of the USA.

November 3rd, 2009 | Tags: anti-Islam, Florida, Islam, Muslim, ohio, Pamela Geller, rally, Rifqa Bary | Category: Civil liberties, Media, Random rants, religion | Leave a comment