Archive for December, 2006

A perfect partner

A perfect partner
I was as thrilled as all of you to read that ChinesePod has been named on Time’s list of great podcasts of 2006, but really… are any of us surprised? Not me, certainly. I have always viewed ChinesePod as the first “horseless carriage” of its kind. I think we’re likely to see many […]

Ninja spam and a gallon of panda juice

Now and then they come up with a clever subject line, those spammers. I go through a daily surge of amusement and annoyance at the hundreds of spam e-mails that flood my inbox, but they change the subject line so frequently that creating a custom spam filter does me almost no good. So, like I […]

The language of violence

1974. Everybody was kung fu fighting.
Fists and feet were flying and we made these absurd sounds like a chicken being strangled when we attacked. Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris had beaten the snot out of each other in the Roman Coliseum and Jackie Chan was already kicking ass and taking names. I was taking the […]

Shèngdàn kuàilè!

Talk about absurdities! Guess what’s in the running for the single most well-known Chinese phrase in my head? I’m talking about the kind of phrase that I could say without thinking about it; the kind of phrase that’s so innate it comes off my tongue as readily as English.
Yeah. You guessed it.
圣诞快乐
Shèngdàn kuàilè
Merry Christmas
I’ve said […]