Jottings from the Granite Studio

First off, Blogspot is blocked…again. I checked out what Chris Amico has done with Eyes East and I’m sorely tempted to go the same route. Until then, I’m back to using proxies. Bastards.
The People’s Daily reports the discovery of 17 tombs in Hebei from the Song and Jin dynasties. The tombs […]

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Two dates were made official this evening.
1) YJ and I will be getting married on September 8 in beautiful dowtown Tianjin. Clear your calendars. Alert the media.
2) The Roots will be playing in Beijing on April 17th and we’re going to the show. My buddy Mike J. called me at 4:34 pm to get the […]

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It’s not too often that I can reference both Aerosmith AND John Prine in the same title.
IHT reports on a fascinating new museum in Singapore that boasts a collection of Chinese toys from 1910 to the 1970s. Toys are so simple and seemingly ubiquitous that it is easy to take for granted their value to […]

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Dave from Mutant Palm has posted a fix for the CCP’s kabosh on Blogspot. As a public service, I am reposting here. It took me a couple of tries to get it going, but I’ve got it running now and it’s great. It’s fast AND smooth…kind of like a pina colada made with Bacardi 151.
The […]

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Jonathan Dresner has a roundup of East Asia history news from around the web that includes the Shinzo Abe “comfort women” debacle and apology (see also the controversy over the approaching anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre) as well as the Taiwan textbook flap. Textbooks are a hot topic in Korea too where recent revisions are […]

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Earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, seeking to shore up his crumbling base domestically, ripped open old wounds by publicly questioning the accounts of thousands of women forced to work as sex slaves by the Japanese army during World War II. Abe suggested that “no historical proof exisisted” that these women had been […]

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“I should think…,” I began one day over breakfast.“Well, I would hope so, Watson,” replied Holmes laconically.
[…]

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Xinhua reports that the last surviving son of Mao Zedong,* has passed away. The reclusive Mao Anqing, the middle son of The Great Helmsman and his second wife, was 83. （中文）
From The Guardian:

Yesterday a brief notice in the China News Service recorded the death of Mao Anqing, who survived his father to live on into […]

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One more on this subject and then I’ll stop. I think. But for the love of Pedro, China is blocking the blog of Curt Schilling, RHP for the Boston Red Sox. Seriously.
Was Mao a Yankees fan? (On a certain level, that would make sense.) Or is this all part of the deal Brian […]

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Dave at The Mutant Palm has a possible fix for the Great Firewall block on blogspot sites. I haven’t got it working yet, but I’m going to keep trying.
Also, I will be experimenting with using my own domain name in the next few days. If the site is down for a short time, […]

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