John Gordon’s English Weblog

I was sad to hear of Paul Newman’s death recently.

Somehow I came across this video of David Letterman’s tribute to Newman:

Obviously, I was very impressed by the story about the Volvo.

Then yesterday I came across this story elaborating on the Volvo.

I’m a big Jon Stewart fan, so I searched YouTube for “stewart letterman 95“, which brought me to this segment:

Well, it wasn’t the story about the Volvo, but it was entertaining. Also, I noticed that Alison Krause was scheduled to be on the show that night. They ran out of time, but Dave said that she would be on the show again at her earliest convenience.

I love Alison Krause, so… I did another search for “Letterman Alison Krause 95″, which brought me to this performance:

Absolutely amazing. I don’t think I’d heard her live performances from that period before, and I found this particular performance to have a beautiful, haunting, raw quality to it.

Then I noticed a link to a performance from 2007 in the “related videos” section, and I wanted to compare:

Still beautiful, and obviously more polished, but I prefer 1995.

This CNN segment about the bailout is incredibly entertaining, terrifying and confusing.

The guy on the left reminds me of one of the bad guys from The Princess Bride, and the guy on the right reminds me of one of the guys from Upright Citizens Brigade.

Both of them describe very bleak futures.

Best quote: “We have to choose between whether or not we want to eat and whether or not we’re willing to have inflation.”

Part 1:

Part 2:

I used to love watching the first twenty minutes or so of David Letterman’s show, but since moving to Beijing I haven’t seen much of him.

This reminds me of how much I like him:

And this is approaching sublime:

Some of these pictures are just priceless. My favorite is the second one.

It’s on very different scale, but people sometimes want to take pictures with me after I give a lecture at a school, and very often they don’t really care whether I’m looking or not, or if I know the picture is being taken.

Of course, it’s not just Chinese kids who are stalking the Dream Team. Catherine’s American study abroad students are staying at Beijing Normal University, where most of the US Olympic Team is staying. I don’t think that the Men’s Basketball team is staying there, but one day they saw Kobe Bryant enter the dorm where the athletes are staying at BNU, and they staked out outside, figuring that if he had gone in he would have to come out.

Watching the buildup to the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on CCTV-5/Olympics, I remember my excitement watching the Olympics as a kid, and my cynicism disappears.

Switching to CCTV-1, some of my cynicism returns.

But then I switch back to CCTV-5.

In Chinese, Artistic Gymnastics (the kind Mary-Lou Rhetton competed in) is called 竞技体操, which means something like “Competitive Skills Gymnastics”.

Rhythmic Gymnastics (the kind with the balls and the flags) is called 艺术体操, which means “Artistic Gymnastics”.

That’s confusing.

Kenneth Tan posts on Shanghaiist about how hotels are lowering their rates in Beijing during the Olympics because the expected influx of tourists doesn’t appear to be materializing.

We were actually one of the apartment owners hoping to cash in on the Olympics. I don’t think we were being greedy–it was only worth it to us to move out during the Olympics if we received an extremely high price, and no one would have rented from us unless they couldn’t find a better deal elsewhere. In any case, a lot of people like us who were thinking of renting out apartments have had to change plans because the anticipated housing shortage never occurred.

Actually, I think that China’s limiting of tourists coming into Beijing (through vague visa restrictions) may be a calculated, smart decision. They could have just opened the gates and mailed out visas to everyone in the world, but–security considerations aside–they would have run the risk of huge congestion and traffic troubles in Beijing during the Olympics.

A lower-than-expected number of tourists before and during the Olympics will certainly cut into the direct revenues that China will get from the Olympics, but I think for China the real prize is the image boost it has the potential to get from the Olympics. If the Olympics go smoothly from a security perspective, and everybody has a great time without having to complain about traffic, there is a huge upside for Beijing and China in the next five to ten years. On the other hand, if people complain about how Beijing came to a standstill with the influx of tourists, or if there are security problems, it has the chance to be very embarrassing for Beijing and China, and could limit the upside gained from the Olympics over the next few years.

Of course, the lower-than-expected number of tourists is due to more than just the visa confusion, and the visa issue itself may be the result of bureaucratic confusion, but I still think it will be a net positive for Beijing and China in the long run.

The Olympics have been in the air for the last six years in Beijing, but over the last week or so it’s finally hit everyone that we’re less than a month away. It seems like just yesterday that the ubiquitous countdown clocks were showing several hundred days, and now they’re down to less than 20!

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Sunday was the big day for traffic changes in Beijing, which will last from July 20th through September 20th, after the Paralympics end. The big change is that cars with license plates ending in even and odd numbers will alternate days on which they are allowed to drive. Today is an even day, so all the odd cars have to stay home. Taxis, buses, Olympic vehicles, and some government vehicles are exempt.

Another change is the addition of the Olympic lane to many main roads. There is a big Olympic logo printed in these lanes every several hundred yards, and only Olympic vehicles are allowed to drive in them. Finally, the Olympic areas have been sealed off to private vehicles without a permit. Our apartment is within the area that has been sealed off, so getting in and out of home will be a hassle for the next two months.

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To me the starkest recent change here has been the greening of Beijing. Trees, bushes and grass are all over the place, and the rains of the last month or so have made the greenery stand out even more. I hope things will stay this way after the Olympics, but I worry about how much water it will take.

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Speaking of rain and water, the rain over the past month in Beijing has been bizarre. I think it actually rained every night for over two weeks, which is very, very rare for Beijing. I wondered if they were shooting missiles into the clouds again, but I don’t think even missiles could create so much rain over an extended period.

Rockets are shot into the clouds, by the way. It’s called “cloud seeding“. I had always thought it was just an urban legend until a few summers ago in late August when a friend pointed out that it had rained every Sunday that summer.

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A couple of nights ago we were watching a movie when we heard explosions outside. It sounded like the firecrackers at a wedding, but people don’t usually get married at night. When we went to our window to see what it was, we were confronted with the most incredible fireworks display either of us had ever seen. We used our digital camera to take a video, and maybe I’ll upload that later, but the video doesn’t do it justice. There were Olympic rings and I think maybe even words written in the sky (it was hard to tell from our angle). The fireworks covered a spread of several kilometers, and were coming from the the general direction of the National Stadium (the Bird’s nest). After a while, the fireworks stopped, but we were still hearing explosions. At first I thought it was just the echo of the fireworks, but when the echo didn’t stop I got confused. Then we ran to the window on the other side of our apartment and saw that the fireworks were still going on in the Olympic Forest Park (another part of the Olympic area that is home to several other venues). What a huge spread!

The next morning I read in the paper that they had been rehearsing the Opening Ceremony. I’d been ambivalent about the Opening Ceremony, but now I’m excited about watching the fireworks again from our window.

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A good friend had a ticket to the Opening Ceremony and was planning to sell it. All other tickets can be transferred freely, but Opening and Closing Ceremony tickets can only be transferred once and are associated with the name of the ticket holder. He found out two Fridays ago that last Monday was the last day to transfer tickets, and wasn’t able to get it sold by then. The restrictions are certainly due to security concerns, and I assume that the early deadline is so that they’ll have time to do background checks on all of the ticket holders. Should be a very safe evening.

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Of course, people have been very concerned about safety. I have my moments when I get a little jittery about Beijing being a target, but I think that the world’s generally a pretty safe place, and I don’t like to worry too much. I’m actually less worried about some sort of terrorist attack than I am about the sort of thing described here. Similar thoughts had occurred to me, but my nightmares had pictured just a place with a lot of people rather than a venue. It would be so, so tragic if the Beijing Olympics were remembered as the Olympics where the protestor got beaten up by the crowd.

Hmmm… Chinese nationalism is something I’d really like to think and write more about, but I’m not sure how to do it in a sensitive way.

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We’ve got tickets to several events. I’m not sure which ones we’ll go to, but I’d like to visit the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, and I’d love to see a basketball game.

The last time I wondered about an untold story (the story behind New Beijing, Great Olympics and New Beijing, New Olympics), I randomly ran across a told version in Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones (a great book, maybe more on that later).

Right now I’m sitting in the Wudaokou Sculpting in Time cafe wondering about another untold story, and a cursory Google search didn’t give me an answer.

Sculpting in Time has been around for a long time. I used to go to the original one outside of the PKU east gate, but that one was bulldozed long ago and they’ve since expanded into several new locations. One of the earliest locations was right next to the Wudaokou subway station.

Well, a while back the Wudaokou branch moved next door, and a new cafe, called The Bridge, opened in their old location. This would not be all that odd, except for the fact that The Bridge is almost exactly the same as the old Sculpting in time–down to the posters on the wall.

So I wonder, what happened? Did SIT just move and someone snatched up their location? Did some rogue employee mess with their lease and kick them out of their old location? Are they secretly owned by the same proprietor? I feel like there must be some sort of intrigue involved.

I guess I could just ask the waiter. Or maybe I’ll read about it in a book somewhere.

I’ve spent the last five days on the road doing promotional lectures for New Channel. We usually speak to university students, hoping that they will come to Beijing and take IELTS or TOEFL classes during the summer break, but last night in Changsha we spoke to 800 elementary school students.

They were fourth, fifth and sixth grade students at the LuShan International school, with whom we are holding an English summer camp starting in July. I didn’t know that we were going to be speaking to elementary school students until I arrived in Changsha from Shenyang.

The lecture hall was quite a scene. When we first walked in only one of the classes had arrived, but their running, screaming and laughing was enough to make the place seem full. One of the kids challenged me to arm wrestle. I let him win, and he was followed by twenty new challengers who each defeated me over the next minute.

After all of the students had arrived, a teacher had the difficult task of quieting them down–at least enough so that the lecture could start. The students had each been given bookmarks, and some were inspecting them and waving them around. The teacher pinpointed the bookmarks as a cause of the rowdiness: “The bookmarks are interesting, but the lecture will be even more interesting!”

I was the first to speak, and I rattled on for about twenty minutes telling stories and offering English-learning tips. The kids were a lot of fun, but I don’t think I ever had more than several hundred paying attention at one time. I’m pretty good at speaking to groups of university students, but I think I need to work on my elementary school lecture skills.

After the lecture I was mobbed by students asking me to sign their bookmarks.