The new solar battery charger I got for my phone kept it at 100% all day. I’ve gotta figure a better mount for it for my everyday bike.

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Deer Encounter on the American River Trail from ZachFine on Vimeo.

A deer stopped by the trail, I think to check out my solar-powered iphone4 battery.

Welcome to Ai Qi Coffee. Please have a seat over here in the overstuffed booth fringed with tassels. Here is a glass of boiling-hot water and a menu. Your waitress will be with you shortly.

I highly recommend this dish. "Customer get angry"

"Frozen old duck soup" Truth in advertising taken one step too far.

"The cold discolored ears, The cold cow shutter" –Would you like to order an unappetizer?

One of the side-effects of living in China for a while is that "Crispy pigeon" doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. It’s a good translation, and just looks like food. But "Chicken rice spent"? Hilarious.

"Spicy beef noodles, bake butterfly" Braise like a bee?

"Onions detonation small cattle" Onions detonation small cattle!

Hints of lava and surfboard? "Hawaiian scenery pizza". ¹

"Nalco small cattle baked carbon"

Lovely. "Red pink beautifuls woman"

"Coconut amorous feelings" It’s a very emotional drupe.

"Flame hockey" Game on.

"Colocasia esculenta schott pearl milk tea"²

"Enough to give comfort" Dayenu.

"Low because of Columbia coffee" You said it buddy, Columbian politics always gets me down too. Let’s stop listening to NPR for a bit.

I really wish I’d asked if I could buy one of these menus, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Although I think many of these translations are hilarious, it is worth noting that I don’t think badly of whoever put it together –it was extremely courteous of them. Very very few English speakers ever pop into the small town of Hengdian, let alone drop into Ai Qi Coffee. So kudos to that establishment for trying (and largely succeeding) to accomodate the occasional English-speaker.
Customer not really angry.

1. Again, those not accustomed to China might also find "Super cows feet pizza" to be noteworthy
2. I suspect a scientific name crept into their woeful Chinese-English dictionary

Are Asian-Americans reclaiming the C-word now? I was a bit shocked to see it, but I suppose Paula either likes it or plays along.

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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I would kill for a copy of this poster. If anyone in shanghai sees these odes to civic pride being taken down, can you please grab me one?

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Haibao is either the mascot of the 2010 world exposition or a puffy blue tooth that stole George Lucas’s hair curl.

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Catching up on posting a few photos from that sojourn in Shanghai. This one was shot in a dusty hutong in Shanghai. Grease from a jianbing seems to have clouded my iPhone’s camera. I think I remember at the time choosing not to wipe it off because it looked interesting. The kid in this photo has the perfect kind of barely-reactive wary look. Better that than succumb to overwhelm, can’t have a billion people throwing a tantrum!

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You’ve squicked your way past the 11 mile point…

…try to stay ahead of the fuzz. If I were you, I’d keep the Bachman novel, “The Long Walk” in mind for motivation. My hat’s off to anyone who ran or walked or rolled today, amd especially to those who’re spending 8+ hours in the rain, walking the course.

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(note: Chinese wedding photos happen before the marriage)

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A lively example of entropy in motion, these hutongs South of the Lujiabang fabric markets reminded me of areas of Beijing. I found the aforementioned food item, xidan, at a stall at the end of the road where the old buildings ended and the apocalyptic wasteland of demolition began.

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Look closely if you dare (click the image to see it at full resolution). Those are no ordinary eggs –unless you expect beaks with yours.

This seems a bit similar to the Filipino food “Balut”, a mainstay of eating challenges on US-oriented reality tv competitions. Often the competitors gag and bow out. I’ve always figured I’d pass such a challenge without issue, as the dish in question probably tastes fine. But when faced with Balut’s Chinese cousin, I skipped the opportunity.

I showed the photo to a shanghainese friend, who said the dish is called xidan and is very good for health problems. I asked if it works, and she said,”of course.”

So there you have it. Xidan. Yum.

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Sometimes Chinese parents show how they really feel about their child with a carefully-chosen bumper sticker.¹

When I saw this sticker I laughed aloud², then reflected on the fact that if my parents had sported this on their Toyota station wagon when I was growing up, I’d probably have been a better student. Fear of unknown unknowns³ is a great motivator.

OK, so the bumper sticker has nothing really to do with the “Tiger Mom” meme, but that phrase is all over the net and the whole concept alternately interests me and cracks me up. My theory is that any truth to Mrs. Chua’s newly-named stereotype has little to do with being Asian⁴, and much to do with the fact that it wasn’t easy for people to immigrate to the US from China in the 1960s-80s and the process disproportionately selected for the hard-scrambling type. Many of those immigrants later decided⁵ to imbue in their kids the same drive that served them in getting through that filter. It’s just like the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue“, but with the parental focus being toughness mental rather than physical.

But no need to be so serious; The best Tiger Mom jokes I’ve come across so far are the article “New Parenting Book Sparks Outrage” from The Onion, and Jen Kwok’s “Tiger Mom Rap!”.

1. Yes, I smudged out the license number, just in case China’s “Human Flesh Search Engines” are on the lookout for people with unharmonious bumper stickers.
2. …then I stopped laughing and wondered whether the driver could have purchased this sticker as a deliberate joke, which would still be funny but less so. Unlikely given that the median level of English literacy among locals of this area in nil.
3. Rumsfeld, Donald, “I never promised you a WMD”, Press Briefing (Winter 2002 Edition), GWB (ed.), URL = <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns>.
4. …except for the Orientalist-tinge to the naming of the meme.
5. …or had less choice in the matter than that, since people may often just use the same parental behaviors that were modeled for them when young, or maybe their nature trumps nurture and the filter selected for genetically-driven type-A peeps.