Jottings from the Granite Studio

Ah the vicissitudes of a government petrified of information…after a brief revival this past week, blogspot is YET AGAIN blocked in Beijing. This time joined by the popular workaround site anonymouse which has, until now it would seem, been a decent way to access blocked sites. Hopefully this is all temporary and somebody [...]

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Whether or not our Google culture is making us smarter, dumber, or somewhere in between, I do get a fair bit of traffic from Google searches. Many of them a bit random, but a few are questions plugged into search engines like messages in electronic bottles floating in the Internet sea hoping for a [...]

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June wasn’t an a particularly auspicious month for the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Thursday marked the founding of the Southern Song by what was left of the Song court who had just been chased out of the north by the Jurchens. In the confusion, they left behind two emperors, Song Huizong (Zhao Ji 1082-1135, [...]

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