One poster on Danwei informs us that The Miss Artificial Beauty contest, aka Miss Plastic Surgery is over. The winner is Feng Qian (pictured), a 22-year-old girl from Jilin city in China’s Northeast. Asia can be, as I have said before, a very weird place. It can also be a frustrating, sad place, too. Here’s another article from Danwei about the effects of the Chinese Communist Party on humor in China. This article is well, well worth the read.
Month: December 2004
How Can You Make People Behave?
From boing-boing: The mayor of Bogota uses mimes for public behavior control. And it’s popular, and it seems to work.
I Believe Mr. Lakoff’s Wrong About The Greens
In an older article at Bush Greenwatch, word is we have a root cause for why the Greens in America are losing to the Bush Brigade: Political and social change often comes down to a war of words. And according to a prominent cognitive linguist from California, anti-environmental forces have been winning that war because progressives don’t know how to talk about issues. So it’s not because the American public is largely pig-ignorant enough to believe that Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” or, worse, “false”? It’s not just because activity on both sides of the partisan political divide is …
Real Life Story?
One more thing I found on Joi Ito’s Web. Did you know that the movie Terminal was based on a real life story? Well, sort of. More here. And here. The not-real-life-story is far more interesting, if you ask me.
Bloglines Catchup
I gave up on doing much of anything useful today; instead, I just kind of relaxed, did a little work on my ghost story, posted some comments to a friend about a draft of a novel she sent me a while back, watched Trainspotting, and turned to my bloglines subs to catch up… a little. There are too many posts to catch up on them all, so I’m going to (a) delete some subscriptions and (b) delete some of the subs I’m not really interested in tracking anymore, or which have stopped existing. One site I will not be deleting …