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Thank goodness for the ayi!

Originally uploaded by MFinChina

A salute to Dai Ayi, the woman who cleans my dishes. I guess it’s sort of sad that I have a cleaning lady just to do that, but I HATE to do it myself.

Today in Google news I saw this headline:

Studies Find No Link Between SSRIs and Congenital Heart Disease

immediately followed by two others:

Studies Link Antidepressant Use to Birth Defects

and

Antidepressants Rated Low Risk in Pregnancy.

Confusing, eh?  The first is from MedLink, the second is from the Los Angeles Times, and the third is from the New York Times.  I’d say the first and third are the more reliable sources.  It doesn’t matter, though, because in the event that I get pregnant (not that it is really likely anytime soon), I will continue taking my SSRIs, though maybe at a reduced dose.

I always thought he was okay, despite being a Republican.  Maybe he is one because that’s just what you had to be to get elected in Indiana at the time.

G.O.P. Senator Splits with Bush Over Iraq Policy

As decided by more than 15,000 readers of The Guardian:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/100filmmoments/

For me, when you’re just talking about moments, LITERALLY, like one-second bits of film, I can think of two favorites right off the top of my head.

1)  When Fyodor Basmanov jumps up onto the table and throws his mask off in part two of IVAN THE TERRIBLE.

2)  In John Woo’s HARD BOILED when Chow Yun-Fat slides across a flour covered table and stops with his gun pointed at somebody’s head.  He’s covered in white powder and looks like a huge ghost.

The Shofar Man

I have all of these Chinglish shirts I want to get rid of! It’s your last chance to snap them up now, before I give them to charity to get rid of them! I’ll post some pictures of them here, or include links to Flickr pictures. If you want them, don’t delay! Drop me a line here (make a comment) with any questions you may have. I’ll charge the same amount for all shirts — $10 US, which will cover the cost and air mail shipping. As for how you can pay me, we can do that on the honor system. Let me know if you’d like to send me a check, or just pop ten bucks in the mail and send it to my parents’ address. As soon as you agree to buy the shirt and send me your address, I’ll mail it out to you. The one down side is that I don’t want to deal with returns. I’ll be sure to send you the right specs on the size of each shirt and look it over for defects.

Oh yeah, and if you’re in China, we can discuss a different price, because shipping will be much cheaper!

Note:  The Chinglish fire sale is officially closed!  I gave all the shirts to the Shanghai Charity Foundation. 

My student Louis, true to his word, included a thank-you to me in the article I proofed for him.  If you’re interested in stem cells and what they can do to reverse hearing loss, you can take a look:

Multipotent stem cells from the young rat inner ear 

Just to keep everyone apprised of what I’m planning to do this summer, let me tell you some of my plans.  I won’t write the exact dates that everything’s going to happen, but if you want to know more, just send me an e-mail or a comment asking me to contact you.

In mid-to late July, I’ll be going to the US.  My first stop will be Philadelphia, where I’ll stay for about two weeks.  During that time, I’m hoping to make a few side trips, like to Washington, D.C. and New York.  After that, I’ll head to my parents’ near Buffalo for a few days, since my dad is having his 80th birthday and it seems to me (but maybe not to them, who knows?) that it is common courtesy that I should be there.  I’m also hoping to see my friend Val who lives in Buffalo again.  Then, I’ll head back to Shanghai  some time in mid-August.

Something strange happened here tonight.  For a while now Shanghai’s satellite TV reception has been intermittent.  Since technically it’s illegal to have one, we all figured it’s the government censoring it.

Tonight I asked my friend to see if hers was working, and we could only get three channels.  One was JCTV, which apparently stands for Jesus Christ TV.  As you can guess, this was all Christian programming.  The next thing we could get was TBN, another Christian channel.  The third was one I’d never heard of before called The Smile of a Child.  The first thing we saw on there was a show with people in scary-looking costumes, so we changed the channel immediately.  Upon flipping to it later, we saw they had a show called Bibleman!  This guy and his cronies try to protect the earth from evil, personified by this guy with bad teeth and a mohawk (who looks sort of like the lead singer of the German death metal band Sopor Aeternus).  The cronies pray a lot in front of a lighted cross in their batcave-like hideaway, and when things get too hairy, their leader turns into Bibleman!, complete with his Breastplate of Righteousness! and his Helmet of Salvation!  Those were the only three channels we could get on the whole satellite network, although they were later joined by one more, Palapa 4 (I think), a Filippino channel with a lot of cooking shows.

It was like some Christian group had hijacked satellite service to China.  Bizarre!

Who is this elegant lady?

Originally uploaded by MFinChina

Why, it’s Amanda, my friend from college, visiting China with her husband Phil. Taken in Xian.

Who is this character?

Originally uploaded by MFinChina

Actually, it’s Phil, my fake relative and (real) friend from college who is visiting China with his wife Amanda.

Not here, anyway.

According to the Reuters story by Doug Young, “Donuts take a bite from Asian fast food market” (for some reason I’m having trouble linking to it, so just search it if you’re interested):

 TAIPEI (Reuters) - Some of the world’s top donut chains have come rolling into China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan and elsewhere in the region as Asians embrace the Western fast food fad.

Oh, would that it were true, in China anyway!  The words “rolling in” makes it sound like tons of companies are coming here, but in fact, we only have one, Mister Donut.  Plus they’re not new — they’ve been here since I came to Shanghai three years ago.  There are only like five of them in the whole city, and when you go in, from about 50-90 percent of the people inside will be foreigners.  So it’s not like Chinese are frolicking amongst mountains of donuts, let alone eating them. 

What’s your deal, Doug Young?!?

It’s getting away!

Originally uploaded by MFinChina

One of the best things about eating at the Chairman Mao-themed restaurant near my house is that I get to watch the children from the Muslim restaurant next door. They’re always running around like mad, doing something wacky. Sometimes the big one will put a bag over his head and run around like that, and sometimes the little one will take of his pants and let it all flap in the wind. Here the little one is rolling around a bicycle tire. Since they’re always moving, it’s hard to get a clear picture of them.

CGI error.

Originally uploaded by MFinChina

Here’s a picture of the actual error message I got when I tried to access the proxy server Unblock Bess. Everything is tightly firewalled for the next week or so because it’s the ann iversar y of something.

The 高考, a.k.a. national college entrance exams, is about to begin.  It’s the most important exam in many Chinese people’s lives.  As far as I know, the college you get into is based totally on your gao kao score.  This is a super-stressful time for students.  Lots of kids get really freaked out, and there are suicides and stuff amongst students who don’t think they did well.  I heard lots of girls actually get some sort of hormone injection this time of year to make sure they’re not having their periods during the exams.

加油, 学生!  Don’t panic!

I rarely throw things out, but it seems whenever I do I invariably get rid of something I really need.  This time I think I threw out a want ad paper that had three part-time jobs in it I was interested it.  Crap!

Retrocrush’s list of the 100 scariest movie scenes:

http://www.retrocrush.com/scary/index.html