|
|
JISHOU, HUNAN — An inept Photoshopping of some local Chinese officials inspecting a new road has generated a flurry of more creative versions of the same image among Chinese netizens.
A photographer took two photos of three officials out in the countryside, and decided to doctor them into a more appealing image for the county government website. Here’s the original images:
And here’s the ‘shopped version, as it appeared on the website.
You will note, I hope, that the three gentleman appear to be hovering over the roadway. The image was promptly removed from the website and the photographer reprimanded, after parodies of the doctored image went viral. Here are a few examples.
In President Barack Obama’s briefing room:
On the Moon:
On a movie set:
On the soccer field:
On Cristo Redentor, Rio:
More examples are here and here.
Permanent link to this post (141 words, 8 images, estimated 34 secs reading time) Possibly related posts:
 Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo My family knows I am a sucker for cop shows. I confess to a short-term addiction to Law & Order, especially the ones with the late Jerry Orbach in them. But, long before the L&O franchise took over cable TV, I had another favorite cop show, about a quirky police detective named Columbo, who seemed like he was perpetually half-asleep, but in the end, always solved the crime.
Peter Falk, who died yesterday at 83, made Columbo the icon that he is. TV detectives and cops come and go, but Falk’s Columbo was as distinctive as Sherlock Holmes. A squinty-eyed look (Falk had a glass eye), a rumpled trench coat (from Falk’s own closet), a beat-up old car (a ’59 Peugeot convertible), a half-smoked cigar and a distinct New York accent (the show was set in LA) all made Columbo a stand-out among TV’s cookie-cutter sleuths.
Falk didn’t create the character, but he breathed life into it. A masterful actor, he once explained his character as an anti-heroic Sherlock.
“Columbo has a genuine mistiness about him. It seems to hang in the air . . . [and] he’s capable of being distracted. . . . Columbo is an ass-backwards Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had a long neck, Columbo has no neck; Holmes smoked a pipe, Columbo chews up six cigars a day.” (Source)
Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — I should avoid reading Right Wing Watch, because it makes me fear for the sanity of the United States. I have to quote this entire remark by Rabbi Daniel Lapin verbatim, because it’s too crazy to paraphrase convincingly.
The Bible provides guidance on certain fundamental principles of life. One of them is that there is a major difference between people and animals. Now this is so important that it’s covered right up in the beginning of the first few chapters of Genesis, we established that.
Look, it’s not an accident that some of the most brutal and cruel, demonic tyrants of history loved animals. It’s not an accident. It’s not an accident that Adolf Hitler was almost never seen without his dog, who he was petting constantly. Loved his dog! Well, what we understand is that there is a potential, it’s not going to happen to everybody, but there is a potential within a large society that if we obliterate the distinction between people and animals it’s not that people will start treating animals better, they’ll start treating people worse…
The reality is that the lives of most women are not as good today as they were years ago, they’re just not good. Now “oh they’ve got opportunities,” yeah they do, like they can get shot up and tortured in Iraq, and guess what-I’ve traveled, you’ve traveled. I mean how often does my heart break when I see a woman on a business trip frantically trying to calm her children over the telephone and tell them they should go to be with the sitter and she’ll be home after they’re asleep. That’s the woman who’d like to be with her kids if she could, but no–we really are making life tougher on people and all of this is of course consistent with the idea of promoting rights for animals
This is a preview of Hitler loved his dog, so animal lovers hate people . Read the full post (316 words, 1 image, estimated 1:16 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — One of my students showed me this video, from a website called Hujiang English Network. The guy in the vid shows us how to speak English with a Mandarin accent (not a Canto accent — so, you won’t sound like a Hong Kong action movie).
Although he’s joking around, the way some Chinese pronounce English comes out sounding just like he says it does. Chinese is a tonal language: every syllable has one of four tones** (nine tones for Cantonese) and each syllable is pronounced distinctly. A Chinese may try to speak English words the same way, so it comes out sounding like machine-gun fire. (Native English speakers tend to connect words together, dontcha know?)
And, as he notes, Chinese will substitute Mandarin words for English words that sound similar, like du 琽 = “stopped up” for “do,” ti 踢 = “kick” for “tea/tee/tip.”
If you visit the Hujiang link, they have the “translations” of the not-so-obvious phonetic substitutions he makes. Here they are, with the real meanings next to them.
downtown = 当烫！(dang1 tang4 = when hot!)
gun = 刚！(gang1 = hard!)
big gun = 大刚！(da4 gang1 = really hard!)
job = 脚脖子！(jiao3 bo2 zi – ankle!)
beautiful = 彪特否！(biao1 te4 fou3 = tiger very evil!)
congratulations = 坑刮出来的屎！(keng1 gua1 chu1 lai de shi3 = blow out of shit pit!)
I’m not sure who the fellow is, but he’s good. His name is Magician Joe, out of Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s got a YouTube page. And you can find him on Facebook and Twitter as @popking161.
Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — Want to buy a propaganda film really cheap? Now’s your chance. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is now available to the highest bidder.
Expelled was the 2008 embarrassment that tried to prove once and for all there was a vast conspiracy to teach evolution while suppressing Intelligent Design and other “explanations” of life on Earth, and putting Hitler in power. Or something like that. The New York Times called it “one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time.”
Narrated and hosted by the riveting Ben Stein, it tanked at the box office, so badly it seems, that its production company, Premise Media, is in bankruptcy court.
According to a document (PDF) filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, on May 31, 2011, the trustee of the bankruptcy estate is seeking to auction “[t]hat certain feature-length motion picture (‘Picture’) ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’ and all collateral, allied, ancillary, subsidiary and merchandising rights therein and thereto, and all properties and things of value pertaining thereto.” The auction is scheduled to take place on-line from June 23 to June 28, 2011.
As awful as the movie was, I reckon somebody will probably bid on it. I hope the winner is a film collector, who will stash it in a vault somewhere, and not some Intelligent Design fanboy, who will try to inflict it on us again.
Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — Sarah Palin erred in one way. Wikipedia got “corrected” in another. Somehow the twain met and still exposed the weaknesses of both.
If the current Wikipedia page about Paul Revere is to be trusted (the citations look solid, anyway), Paul Revere did in fact warn the British about the Massachusetts militiamen ready to fight them. But he didn’t do it at all like Palin said he did.
Predictably, Palinites are declaring victory for Saint Sarah, ignoring that the truth that she’s still embarrassingly wrong about a well known moment in American history.
Here’s the play-by-play.
At a rally Friday in Boston, Palin told the crowd that Revere rode through town, firing shots off like John Wayne and ringing bells like Bing Crosby, to warn the British (the British –OK?) that the red-blooded colonists were not going to give up their arms to any Redcoats without a fight. Here’s the exact quote, complete with her folksy diction:
“He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that uh we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free…and we were gonna be armed.”
So, Revere is on horseback making a lot of ruckus to alert the British army that the colonials were ready to shoot them. Nothing like tipping your hand. And this woman wants to be commander-in-chief?
Possibly related posts:
 Paul Revere facepalm (via boingboing.net) JISHOU, HUNAN — Can American politics get any stranger? Alleged presidential contender and full-time media hog Sarah Palin recently mangled the story of Paul Revere in a public address, and soon after some of her fans went to Wikipedia to change the Paul Revere entry to match Failin’ Palin’s version.
Because, they said, Palin is a “reliable source,” so her imaginary version of events entitles them to rewrite history. One imagines if Palin told them the Moon was made of green cheese, they’d try to rewrite its wikipedia page, too.
Dumb and dumberer.
In case you missed the gaffe, Palin told a crowd in Boston on June 2 that native son Revere rode through the streets toward Concord ringing bells and making a lotta noise to warn the British.
“He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that uh we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free…and we were gonna be armed.”
And we were gonna still be, um, part of that, um, peachy British Empire that has the nice grandma as queen, you betcha!
Possibly related posts:
|
Recent Comments