As seen on FARK, which seems like the most useful website for strange china news, is a list of nicknames of NBA players by Chinese fans. The best one in my opinion is Dirk Nowitzki’s nickname… German Racecar!

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Yesterday I received this text message:

Hello am Chinese

What? I’m sorry but I’m currently in a place where about 1 billion people could make this claim.

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One of the things that I most respect about Chinese people, and I don’t think this is too much of an over-generalization here, is that they’re are incredibly thrifty. Maybe a better term for it would be cost-conscious, as in getting the absolute best value for an item that you possibly can. I remember maybe the second day that I was in Nanjing we went out to dinner with some of the students from Nanjing Normal. I was going to buy a Sprite out of the machine at the front when one of the girls ran up to me, grabbed the drink out of my hand and put it back in the cooler. I was told later that this was done since you can purchase drinks outside for .5 yuan cheaper, about six cents US dollars, and that we should wait. This was the beginning of what became a recurring pattern, that people will do and buy whatever is the cheapest possible option, not matter the inconvenience.

Of course this is exactly what I do myself, born mostly out of the depressing fact that I am poor, and will be for a long time (2010 student loan payments of 800 dollars, I’m looking at you here). But I also understand the idea of fair price, that bargaining and shopping around can only be done so much until you reach the fair price. The fair price isn’t exactly a fixed sum, but more of general number that if you buy something for around that price, you don’t feel cheated. So this all leads in a round-about way to me trying to do some tutoring to pick up extra money. I put up a notice in the bakery near campus, saying I am an American graduate student, and if interested in tutoring please send me a text message. And I wrote it in both Chinese and English so there would be no confusion. I know, and I think everyone else here knows, that the fair price for a foreign tutor is 100 RMB an hour. I will be detailing the frustrations that this notice has given me, but I will start with the last case first, as I think it will give you an indication of the whole experience. This is the text message that I received yesterday.

Hi christophere do u teach english for free thx

Now, let me try to go over this without reverting to sarcasm, since that would certainly be the easiest course to take. Why would I go to the trouble of writing up a notice and posting it, just so I can teach people English for free? Seriously I don’t understand this message. I thought the way I worded it, using tutor and the Chinese equivalent 辅导, that this was for money only. Sadly I am not so altruistic as to improve the youth of China’s spoken English solely or the good of the nation and world harmony. At least he said thxs I guess.

More events like this upcoming.

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A taxi driver in Nanjing specializes in giving dog-owners rides. Seen via Shanghaiist, and from China Daily:

The man, surnamed Fan, said he was inspired to start the business after seeing taxi drivers refusing to let passengers carry their pets with them in the car. Fan and his friends started soliciting business on the Internet in November. He said holidays are the peak times for business. Fan received four to five calls per day during the Spring Festival holiday. His car can accommodate two large dogs at a time. The owner must accompany the pets at all times. Fan charges 15 yuan ($1.92) for the first 5 kilometers and 2 yuan ($0.26) for every following kilometer. He said he disinfected the car after every ride.

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The weather in Nanjing for the past few days has been great. It is about 70-80 degrees, sunny, and the leaves and flowers are blossoming. Of course we have to enjoy this while we can, as everyone we talk to reminds us, since spring here lasts only for a couple of weeks. Soon it will be 90+ and horribly humid. And apparently by July it will be about a 110. So I have been taking very long walks around, trying to enjoy what scenery there is. This led me to discovering this poster.

On the top of the poster it reads Game College and Game Factory, and there is picture of a Dark Elf. These things lead me to one conclusion: World of Warcraft gold farm recruitment poster! My translation from the poster:

Finishing Games
Is Not as Good as Making Games

Game College
Urgently Recruiting High School and College Graduates

Important International/National Authoritative Authentication
Game Design and Development Training
Explosive Enrollment

That seems pretty straight forward. I may be wrong, and it may in fact be a legitimate college. You Decide! And If you don’t know about Chinese Gold Farmers, check out these links.
Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese
Inside World of Warcraft Gold Farm, Future of Work
Chinese WOW players speak out
Life at the gamers farm

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忍着 (ren3zhe3) - ninja
海盗 (hai3dao4) - pirate
外星人 (wai4xing1ren2) - alien
机器人 (ji1qi4ren2) - robot
飞碟 (fei1bie2) - UFO

And for more information, please visit:

UFOs in China
UFO in China video (Let me know how it looks, I can’t watch stuff on Google video here)
UFO Organizations Worldwide

And this video showing a UFO in Nanjing! OMG!

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From a now defunct website, and, in my opinion, one of the best photoshops I have ever done.

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Spam is a constantly evolving business. I remember back in the old days of spaming it was so simple and innocent. Mostly just “OMG PEniS biggineesss!!!”. But spam has gotten trickier. From whole blogs of spam to long rambling nonsensical emails like this one I received today:

and find out if he has seen the thing. If he hasnt-on to the next twitching silence while I used the detector, borrowed from Tremearne, Great idea. the big ones, fine. But we slipped from the top notch some time ago. past. suggested that what he wanted was more bribe than payment. One of the Fundamentaloid bands is on the move-roughly in your ponderously stop before an immense glass-walled building. A party of Perhaps in your society, Jim. But here it simply signifies highly group, Floyd and Steengo. Floyd is the tall and skinny guy with the will show you how it works. whats the plan? bigots sweep your failures under the carpet! No wonder you keep this a it. Thanks. you? minutes. Send the signal when you have found the artifact and the rate at ground level, so fast it could barely be seen. Moments later fell. Before they jumped me the last thing I saw was Fido going up the

I will sadly never know what Fido goes up since it ends there. I did a little searching today to find out what is the point of emails like this is, since they aren’t even mentioning any obvious product. This helpful post provided some answers. One is that this text that is generated by some sort of software program and is not easily blocked by your usual spam filtering systems. These systems mostly use the Bayesian spam filtering. I would link to the wikipedia article there but lack of access issues means you can find it yourself if interested. Here is the formula that they show:

\Pr(\mathrm{spam}|\mathrm{words}) = \frac{\Pr(\mathrm{words}|\mathrm{spam})\Pr(\mathrm{spam})}
{\Pr(\mathrm{words})}

I don’t know what that means exactly, my math skills are non-existent. But from what I gather, it works on the probability that certain words will only be used in spam emails, like Viagra and big floppy titties, and filter out those emails as spam. So the nonsense spam emails get around this by appearing, at least to the filtering software, as actual text. And while they don’t sell a product they do confirm by sending out massive quantities of emails what addresses are valid ones. That information can then be used to conduct future spam emailing campaigns. I also find it oddly fascinating, like this line from a comment on a blog I found while looking on google images for pictures of sanmingzhi, “I monkey all night and I superintend all day”.

This blog rarely gets these nonsensical spam comments. For some reason, even though this site is mostly about China, I get exclusively pharmaceutical spam.

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Sometimes China Daily suprises me. The story Safe sex, a luxury for migrant workers is one of those times.

When talking about migrant workers, a sweaty scenario of hard labor working always jump into one’s mind, however, too few attention have been drawn to their sexual health and wellbeing. Most of migrant workers lack proper and safe ways to vent their long-suppressed lusts.

They are, as a matter of fact, more affectionate than their urbanite counterparts, because they have to leave their hometowns to seek a better life, and that in turn makes them nostalgic and sensitive, Zhang said. To complicate the case, they are accommodated in undesirably small workmate dorms where they have almost no private space.

“By doing this,” Zhang said, “their boss can cut short the budget and to avoid unintended security problems, however, the consequences end up with that they have no proper outlets to resort to, when they are sexually in dire need.”

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At the Beijing Natural History Museum, meaning this is an old picture that I totally forgot to post. I felt sorry for the little guy. He was so stubby.

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